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by Ras_
3360 days ago
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A-10 has been known to be a MANPADS magnet since the Desert Storm. If you have air superiority, you can keep them, use UCAVs or buy new Super Tucanos. But in contested environment they are useless. Multiroles or bombers with precision weapons are better suited for CAS. Cannons are legacy, which is why you haven't seen a uav concept matching your description. In the future targeting platform and the one doing the shooting might not even be the same. "Part of the reason the A-10 has enjoyed the amount of success and notoriety it has is because there has been unopposed use of the airspace over Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria. It is not a contested environment. It is not a degraded environment. It’s not an operationally-limited environment–save for bad weather and some really big, nasty mountains in Afghanistan. All of that means our air assets have an ability to fly and operate unmolested in those AORs. Tomorrow’s fight will NOT be that." https://fightersweep.com/2038/the-a-10-warthog-debate-a-fate... |
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Why should we expect otherwise? The only conflict the U.S. might be engaged where that wouldn't be the case is an an all-out war with Russia or China, either on their territory or, like in Korea, an awkward proxy war where we're unable or unwilling to control airspace. (Hopefully we don't ever repeat the mistake of Vietnam, where we refused to control either the ground or airspace in North Vietnam for flimsy political reasons.)
It seems pretty dumb to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on such a theoretical conflict, especially given that so far the nuclear powers have managed to avoid such direct conflict.
In every last one of our conflicts with substantial American ground troops in the past half century, we've always controlled the airspace in short order. If it's ever the case where we won't be able to control the airspace, we'd have bigger problems than bike shedding this sort of technology. Any difference between the F-35 and the cheaper alternative (Super Hornet, A-10, etc) would be negligible.
I just don't understand wasting the money. I understand the principle is to plan for the next war, not the previous war. But after a half dozen previous wars with identical circumstances, and several similar on the horizon, at some point not taking _reality_ into account seems grossly short-sighted.
Yes, MANPADS may be getting better, but there are more effective and cheaper solutions to maintaining effective control of the airspace (excepting the above exception) than the F-35 or similar platforms.