[Jim Horton]

Unfortunately time and technology has caught up with the A-10. A grunt with a laser and a zoomie at 30,000 feet can do what it used to take a warthog to do low and slow with ordinance and Apaches are pretty effective down low.

 

[dwight55]

Unfortunately time and technology has caught up with the A-10. A grunt with a laser and a zoomie at 30,000 feet can do what it used to take a warthog to do low and slow with ordinance and Apaches are pretty effective down low.

Jim you may have a half dozen points there, . . .

But every time I see one of these things take place, . . . I just wonder which congressman trying to scrap a "tool" has a brother in law or son or some other kinfolk sitting in the drivers seat for another 50 cool million bucks just as soon and the vote is taken , . . .

The old "X" is voted out, . . the new "Y" is voted in, . . . and us taxpayers get stuck with the bill.

May God bless,
Dwight

 

[lysander]

Unfortunately time and technology has caught up with the A-10. A grunt with a laser and a zoomie at 30,000 feet can do what it used to take a warthog to do low and slow with ordinance and Apaches are pretty effective down low.

Jim you may have a half dozen points there, . . .

But every time I see one of these things take place, . . . I just wonder which congressman trying to scrap a "tool" has a brother in law or son or some other kinfolk sitting in the drivers seat for another 50 cool million bucks just as soon and the vote is taken , . . .

The old "X" is voted out, . . the new "Y" is voted in, . . . and us taxpayers get stuck with the bill.

May God bless,
Dwight

The A-10 is like the German Ju-87 Stuka, it works great if you have total air supremacy, otherwise it's dead meat against modern fighters or surface-to-air missiles.

There is a reason the Israelis never bought any.

 

[Sorry Dude]

I still think it's so cool and when don't we have air supremacy? That's who we are and what we do.

 

[dwight55]

Air superiority is the name of the game we play these days, . . .

Warthogs shouldn't be in the air if they don't have cover, . . .

And infantry shouldn't be going into a place they cannot holler for the air birds, . . . as well as arty and armor.

May God bless,
Dwight

 

[lysander]

I still think it's so cool and when don't we have air supremacy? That's who we are and what we do.

The problem is when was the last time we fought someone with a real air force? One that really tried to stop a US bombing campaign? One that had a good integrated missile/gun/radar network?

The last time I recall that being the case was December 1972, and we lost 9 B-52s, 3 F-4s, 2 F-111s, 2 A-6s, and an RA-5, in just 12 days of combat. If you go back to the May-October timeframe, you can add another 104 aircraft lost in combat, worthy of note are the 36 attack aircraft lost during this phase, all fast jets, A-7s, A-6s, or A-4s. (The A-1 Sandys had been retired by this point)

I picked Linebacker and Linebacker II as representative of the US versus an integrated Air Defense as this was the first time all of North Vietnam was fair game.

Other examples of having air supremacy but still suffering heavy losses in attack aircraft, look up the War Of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War. The advancement of surface to air missiles and simple radar directed AAA, have made "low-and-slow" a recipe for failure.

 

[Ted Brown]

With all the precision bombing systems we have it's hard to miss any targets. I witnessed this first hand during the first Gulf War. Even so, the most feared weapons we had were still the A10 and AC130. Air cover or not they did the job. The Apaches and Cobras were supper effective too. We were lucky the bad guys didn't have the Su25 Frogfoot to send after us.

 

[shvlpn]

a-10 questions

the latest i heard they were going to design a new wing to make it more manuverable and can give it more room for ordence

 

[lysander]

the latest i heard they were going to design a new wing to make it more manuverable and can give it more room for ordence

Actually, the new wings are to replace the old wings that are about to fall apart.

 

[boomerpusher]

Actually, we need both - low and slow and high and fast. The A-1 and A-10 supplied support for the troops in combat and the high fliers kept the Migs off their a$$e$. The F-35 MAY someday be a good plane and MAY someday do all that it is designed to do BUT it doesn't do it now. The F-22 seems to be a good plane and seems to do all that it was designed to do but it is not intended to be a weed-wacker like the A-1 or the A-10. The grunt on the ground has to have the CAS or he is in deep do-do. The Cobra or Apache works for what they were designed for but are still open to ground fire ,sam, and fighters so you still have to have the fast movers. Got to have both. Now if we could get the different branches of the service to work together instead of fighting each other, life could be good. Ya, fat chance of that.