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Sturgeon's House

Not so fast you Zoomie bastards...


Belesarius

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MZW weighs in on the A-10's retirement.

I would have to check my figures again, but I'm pretty sure the M14 was like 1.1 times as expensive as the M1, not 3 times as expensive. It was mediocre, though.

F-35 will hopefully not be that bad. It at least isn't a warmed over, like, F-117 or something.

In general, though, his argument checks out.

What do HATO counties use for CAS?

I always assumed it was a mix of rocket pods, LGBs, and mavericks on everything

Besides the usual helicopter and drones

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Hellfires are far and away the most common, I think. You can put them on virtually anything, they carry a useful multpurpose payload, and they are very accurate.

.mil stopped using "dumb" ordnance almost entirely, from the 2000s on, though there's still a lot in inventory. That includes rockets, though as Bele mentions, APKWS is changing that.

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Hellfires are far and away the most common, I think. You can put them on virtually anything, they carry a useful multpurpose payload, and they are very accurate.

.mil stopped using "dumb" ordnance almost entirely, from the 2000s on, though there's still a lot in inventory. That includes rockets, though as Bele mentions, APKWS is changing that.

Theses days the ideal is if it's 'dumb', make it smart with bolt on tech. 

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Well that's what I get for drinking before dinner.

 

But I'd say that it's pretty untruthful/dumb to say that air superiority has no direct benefit to infantry when the army hasn't operated under contested skies since WWII, to the point of reducing medium/close range air defenses to Stinger missiles and hoping that the Air Force and Patriot batteries do their job.

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Yeah, you're totally missing his point, which is that there's a special relationship between A-10 pilots and the infantry. He's not saying that air superiority doesn't benefit infantry, he is saying that the infantry don't have a close relationship with air superiority elements and that the benefits they do get from air superiority aren't visible or tangible to them. Having a clear sky with no enemy aircraft isn't something the grunt is likely to notice, but an A-10 zooming in and blowing up the house full of bad guys is.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm still of the opinion that a combo of Ah-64s and multirole jets like the F-35 can basically fill the same role as the A-10. Need quick CAS? Jet. Need a platform to loiter around and shoot shit with a 30 mm cannon? Ah-64. 

 

Or any jet with dumb or laser guided bombs and rocket pods.

 

 

The concept of a pure ground attack bird isnt obsolete, but so something like the A-10 is. 

 

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  • 2 months later...

Hognose weighs in impassionedly on the A-10's stay of execution.

 

One thing I don't get is this idea that F-35 "can't carry ordnance". Who says, the Washington Post? F-35A has four internal weapons pylons and six external weapons pylons, and a reported maximum load of 18K lbs, versus the A-10's 16K. Or does he mean that F-35's development isn't finished yet, so it isn't currently allowed to carry weapons? That's an entirely separate issue, having nothing to do with the design of F-35 itself.

The A-10 is a better loitering bird, with a higher number of pylons and a massive cannon and better low-speed handling, true, but it's an old airframe and its maintenance costs will only increase, as the gap in capability between it and surrounding systems widens. Once it completes development it will be quite capable of performing a CAS mission, and probably better in several important ways than the A-10 (visibility and networking with on-station drones immediately come to mind).

I love the A-10 a lot, but the rabble rousing about its retirement doesn't seem to be helping anybody except the A-10 maintenance contractors...

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Yeah, Don, the reason why not is that the Air Force's fleet (of everything, F-16s, A-10s, F-15s) is getting very old, and if they keep them in service long enough to meet their projected needs, their maintenance costs are going to shoot through the roof (they already are).

We can't afford to keep the old birds in service, that's why it sounds so goddamn stupid to me when people talk about cancelling F-35.

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Were I a Murkan, I'd vote in favour of cancelling F-35 for LRSB. F-22 is dead (nobody wants to restart production), the rest are old (although still plenty good by any metric). Or make a stretched F-35 variant and leave the C model for the marines to wank over.*

 

Long range stealth boat with large internal capacity seems to be where things are headed for the moment. Well, that and drones.

 

 

* Also, I'd cancel the marines and give the army their name for brand recognition purposes. I promise that nobody would even notice.

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Were I a Murkan, I'd vote in favour of cancelling F-35 for LRSB. F-22 is dead (nobody wants to restart production), the rest are old (although still plenty good by any metric). Or make a stretched F-35 variant and leave the C model for the marines to wank over.*

 

Long range stealth boat with large internal capacity seems to be where things are headed for the moment. Well, that and drones.

 

 

* Also, I'd cancel the marines and give the army their name for brand recognition purposes. I promise that nobody would even notice.

 

 

The legacy fleet is good-ish.  It won't stay that way forever.  Fatigue is already an issue, and it pops its ugly head up now and again.

 

If you cancel the F-35 there will be a a lot of other countries wondering what in the hell they're supposed to fly now.  There will be brief enthusiasm for Gripen NG, Rafale, etc. until people realize that those aren't that much better than upgraded F-16s, and not remotely a match for the likes of the PAK-FA and J-20.  

 

F-35 is also the closest thing to a "long range stealth boat with large internal capacity" that's being produced, and from a non-evil country.  F-35 has bigger internal bays than F-22 (and as of block 5 will match the internal missile capacity of the raptor), and it outranges the F-16 (which, let's not forget, had amazing range for a tactical aircraft of that size when it was introduced) once you start attaching weapons.

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The newest F-15Cs were delivered in 1985. The last F-16 was delivered in 2005 while (IIRC) the last batch of 20 Super Hornets will be delivered this year. Boeing is shutting down the F-15E and F/A-18 lines in 2017 (barring further orders) and Lockheed is saying 2018-2020 for F-16 production.

 

187 F-22s and 2,443 F-35s will be replacing 291 A-10s, 192 F-15Cs, most of the Air Force's 957 F-16s, 314 Navy and 229 Marine Hornets, and around 130 Harriers. Plus 600 or so F-15Es and F/A-18E/F when those start getting phased out.

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