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GAU-8 might not be that great against modern armor, well, it's from 70s, but it's still capable of M-kills even on Abrams (happened during one of those unfortunate friendly-fire incidents during 1st Iraq war). And immobilised tank is a dead tank. Or at least useless for the mission. A10 was designed for one specific task - to slow down Soviet tank armies rushing into Germany in case of European non-nuclear conflict. And while it was guranteed they would be accopmanied by mobile SAMs, it was tanks themselves that were major concern. The goal was to slow down the hordes by any means necessary and A-10 was the ideal solution for that. According to all documents I was able to find, including several US military assessments, GAU-8 was more than capable of achieving K-kills on T72s using top-down attacks or low-angle side attacks. CAS != tank killing, if your plane "gets there and out faster", you are not doing CAS but some sort of flyby. CAS usually requires visual confirmation of the targets, that means you have to fly low and slow, which F16 is not really made for (bad maneuverability at low speeds). You might also need to stay in the area for extended period of time, which, again, isn't F16s strong point (it's a great plane though). IIRC pretty much all Mavericks in 1GW were from A10s, something like 95%. I mentioned only 1k tank kills because I was lazy to type the other stuff, like trucks, armored vehicles, SCUD launchers, SAMs, all sorts of bunkers, command infrastructure, radars, etc. |