What would be reasonable is the Air Force pulling its head out its ass and just giving the CAS role back to the Army, since they hate it so much. Seriously, just give the Army the CAS roles, and the Air Force can go zoom around in their shiny supersonic invisible aircraft, and the soldiers and marines on the ground can get the close air support they so need from an organization not doing everything it can to stop giving them that support.
Randomly, nice nick. The Culture reference made me smile.
Doing that (Taking CAS responsibilities from the USAF) is actually a wonderful idea. One of the reasons the F35 is such a cluster f is due to the Marines requiring it to more or less be a Harrier replacement. The Marines use the harriers primarily for CAS and I've targeted for them as well in Iraq when I was there ~2003-2004 during the big Fallujah offensive.
Yeah, that's a big reason the F-35 is fucked. At this point, it definitely would have been more effective to develop at least two entirely separate aircraft.
The problem is that the CAS mission the A-10 performs is effectively impossible against any modern enemy with modern missile systems and manpads. The A-10 is for shooting up poor brown people we're messing with for no particular reason, not for fighting a real war.
The solution here is to get rid of the A-10 and simply not do "nation building" and counter-insurgency in poor countries. We don't need the A-10 because it's useless for any war worth fighting in today's world.
It really isn't. The A10 is basically a flying tank meant to be hit and survive. The Iraqi army of desert storm was a "modern enemy" with pretty decent soviet gear at the time. US gear was just that much better due to us spending such an obnoxious amount of our GDP on our military. A manpad doesn't have remotely explosive power of the AA that hit the A10 in this video, don't believe me? See the pictures yourself:
There are literally dozens and dozens of similar stories. The A10 is simply put the most effective CAS tool the US Military has or ever had. CAS is a very important part of US warfare and just because they might be against an enemy with better anti-air doesn't negate the need for boots on the ground, which require CAS for maximum survivability. Most likely the Stealth B2s or RQ-170 Sentinel would be sent in first to quickly take out as much of the AAA as possible.
Disclaimer: I'm a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom II, and flew the Shadow 200 TUAV. I targeted several times for A10s and have heard the BRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTT up close.
>The A10 is basically a flying tank meant to be hit and survive.
Like Dale Storr's OA-10, which took a single Strela hit and went down? The A-10 is certainly more likely to be mission killed by MANPADS and AAA than other aircraft (which are liable to be destroyed outright), but those that survive are not useful for combat--Kim Campbell's A-10 was grazed by a Shilka and rendered combat ineffective; after she landed it in manual reversion, it was shipped back to the US and required months of intensive repair. That's great if your objective function is maximizing the number of airframes that are eventually flyable again after being damaged, but godawful if your goal is to actually use them to perform CAS.
>The A10 is simply put the most effective CAS tool the US Military has or ever had.
I completely agree with this, but tools only benefit you /if you can use them/. A-10s cannot survive in contested airspace, and if the not-at-all-fearsome Iraqi Army spanking them so hard that they ended up with a 10,000 foot hard deck didn't clue politicians in on that, maybe a few videos of modern SHORAD like the Pantsir which are available for $peanuts will.
>just because they might be against an enemy with better anti-air doesn't negate the need for boots on the ground, which require CAS for maximum survivability
The CAS you get is better than the CAS you don't. If your primary CAS tool is the A-10, then being against an enemy with even the slightest anti-air capability means that you don't get any CAS at all.
>Most likely the Stealth B2s or RQ-170 Sentinel would be sent in first to quickly take out as much of the AAA as possible
The RQ-170 is a phenomenally expensive unarmed recon drone that the US operates a handful of. The B-2 is useful for striking an enormous number of fixed targets, but is not designed or intended to be employed in a SEAD/DEAD role against anything more mobile than theater-level air defenses. No SEAD weapon in the world is capable of striking air defenses that it isn't fired at, and as a result anything flying at low level is vulnerable to SHORAD whose operators use the advanced tactic of parking it in a treeline and waiting until they hear a jet to engage it.
First off, fantastic reply, thanks for taking the time to write it. The typical US strategy is utter dominance of the sea, air, and night. I really do see drones + tomahawks taking out much of the AAA in addition to long range bombers like the B2. Even if stealth isn't effective, a hoard of Tomahawks is going to give any advanced adversary a hard time. The newer Block IV Tomahawks ones are smarter and quite a bit more lethal. The suckers can loiter for up to 30 minutes on station in a holding pattern and be set to all hit targets at the same time. Hitting 4-5 targets is cool, but hitting 20+ at the same time is quite devastating. In the opening of the war in Afghanistan if I recall they launched a cruise missile every 12 seconds on average for 48 hours. Also, they'll use drones (again like the RQ-170, or its classified and armed bigger brother) to find AAA, where it is worth sacrificing a few to sniff out the well hidden AAA. Hiding in the tree lines won't do much to hide from modern UAVs (as I can attest as a former UAV pilot). With the Shadow I could see footprints through wet grass at night with the thermals (as it detected a +/- 0.1 degree C temperature variation).
So in summary, I think you're entirely right. The A10 was meant to be survivable in contested airspace of yesteryear, but gen 5 and the coming gen 6 fighers along with modern AAA would obliterate it. Even not entirely modern but very advanced AAA like maybe the S400, which Iran has, would knock out an A10 no problem. But the US wouldn't willingly put boots on the ground without utter dominance of the air first. You only need CAS when you have boots on the ground, so I see it ultimately as a moot point. China isn't stupid enough to go toe to toe to war with the US, as we'd both suffer heavy heavy casualties. They're doing a better job of simply asserting their strength economically and through cyber means, which they're better at than us.
Interesting that modern system like Pantsir seems to cover the F-35 case too: "Aerial targets include everything with a minimum radar-cross-section of 1 cm2 and speeds up to a maximum of 1,000 metre/second (Mach 3) within a maximum range of 20,000 metres and heights up to 15,000[7] metres". I don't think that F-35 RCS is less than 1 cm2.
Giving that and also that stealth isn't much of a stealth if there is a network of radars, including airborne ones, it doesn't seem like F-35 would be any better than A-10 in CAS against modern military, while against bearded guys with AKs in desert the A-10 is just more powerful and cheaper.
The advantage a fighter is going to have is it's higher and faster. An F-35 can fly outside Pantsir's envelop and still carry out a CAS mission using a targeting pod.
This is why I don't like the A-10. The environment in which the aircraft is expected to fly is much more dangerous than it used to be. Against a competent opponent we'd see A-10s getting shot down one after another.
I showed a concrete example proving it. That was with an actual anti-aircraft missle. A manpad is much much smaller and the A10 was designed explicitly to take direct manpad strikes.
The solution here is to get rid of the A-10 and simply not do "nation building" and counter-insurgency in poor countries.
Or not to get into wars in the first place; then you could give up having an Air Force at all, right?
Seriously, "stop doing COIN in poor countries" is a political solution that requires a top-down policy change that goes counter to the entire historical direction of US military involvement since Vietnam. The US very seldom tackles even a second-rate military armed with Russian cast-offs -- the most recent example was Iraq in 2003 -- so the A-10 is still useful for the sort of brushfire wars and missions you get involved with. Even though they'd die like flies in a shooting war with a real front-rank opponent. (Like who?)
In the abstract, yes, it's the most sensible course. Unfortunately, from where I'm watching (hint: not an American) it looks like the State Department has an ad-hoc de-facto promotion track whereby you can't make it to the top unless you've got a proven record of running a short, victorious war. Not that this is official policy or anything so formally clear-cut -- it's more like an emergent property of the institution itself, and the priorities that the bureaucracy has evolved to service -- but you don't get to become SecState unless you're a hawk and the best way to acquire hawk credentials is to "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" as Michael Ledeen put it (according to Jonah Goldberg).
OK, you tell the soldiers and marines who are currently on the ground and fighting that we're getting rid of what is, for them, the most effective solution. Until we're actually not fighting these wars, it's best to keep the most effective weapons to fight them around.
That is sadly untenable. Daesh, AQ, and affiliates aren't going to just stop wanting America to burn in ashes because we pull out of Iraq & Afghanistan. War sucks, but you can't reason with ideology of fanatics. If they try to kill you, you have to kill them or let them kill you. You can try to help educate the children and give them alternatives to killing you, but you can't stop them all as ideals never die.
Yeah, I think separation of forces should also be done around capabilities rather than modes of transport. CAS should be part of some sort of infantry command.
In my experience, we got better support from Marine Supercobras in Iraq than any other air entity, and in Afghanistan A-10s. Theyve been talking about getting rid of Warthogs for years, but all the guys I talked to saw right through it and knew it was just to pad the Virginia old boys pockets some more. Of course Im biased, because Ive literally had my life saved by close air support from hogs.
