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Comment by dogman144 | Hacker News Reader

This is an… unorthodox take from the ground commander/fires perspective or conversely the orthodox take from the USAF perspective.

Hard lessons from the GWOT have firmly put the A10 as the most capable CAS platform, and it’s taught as such in all joint fires classes to forward observers and also via unit history/anecdotes fires units (“A10 saved my butt in ‘12”). A10 pilots and units also have a much better rep for CAS than F16 etc units (w/e the USAF name is?).

As in, from the ground units perspective, the unit actually needing and coordinating the CAS, everything you’ve argued is against the grain.

However, the USAF has been running the exact argument you’re using for years.

What matters more - IRL combat experience and successes with the A10 platform, or the 10 year PR campaign to get rid of it for no good reason from the combat perspective.

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The most capable CAS platform, and one of the most widely used, was the B-1 bomber. Flying in circles for hours and dropping scores of guided bombs.

The best CAS in GWOT would have been the Super Tucano if the program hadn't taken so long. It would have done the same job as A-10 but much cheaper.

The CAS mission is obsolete outside of counterinsurgency. MANPADs mean that going low and slow is a death trap. Getting low and slow was needed in the past to identify targets and make dumb weapons accurate. Now fighters fly at medium altitude for safety and drop guided weapons. Ukraine shows that medium altitude is dangerous with near-peer conflict without air supremacy.

The F-35 is required to gain air supremacy. If you have them, might as well use them for ground support. I think drones will change things with CAS. On one end, can have small attack helicopter drones for direct support. On the other, can have large drone that loiters for long time dropping bombs. The F-35 will be used for things it is good at.

In neer peer conflict air supremacy is probably pipe dream because of combination of ground based anti aircraft systems and inability to take out airports for more than 1-2 hours without using tactical nukes. Tor/S300/S400 and western/Chinese alternatives are highly effective, mobile and hard to detect - you can never take out all of them. AWACS are big, expensive and slow targets so they will have limited utility in a conflict - so limited visibility on what's in the air.

Go low - you will get MANPAD. Go medium - Pantsir will get you. High - S300. Not everytime but often enough that all sorties will have to be very quick with no loitering and unpredictable flight paths (so no CAS).

Drone loitering seems to work really well. We call army units on boats marines. What do we call army units that provide their own air cover? Aerials?

The combat footage out of Ukraine is very enlightening. Communication, drone surveillance, full stomachs and no booze is apparently how you win a land war in Asia.

Does this perspective assume that Ukraine is “winning” the war at the moment?

They are certainly reversing momentum and reclaiming taken territory. By this time next year I would bet they are “winning”

Yeah good luck getting any long lasting air superiority if you have S400s less than 100-200 miles around. And there are newer models in the pipeline with better reach, although they may be as useful in this decade as Armata.

Is the GWOT relevant though? It seems like one of the biggest issues the us military is facing a shift back towards "conventional" military matters, aka potential future faceoff's with China or Russia. These opponents field a significantly different set of weapons than we saw in GWOT.

The mil has accounted for “Near-peer” training scenarios at the training centers (literal war prep, “enemy force” with their own tanks etc) since mid 2010’s. A10 still features in them.

> Hard lessons from the GWOT which must be unlearned for an neer-peer engagement.

and again, a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with smart bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to boot.

> a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with smart bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to boot.

Well, if you ignore how much quicker it will be shot down (in any environment where at least one of the two would be usable at all against combat forces), sure.

OTOH, the set of environments in which even the A-10 is usable is only going to shrink over time.

The point is if you're in an environment the A10 survives in, so would the prop aircraft. If you aren't, neither works anyway. The A10 exists in a middle ground where it is much more expensive but not really any less vulnerable regardless.

As long as the Air Farce runs CAS, instead of the army, they will continue to attempt to kill any mission that doesn't involve winning wars through the holy doctrine of Air Power (ie incinerating as many civilians as possible).

...Is this supposed to be a defence of the A-10?

Not really, but I think the A-10 drama is an example of what can happen when an organization that doesn't share your own goals is able to take over a task critical to you. Perhaps like outsourcing your engineering offshore. It may be more efficient to find cheap labor overseas, and push a button from 30,000 ft while going mach 2, but efficiency only makes a few people happy.

My point is that if you hold incinerating civilians (and friendly troops) to be a bad thing, then the A-10 is a strange platform to idealize.

This is the gist of the issue

You have to remember the GWOT was fought against ill equipped combatants, unarmored vehicles, and cinderblock structures. The US is generally not worried about those types of threats in planning for future conflicts. There is a reason why Ukraine is getting F16s and not A10s: The Russians brought more than just AKs and Toyota Hiluxes across the border. The A10 is a good aircraft but times have changed and we have much better platforms now.

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