harmonica
Diamond Member
- Sep 1, 2017
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I thought other aircraft did Scud hunts alsoyou have to measure it somehowlooks like the F16s are the only aircraft that had more AI sorties than the A-10
so the A10s contributed a lot
The Sorties only tells the launches. Not what it did while on the mission. It's pretty meaningless. The problem the A-10 has is it's range, speed and more. If you load it out to do an actual bombing and strafing mission, the range is shortened due to him having to exchange fuel for munitions. The real problem with the A-10 is that he has very weak engine power. As a Tank Killer, he could lower his available external stores to get the range since his primary weapon would be his gun. Would have been devastating against massed tanks in Europe. But by 2001, many things had changed and they were looking for other missions for it. So they sent it out on a Scud and Surface to Air Destroy Mission where his gun was not the primary weapon. Hence, the loss of 4 in the opening days. That's dangerous work. He had to fly more sorties per day while looking for the targets with limited range. Luckily, he could operate from dirt runways if they were prepared and the support people were available on location. A lot of Ifs there. The A-10 was given a very dirty and dangerous job and it did the job. He was playing "Shoot me so I can shoot you" games with some mighty nasty things. There were better Aircraft for the job but we only had X amount of assets. Using either the A-10 or the AC-130 prior to cleaning out those Surface to Air weapons is damned dangerous so the loss of Aircraft happens. The F-15E would have been much better at the job but the F-15E was stretched mighty thin as was the F-16. The F-18 also got hit from those same assets. Welcome to war.
To say that any one Aircraft was more important than another is just playing political favorites. And the A-10s conception was political and economic from the very beginning. It still is today. If you removed the PR factor (whether real or perceived) the A-10 would have been completely gone out of the inventory by 2001. As it stands now, due to the airframes aging, it's not going to make it past 2023. That still gives it 5 decades and there are very few aircraft that have that kind of life. In 2003, it was already 30 years old. Outside of the engines, it was built right enabling it to make it to the end of life cycle. It's time to stop trying to find missions for it and move on to Fighters that can adapt in the air.
I really don't know how on this one. The A-10 started the battle out seeking Scud Sites. We do know that many of them were not real scuds. We don't really know how many were real. With the short flight time and range of a fully armed A-10, he would be making a huge amount of individual sorties with most not panning out. Some would. Then there is the utter confusion of battle. I doubt if all the records of all the AC are that accurate since there were so much going on at the same time. It's easy to list losses and air kills. It's easy to keep track of armor kills. But it's not so easy on when a bird is seeking a specific target which are allusive at best. So I give you this one.
and they would usually have and secondary target/etc if they didn't find Scuds
if there is confusion for the A-10s, it would be equal for the other aircraft
post # 7 link gives a list of A-10 attacks---very impressive
these would've been more likely frontline attacks more so than B-52s---so they are helping the ground war
appears they killed about one third of the tanks
page 75 of post # 9 link shows A-10 greatly outnumbering all attack aircraft except FA-18s and F-16s
F-15E is only 2.6% pf the force while A-10s are 7%
etc
the FA-18s did not do as many CAS missions as the A-10 per the link
according to these numbers, the A-10s contributed a good part of the CAS support