The Warplane Nobody Wanted

[williepete]

Pretty good article about the A-10. It covers the history of C.A.S., the A-10's journey into the USAF inventory and the current argument over its continued relevance.

The other A-10 thread was getting a bit stale. This article sheds the light of history on the Warthog perhaps resulting in a fresher discussion.


THE WARPLANE NOBODY WANTED

The A-10 story is a painful illustration of just how much flag-rank military thinking is driven by ego, selfishness and greed and how little of it is relevant to war-fighting.

The Warplane Nobody Wanted




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[Daryl Hunt]

The Article completely leaves out the A-1E. With the A-1, the P-47 was no longer needed. The Loiter time of the A-1 is even more than the A-10. But the problem is, the A-1 costs too much to maintain and is about 100 kts slower than the A-10.

It also leaves out the fact that the B-1 is doing much of the CAS right now when things are tight. It's more accurate than the A-10. And so is the F-16. The A-10 is being used less and less as time goes by. A Mistake using Mark1EyeBall with that 30 mm gun can cost quite a few lives if a mistake is made. Yes, there has been mistakes made by the B-1 (one mistake) that costs blue and green lives but that's part of war.

The A-10 was supposed to be the killer of Armor. Funny, the B-52 was called on for those acres of attacking tanks. A fantastic target of interest when you carpet bomb anything. Believe it or not, this saved lives on both sides allowing the enemy to pop the hatches and surrender.

Recently, the A-10 was called on to attack fuel trucks. What was left out was the two AC-130Us that were also there. I saw a news report where it showed what was claimed to be the gun camera of the A-10. It wasn't. It was the camera from one of the two AC-130Us. To nail 200 trucks that are parked like that, those two AC-130Us would only need to do one orbit. The AC-130U carries more ammo than the entire squadron of A-10s and can take one truck out every few seconds.

The A-10 is back to trying to fit somewhere other than Sandies.