>CAS is a job best done by relatively slow, but well armored aircraft flying low and slow.

That was true, but it's not true any more. Modern targeting pods (like the Siper XR pods on the B-1) mean you can get the same situational awareness from much farther away. Between targeting pods and laser guided weapons the A-10 is obsolete.

Low and slow is dangerous. Aircraft defenses (lasers, flares, chaff, ECM) haven't been evolving as quickly as threats at low altitudes. Not by a long shot. You're fine against a dozen guys with rusty AK-47s and RPG-7s, but once you start fighting armies equipped with something like Pantsir or NASAMS you're in big trouble.

There's two points here:

Have fast planes with targeting pods proven more effective than A10s thus far in practice? (I don't know, I'm asking.)

How many potential enemies have high end AA missile systems? It's all very well to argue that a weapon system can't defeat X, but is X what we'll be fighting in practice?

The M1 Abrams turned out not to be especially useful in Iraq although it remains superb for defeating a Russian offensive in the Fulda Gap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap).

I think the US needs to figure out what its strategy is before it picks weapon systems. Since the end of the cold war we seem to have lost the plot both in terms of strategy (what do we want? how should we get it?) and tactics (how will we employ available resources to obtain desired results). If anything, our strategy seems to be dictated by our tactics which are dictated by resources which are decided by pork barrel politics.

This is hardly surprising -- when Senator McCain "schooled" Obama on the meaning of strategy (as Grand Tactics) he demonstrated that top policy makers literally don't even know the meaning of the word.

Recap: the A10 is very good for fighting counterinsurgency against people with relatively shitty equipment. Do we think we should be fighting a lot of such wars? Why? If the answers make sense, then sure, keep the A10.

A-10s having been flying with targeting pods (Litening and Sniper) and dropping laser and GPS-guided weapons for years. So how exactly has their presence made A-10 obsolete again?

Can't say I know very much about this, but if you can see and hit things well from a distance why go close? And if you don't need to go close, why do you need something that is built to go close over something that can carry more ordinance or fly for fewer dollars per hour or get there quicker? Surely it costs something (speed, flight range, maybe) to get the ability to go close and if you don't need that ability you can use that cost elsewhere.

Sometimes standoff is good and necessary. Stay out of threat range, not be seen or heard by the enemy as you follow them with your targeting pod, etc.

Sometimes standoff is pointless. Friendlies on the ground are in a knife feet with the enemy less than 100m away and they need air support. Now close, and slower to better maintain SA on who the friendlies are and who the enemy is -- and the ability to deliver weapons with lower Risk Estimate Distances and/or Collateral Damage Estimates is critically important. The GAU-8 does both. The F-16 gun is useless. A laser guide bomb in this scenario may present too much risk for fratricide.

A-10s can carry more ordnance, for a longer time over a target area, and need less tanker support to do so, than an F-16. And for less $/flying hour. It does cost speed. A-10s don't go anywhere quickly. But it can perform CAS in a standoff roll, or in a close-in fight equally well.

Making a presence does influence the tactical decisions made by the enemy.

Here's a simplistic example. If the enemy isn't aware that your side has CAS, he may believe that it's a good idea to attack your side in a certain way. He may get killed in the process, but that attack may result in some losses on your side.

If, on the other hand, the enemy is made aware of your CAS, he may opt to play it safe and not risk his assets by attacking you that way.

It's like when you play chess: some pieces control some areas of the board without doing anything. Just by being where they are, they restrict the opponent's actions.

Closer means less reaction time.

Because you can get situational awareness and targeting without ever having to get close to your target. A multirole fighter (or better yet, a B-1) with a pod can carry out the CAS mission just as effectively. You don't need a dedicated ground attack aircraft.

And yet, A-10s are currently deployed to Middle East fighting ISIS and Europe to saber rattle Putin. Not very obsolete.

There are a myriad of incorrct assumptions in your argument, but I'll focus on one. Pilots flying multi-role aircraft have to train for those multiple roles. They have to remain proficient in multiple mission and skill sets, many of which do not overlap. Do you think multi-role F-16, F-15E, and B-1 pilots/WSOs get extra training resources (flying hours and sorties) over A-10 pilots, who only train for really one mission -- CAS? Newsflash…they don't.

It appears you think CAS is nothing more than finding targets in a targeting pod. It is not.

>And yet, A-10s are currently deployed to Middle East fighting ISIS and Europe to saber rattle Putin. Not very obsolete.

Which pretty much any other aircraft in the arsenal can do. And obsolete doesn't mean "useless". It just means there are better options.

>There are a myriad of incorrct assumptions in your argument, but I'll focus on one. Pilots flying multi-role aircraft have to train for those multiple roles. They have to remain proficient in multiple mission and skill sets, many of which do not overlap. Do you think multi-role F-16, F-15E, and B-1 pilots/WSOs get extra training resources (flying hours and sorties) over A-10 pilots, who only train for really one mission -- CAS? Newsflash…they don't.

You have a myriad of incorrect assumptions in your argument here, but I think the fastest way to blow hole in it is to point out the A-10 only accounted for 20% of CAS missions in Afghanistan. Pilots of those other airframes are certainly training for CAS - they're doing 80% of the missions.

>It appears you think CAS is nothing more than finding targets in a targeting pod. It is not.

Your whole argument boils down to "I know something you don't". Maybe you should expound, as the only supporting point you provided is simply wrong.

In COIN missions, when operating very close to the enemy, you often need to get close enough to for visual confirmation. The truth is, with guidance you can hit a dot at an arbitrary distance. But without visual, it's awfully hard to be sure what that dot is.

Visual confirmation allows ordinance to be fired at tens rather than hundreds of meters. The perfect replacement for the A-10, which (let's face it) is major overkill, despite being a truly awe-inspiring machine, is the turboprop South American anti-cartel aircraft the A-29B Super Tucano.

The other proposed replacements for the A-10's CAS duties are the F-35 JSF, and the Sikorsky S-97 Raider, which is an overpriced under-armed light attack helicopter.

The problem is that now that the A-29B isn't being built, the A-10 has to be decommissioned in order to justify the Raider and and the F-35 CAS.

And with Putin's "frozen conflicts" strategy expanding, it never hurts to have a aerial gun that can punch through Soviet-made tanks like tissue paper.

Why not C130?

There is a C-130 variant for ground attack, as well as kits the marines use to turn a C-130J into a ground attack craft. But the C-130 is very big and very slow, so you need absolute dominance of the skies and you need to make sure you've cleared out all the ground based AA.

85 ton B1 vs. 35 ton C130.

It doesn't matter that much if you are going 720 knots or 320 knots if you get shot by BUK missile traveling 2000 knots. Both C-130 and B1 can fly above small caliber Anti-air artillery range and above MANPAD range with ease. Nothing can fly above BUK, you would need stealth to operate at those environments.

The only threat where B1 is clearly better is if you get shot by Flack 88. But that's not going to happen. So B1 gets phased out as too expensive platform.

On the flip side, you're not any safer putting drones up against jamming technology, like GPS jammers and so on. China proved that tech when they put one of our stealth drones down in Iranian territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

There's certainly a middle ground between blowing up dudes with rusty AKs and fighting high-level proxy wars but honestly that barrier is paper-thin, nations like Russia and China will always be escalating that. It's always an arms race. Drones can react faster (for now) but humans can react appropriately.

Isn't the control latency a problem here? Firing a missile at a residence or car on the highway is one thing, but engaging an enemy who is engaging you back in a battlefield situation would seem to require that the pilot be experiencing and responding to the situation now, not a satellite roundtrip halfway around the world ago.

I have to agree with this, but there's nothing saying that drone operators can't be situated closer to the action. They can operate from a ship off-shore or even a nearby ground facility or plane.

Realistically though, a thousand kilometers of distance incurs only about half a millisecond of delay. The real issue is probably getting the latency of everything else in the chain down to a low level. e.g. One problem commercial VR systems are currently engaging is getting latency down to a level that doesn't make people feel sick. The standards for a military jet are probably a lot higher.

On the bright side, a CAS fighter flying at a few hundred kilometers per hour is probably a much easier first-step for drone replacement than a supersonic fighter. I'm not saying the A-10 is obsolete yet, but it's likley going to be replaced by drones before any other manned fighters are.

I think your half millisecond is an order of magnitude out. c = 3x10^8metres/sec. c=d/t. So t=1000×10^3metres / 3x10^8metres sec = (approx) 0.3x10^-2 sec = 3x10^-3 sec = 3 millisecs. Phew, tough editing work on a phone. 6 millisecs for a round trip.

Yes, you're right. Average human reaction time is on the order of hundreds of milliseconds though. If you can keep latency under ten milliseconds you're probably doing pretty good, and that's reasonable over distances of a few hundred kilometers. Having the operator thousands of kilometers away is only really necessary for extrajudicial assassinations, which should be put to a stop anyways.

I can remember playing Quake on a server with a latency of 40 ms and being an untouchable god because of it.

But for VR you can just have a ultra wide fov camera and then allow your pilots to look around that field with zero latency. The only latency would be with actual commands to the drone which shouldn't cause any problems with VR anyways.

There is significant lattency in digital videos streams and also the render pipe. I don't know how they stream video but it can't be mpeg.

Even with compressed independent frames that never spend on future frames you get the transfer window lattency so you need a lot of unjammable bandwidth. Line of sight transmitters? Ir lasers? Kind of a hard problem though as you might possibly want to not light up the whole country with your communications.

And commodity hardware can't push frames without a lot of buffering. I guess they might afford custom display hardware but it's a complex problem too.

I guess it would be easier to just send the coordinates where you want everything dead and get the popcorns. Bonus extra is everything that actually is a threat but I doubt that it's a actually a big concern when doing CAS, although I guess a A10 pilot might be able to spot schoolyards and kids if they are not under pressure.

The ping from US West to Tokyo is around 150ms on AWS, last I remember.

I read once that musicians need to be within about 20ms to collaborate in real time, and that sound travels through air at about 1 foot per ms. Fighter pilots can recognize an image flashed for 1/220 second (4.54ms) [1]. Etc. I'd call these operating parameters for drones, split between computing and communication.

1. http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm Test #3

You can put big guns on drones.

A-10 are anti tank, and anti dug in positions. If someone is running in the open ground forces can just shoot them. Further, a person running at 25 mph takes 27 ms to move one foot. So a little latency is not an issue. Remember, these things are spraying billets in a line on the ground. They don't need or really want pin point accuracy.

Yea, the GAU-8's precision is like 70% within some multiple meter radius at 1km anyways. I don't remember the specifics.

80% within 5 mils. 1 mil = 1 foot at 1000 feet. At 1nm (usual employment range), that's 30 feet.

"Marines in planes, on the other hand, are likely to accept similar risk to marines on the ground if it reduces risk for all."

Is this an issue of different cultures within different departments, or different objectives, or what? I would hope that combined arms in a modern military would break down divisions in combat behavior like this

All of the above. The USMC is designed to be quickly deployed in such a way that combat operations can continue to be performed with no support dependency (1-3 months, I don't remember). In order to make that happen they've duplicated a slimmed down version of a bunch of DOD components: air, armor, artillery, navy, etc. The moment one of those components underperforms in comparison to the fatter DOD version - it calls the whole endeavor into question, so there is considerable incentive to the folks at the top to make it work. Long story short: the USMC is a statically compiled version of kill.exe.

They rotate the pilots to ground operations as well, FACs - forward air controllers, so there is a pretty close link at the company level: the FAC knows the pilots in the air. Rifle squad leaders are required to be qualified JFOs, joint fire observers, so for every 13 infantrymen you've got someone who can direct fire support. The common practice in the infantry is for individuals to train in tasks performed by the next two levels in one's chain of command, so every rifleman is effectively trained to interface with fire support. This requirement for interoperability is often reflect in weapon design: tanks have comm boxes on the back, grunt phones, where an infantryman can grab the phone and direct the tank commander. This leads to the implementation of the "billet supersedes rank" philosophy, where you often have a lance corporal instructing an officer - and the instruction is cheerfully met with "Direct fire B2, fire for effect, aye aye lance corporal".

The effect of the culture can't be overstated, I've seen a lot of brave men from every branch, but in my experience as an infantry machinegunner - the USMC air wing operated on a whole other level of "Just make it happen". Judgement calls are made at a much lower level in the Corps, which can lead to emotion driven mistakes, but generally results in faster decisions by those with greater situation awareness.

Purely on the basis of training, equipment, and investment of taxpayer dollars, a pilot's life is worth a helluva lot more than an infantryman's life, and air force pilots are probably aware of this. They're like the modern day equivalent of noblemen as mounted heavy cavalry. They feel the duty to protect the peons with pitch-forks on the front lines, but they're not trained to do so recklessly. A platoon getting wiped out is a far smaller loss than losing a plane. Such are the economic realities of war. Pilot training no doubt reflects this.

I honestly don't know much about marine aviator culture, but I'd be very surprised if they don't see themselves as having more in common with marine infantry than air force pilots do. That commonality probably makes them a lot more committed to keeping ground forces safe when flying CAS missions. I could be wrong. I am speculating here. I'd welcome the opinion of somebody in a position to know better.

> "...but I'd be very surprised if they don't see themselves as having more in common with marine infantry than air force pilots do."

You're exactly right. AF pilot here, not a Marine, but it is my understanding that all Marine officers go infantry school first. The Marines are very good at Combined Arms - it's what they do.

But that doesn't mean they are necessarily more committed to CAS. CAS is pretty much all A-10 pilots do. They live and breath supporting dudes on the ground. Objective #1 for just about every CAS training mission is something along the lines of "Achieve the Ground Commander's intent."

One key difference is that Marine pilot mostly provide CAS for other Marines. AF CAS pilots mostly provide CAS for the Army -- a completely separate service.

So going back to Objective #1, a Marine pilot could very well personally know that ground commander. Went to various schools together, crossed paths, etc. The USMC isn't terribly big, all things considered.

An Air Force pilot has about a 0.1% change of knowing who that Army ground commander is. Question becomes, does this matter?

A Marine may say it does, and I won't argue with him. I will say this, as a A-10 pilot: I don't give a shit you who are. If you need CAS, I will give you everything I've got. Even if all you need is for me to stare at building with my targeting pod for three hours to to see if any bad dudes are hiding inside. That's how I was raised, and that's what teach brand new A-10 pilots.

In WW1, the aviators were drawn from the nobility. Until they all got slaughtered. Then the lower classes started getting accepted into the flying schools.

This is the background of the movie "The Blue Max".

That's a pretty strong statement to justify with 'no doubt'.

DOD has a zillion ways they support the families of KIA soldiers. Even just looking at economics, losing 10 soldiers isn't cheap.

> losing 10 soldiers isn't cheap.

It's cheaper than losing the plane, the pilot, the resources spent in training, maintenance, and preparation of the whole logistic structure.

Not to mention the asset and its capabilities. After all, a grunt with a gun is less of a threat than a plane carrying an entire arsenal.

An F-35 starts at around $100M, and that's the plane the air force is touting to take over the CAS role. Does it really cost more than $10M per infantryman killed?

ok but the F-35 isn't the go-to plane for CAS right now. On the opposite end of the spectrum you can get an AC-208 'combat caravan' for $150k in non-sequential bills and a late-model hyundai sonata (KBB value $15k).

Someone cooked up a model showing that the embraer super tucano would have been more effective in the CAS mission in afghanistan than some of the high power jets we used, in addition to 10x cheaper.

The USAF does not fly the AC208 or the Super Tucano in combat. There is no prize for hypothetical savings.

I would love to see such airframes flown, they would be much more effective in many roles than "super-airframes" like the F-35. But that's not the US military philosophy. We fly the best and most expensive, even if it's 10x as expensive as an airframe that's 75% as effective. It's a calculation that government debt is cheaper than having to face the public over killed and captured soldiers.

The writers arguing for this (not me, I don't have experience or expertise to have an opinion) say that cheaper airframes are more effective because of slower stall speed, ability to operate at lower altitude, and greater fuel stamina, all of which translate to better loiter characteristics.

Also have heard that ground commanders hate the high-altitude planes for CAS because they're less likely to correctly discriminate the situtation on the ground before unloading.

To your point -- yes, we don't operate AC208; I think iraq is the only one who does. (And if the sight of a hellfire stapled to the wing of a small turbopro doesn't make you want to run and hide, I don't know what will). But we also don't operate the F-35 in the CAS mission. neither plane is a good example of a CAS plane.

> On the opposite end of the spectrum you can get an AC-208 'combat caravan' for $150k in non-sequential bills and a late-model hyundai sonata (KBB value $15k).

Even considering that hypothetical scenario, there's also the cost of training everyone throughout the logistics chain and required to get the plane operational and in the air.

If you lose a peasant, you lose a peasant. If you lose a knight, you also lose the squire, the page, etc etc etc.

The tactical decision is going to consider a value pretty close to the cost of the plane and pilot though. The logistics chain can support a new plane and pilot.

The squire can help some new guy with his helmet, etc (I think this is considerably more true for modern military than for knights...).

well with improving optics and coordination who needs CAS drones, the things will be deployed anywhere on the horizon and either employ a rail gun or long term a laser to blanket an area. Railguns are frighteningly fast and don't require close proximity to their target to respond to a situation near instantly.

The latency inherent in drone control is at odds with the need to develop an awareness of the battlefield situation.

When your sensory data is out of date by up to 2 seconds, you're going to get a lot of blue-on-blue fire.

If you are firing on a target that is so close to friendlies that 2 seconds of on the ground movement can make a difference, then that is a danger close fire mission - which is rare. They also lead to additional safety checks and procedures before final execution. For example: normally an aircraft could just drop ordinance from any angle, but for danger close they align the friendly unit with the target - dropping ordinance once they've passed over the friendlies. While a drone can't really do that, the detached nature of the operator would actually be an advantage in that situation. If I had to choose between someone dropping bombs near me with a Google maps like interface or some dude rolling in riding 30 tons of angry aircraft, I'd choose the point and click option.

Former jarhead here, familiar with "danger close" ;)

My point was just that, though: 2s of latency on a danger close fire-mission is something that brings the pucker-factor up to a solid 9. At least for me, the (former) grunt on the ground.

Huh, I just assumed you were AF because you've made the same argument that they use for dragging their feet on drone deployment - the value added by retaining a large amount of human judgement in process that no longer requires it. I imagine the folks who got replaced by standardized tooling during the industrial revolution made the same obviously self serving argument.

Well grunts can disagree, I was an 0331 ten years ago, but you've got me curious about what experience has informed your thinking on this matter. I've only been down range of danger close fire missions twice, and in neither case were we moving around much. The first was when we were pinned down, and the other was when our foot patrol stumbled onto a numerically superior enemy with technicals. I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a danger close is made any more dangerous by adding a two second delay. Even in a scenario where your FDL is breached and you're poking people to death, there is a clear delineation - you aren't running past your attackers. A flanking maneuver would confusing that delineation, but that takes a lot longer than whatever delay the drone operator faces.

>Pilots of this type of mission are going to come under fire, which is something the air force is fundamentally unwilling to accept.

O.o O Rly? and of the entire spec ops community down in Florida?

>Given that CAS pilots must work most closely with those on the ground, it makes little sense for them to be air force.

We literally have an entire command-control element built around reducing the latency between ground and air assets called the TACP (tactical air control party)

>drones are probably the real A-10 killers.

Alright, you earned some street cred back

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