1. Take a good look at the tail in relation to the engines. From most angles, the engine exhaust is hidden from the ground. The A-10 is flown with an undulating motion that will break a heat-seeking lock.
2. The typical little missile just isn't going to do much damage. The A-10 is a twin-engine aircraft with some armor around the engines. There is even a bit of extra fuel kept there, in case the fuel line is cut.
Modern air defense systems are explicitly engineered to very effectively kill things like the A-10, and it can't support modern counter-measures because of these limitations. It still works in environments for which it was designed i.e. absent modern air defense systems.
"From the beginning of 2006 to October 2013, A-10s conducted 19 percent of CAS missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than the F-15E Strike Eagle and B-1B Lancer, but less than the 33 percent flown by F-16s."
...and...
"The U.S. Army had expressed interest in obtaining some A-10s should the Air Force retire them"
I am not sure why SAMs aren't the threat to the A-10s that they were to Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan. Maybe the Taliban can't afford them? Also SAMs require training and degrade quickly if not maintained.
And the real issue is whether the A-10 can survive against a near peer like Russia or China. Considering that in the late 70's the life expectancy of an A-10 over the Fulda Gap was measured in single digit sorties, expecting them to survive today against modern SAMs (both radar guided and infrared) is unrealistic.
CAS in bush country like Iraq/Afghan is much better performed by fast jets that can respond quickly with a JDAM or SDB.
Iraq: https://military.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_...
Afghanistan: https://military.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_Coalition_aircraft_l...
The A-10 was designed knowing it was going to get shot at and take hits. It doesn't have the speed other craft do, though it was somewhat underestimated just how many hits it'd take. All of those redundancies and protections are designed to protect the pilot and save the aircraft. However, an A-10 doesn't have to be shot down in order to be considered a "mission loss", which is what would happen. A damaged aircraft is no longer mission effective, as the pilot is now focusing everything on keeping it airworthy and getting it back to base. So as one of the other posters indicated, while many wern't a total lost, many were damaged, and either had to abort or cut short their mission as a result. From a sortie effectiveness perspective, that's the same result as a downed plane. https://baloogancampaign.com/2015/02/02/10-future-us-close-a...
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_... ... says only one A-10 was lost during the conflict.
You want to see something, tell someone you don't like seeing that thing, have someone make it no longer there. Repeatedly over a period of time.
Whether that's an A-10 or a magician on a flying carpet doing that work, the work just needs to get done.
I wonder if a fleet of drones will do that work. You could have them peel off, refuel and come back as required automatically while maintaining a minimum strike force in the area.
Regardless, it has to Just Work TM.