The A-10 also has high maintenance costs and a relatively low loiter time. For fighting terrorists in flipflops, something like a super-tucano does its job for a tenth of the operating cost.
Fundamentally, the A-10 was not built for CAS. It was built as a last-ditch, suicide strafer of Soviet convoys during a land war in Europe. Very few were projected to survive past the first week.
Hard lessons from the GWOT have firmly put the A10 as the most capable CAS platform, and it’s taught as such in all joint fires classes to forward observers and also via unit history/anecdotes fires units (“A10 saved my butt in ‘12”). A10 pilots and units also have a much better rep for CAS than F16 etc units (w/e the USAF name is?).
As in, from the ground units perspective, the unit actually needing and coordinating the CAS, everything you’ve argued is against the grain.
However, the USAF has been running the exact argument you’re using for years.
What matters more - IRL combat experience and successes with the A10 platform, or the 10 year PR campaign to get rid of it for no good reason from the combat perspective.
and again, a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with smart bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to boot.
Well, if you ignore how much quicker it will be shot down (in any environment where at least one of the two would be usable at all against combat forces), sure.
OTOH, the set of environments in which even the A-10 is usable is only going to shrink over time.
The best CAS in GWOT would have been the Super Tucano if the program hadn't taken so long. It would have done the same job as A-10 but much cheaper.
The CAS mission is obsolete outside of counterinsurgency. MANPADs mean that going low and slow is a death trap. Getting low and slow was needed in the past to identify targets and make dumb weapons accurate. Now fighters fly at medium altitude for safety and drop guided weapons. Ukraine shows that medium altitude is dangerous with near-peer conflict without air supremacy.
The F-35 is required to gain air supremacy. If you have them, might as well use them for ground support. I think drones will change things with CAS. On one end, can have small attack helicopter drones for direct support. On the other, can have large drone that loiters for long time dropping bombs. The F-35 will be used for things it is good at.
Go low - you will get MANPAD. Go medium - Pantsir will get you. High - S300. Not everytime but often enough that all sorties will have to be very quick with no loitering and unpredictable flight paths (so no CAS).
The combat footage out of Ukraine is very enlightening. Communication, drone surveillance, full stomachs and no booze is apparently how you win a land war in Asia.
Isn't the A-10 the cheapest-to-operate combat jet the U.S. uses?
I mean, maybe you could argue that you get more capability per dollar for some other platform, but A-10s aren't expensive. (Or at least, historically they aren't. Maybe they've been getting more expensive because the airframes are so old.)
F35 is the multirole fighter. You build it because you don't know if you are doing a stealth mission, a dogfight, CAS or wild weasel.
F35 can do it all, but as a jack of all trades master of none.
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Consider the A10 in the current Ukrainian war: CAS is impossible because both sides have too much antiair. You need wild weasel (aka: anti-air defense) fighters right now.
Eventually, one sides air defense will be destroyed to the point where CAS is needed. A multirole fighter can perform both jobs.
While a specialized wild weasel (ex: stealth bombers) would be kinda useless after air defenses are down. While A10 is useless before air defenses are down.
Wild Weasel worked because you could use a jet as bait to find the position of a SAM site. That worked fine when a SAM site was multiple trailers, and took a day to move.
With MANPADs, you don't have a fixed base, and if you discover where one is (because it shot at you), that information isn't useful, because by the time you know where it is, it isn't a SAM site anymore.
I suspect that when fighting wars against people that aren't insurgents, we end up being much better off with remote piloting, and relatively cheap guided munitions for air support. I.E. its a strategic win to get your $3k drones shot down by $50k MANPADs.
If you're only guarded by MANPADs, then a traditional bomber will blast your position repeatedly. The MANPADs are really there to deal with low-flying aircraft (A10 and Helicopters).
EDIT: I guess the AC-130 cruises at high speeds, but since its gun-based it has to drop relatively low... 7000 ft or less, which might open it up to MANPADs.
But the lower your aircraft, the more at risk vs MANPADs. Helicopters and A10 are probably the worst off since they're far lower to the ground than even an AC-130.
Furthermore, the AC-130 has the AN/AAR-44 Missile Approach Warning Systems, and a _TON_ of flares to misdirect missiles like a MANPAD. The A10 doesn't have nearly as many flares and is therefore far more vulnerable.
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Anyway, CAS are vulnerable to MANPADs (be it A10 or AC-130) because of their mission type.
But jet fighters and fighter-bombers, like the F35 or F16 (or at least, fighters that can play the fighter-bomber role) fly too high and too fast to ever be hit by a MANPAD. They're only worried about the bigger missiles who have enough propulsion to actually reach 10,000+ feet.
Just looking at the wild weasel causes the RADAR system to possibly be bombed. SAM installations vs Wild Weasel tactics are very complex.
In any case...if your SAM is too scared to engage with the wild weasel, they just bomb you from 12,000 feet altitudes.
Winning at 12,000 feet altitudes 50 miles away is the point of the US Air Force. Their goal is to never even engage at lower altitudes until they know they have won in the standoff, long range game.
How would something like that help Ukraine? Does Russia even need HARM when they have so much artillery they can just turn the surroundings of the radar site into the surface of the moon? My understanding is Ukraine preserved its air defenses by moving them right before 2/24 and is betting on Russian cruise missile avionics and military intelligence sucking.
F35 is better because the pilot can turn off all communications when doing the SAED mission, forcing the enemy RADAR to increase their power to even try to see the F35. I don't think drones are in a position (yet) to go radio-silent and accomplish their mission.
AC-130 is only effective against a flipflop army... which doesn't have a friend which would supply tons of MANPADs to the gallant people of your country.
Welcome to the CAS role. You fly low and shoot cheap bullets (lots and lots of cheap bullets), but you're also vulnerable to ground fire.
At least the AC-130 has a ton of flares to misdirect enemy missiles automatically. A10 basically has no form of defense. In any case, a CAS aircraft is in a position of higher risk than most other aircraft since it needs to travel low enough (and long-enough) on the front-lines.
That doesn't mean that CAS is useless. It just means you need a _LOT_ of support before CAS is helpful. That's why an aircraft like F35 (which can perform SEAD / Wild Weasel, as well as CAS later in the war when the air-defenses go down) is better.
Not to mention, F35 has stealth capabilities, so I'm not even sure if MANPADs can lock onto an F35 reliably. Stealth is more than just invisibility, its also one of the best layers of armor since missiles need a RADAR signature to hit airplanes these days.
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But you're right. In the current Ukrainian war, there's almost no need for AC-130 or A10. Neither side has air superiority and both sides have incredible amounts of anti-air defenses. If anything, this is the war that shows why the F35 would be such an incredible aircraft.
So the window where you are vulnerable to MANPAD operator is less than of that AC-130.
> Welcome to the CAS role. You ....
Ah, yes, sorry, sir, looks like I need to take my Hazelnut Bianco Venti Latte and get out of your lawn, sir?
> AC-130 has a ton of flares to misdirect enemy missiles automatically
There is no ejection seats on AC-130. It would be never be operated where MANPADs are the norm.
> A10 basically has no form of defense
Oh ffs, A-10 is armoured with 15-40mm titanium plates, while AC-130 armoured with hopes and prayers.
> so I'm not even sure if MANPADs can lock onto an F35 reliably
If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot) fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane stealthiness.
*Multi-role* fighter. F35 has gun-pods and absolutely is expected to play some CAS role.
Its not a dedicated CAS aircraft, no. Its not as good as other aircraft at the job (AC-130 has more loiter time, bigger guns, etc. etc.), but in a war you use what you can get your hands on.
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And suddenly talking about different weapons now that MANPADs are (probably) useless vs a Stealth Aircraft is the case-in-point of a multi-role fighter with multiple advanced capabilities.
No weapon is immune to all weapons or defenses. But F35 is immune to most missiles due to the nature of stealth. Stealth is the modern armor: if you can't be seen or can't be tracked, you can't be hit. I wouldn't say that F35 is ideal for gatling-gun strafe runs of enemies, but the fact remains that it _CAN_ do the job if forced (thanks to those configurable gunpods).
IMO, the war on the ground being fought right now? A system that can kill enemy Helicopters, perform SEAD, stealth capabilities and even do CAS (albeit a crappy job at it but "can do the job") is so obviously useful to the Ukrainian war that its hard to take any counter-argument seriously.
> If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot) fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane stealthiness.
What's the Shilka's RADAR-guided gun supposed to do against an airplane it can't even see? Are the operators expected to aim and shoot purely on optics?
> in a war you use what you can get your hands on
In a war you don't use a multi-billion toy for it's marketing qualities. Because this is the way lose your multi-billion toy.
> MANPADs are (probably) useless
Beam riders (eg Starstreak). And as soon as you are -lt 2km then you are in IR/UV/Image recognition danger zone too, because: low, fast, precise - choose two.
> albeit a crappy job at
*sigh*
No. It can't do CAS with it's guns. It can do precision drops for CAS (which were done by F-16 against fortified and non-moving targets quite effectively) but it never would be deployed in A-10 style, because that would be the one step before the embarrassment of losing a modern stealth fighter to some MANPAD.
> an airplane it can't even see
At 5-7km? Are you sure it can't be seen at all at that distance? It's a radar absorbing and a radar dispersing materials, not an invisibility cloak from Harry Potter. And yes, you can point it and spray-n-pray. With AAA rate of fire you can do this.
> Are the operators expected to aim and shoot purely on optics?
"but in a war you use what you can get your hands on"
The most recent batch of F35A unit cost was $110 Million.
I think you've got some severe misunderstandings about the nature of the F35 project. Its a multi-billion $$ *research* project, but each airplane is much cheaper than that.
> The F-35’s price per unit, including ancillary costs like depot maintenance, ground support equipment, and spare parts is $110.3 million per F-35A, $135.8 million per F-35B, and $117.3 million per F-35C.
This airplane is designed to be mass produced well. The mass production / upfront engineering costs are massive, but the airplane itself is... ya know... an airplane.
> No. It can't do CAS with it's guns.
That's why the F35 has gun-*pods*. It can equip the pods and turn into a CAS fighter.
The F35's ability to equip gunpods and perform a CAS role is well known. Its not very good at it and has all kinds of restrictions, but it is in fact a use-case that had some level of design thought go into.
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> At 5-7km? Are you sure it can't be seen at all at that distance? It's a radar absorbing and a radar dispersing materials, not an invisibility cloak from Harry Potter. And yes, you can point it and spray-n-pray. With AAA rate of fire you can do this.
Uh huh. https://media.cheggcdn.com/media/1fe/1fe5f562-7e84-4761-9bce...
You know that bullets drop different heights given the distance to target, right? You can't just spray-and-pray at these distances, the difference between 5km and 5.5km is a lot of space that the "bullet drops".
Ask _any_ hunter or marksman. They'll have tac-marks on their rifle for how high to aim even at 100m vs 300m shots. When you start dealing with much further out targets things get even worse, especially if you're "aiming up" and the ballistic trajectory of bullets starts to grow very complex.
Doubly so when these aircraft are moving at 500mph+, so you need RADAR to calculate how far to lead the bullets. At 5km, an AA gun will take as long as 5 to 10 seconds before it reaches the target, so you need significant amounts of calculation on the Jet's direction-of-travel (and leading your shot) before you even have hopes of hitting it.
Now yes, RADAR + Computers do the job well... against an A10 or otherwise aircraft devoid of stealth. If you blind the RADAR system and none of these computers work anymore, you pretty much have free reign and are nearly immune to bullets. You can't be tracked, you can't be calculated, you can't be hit.
Hitting a 3D target maneuvering in the air is very difficult. That's why we built aimbot / Anti-air gun systems to calculate these things.
All of those computers cease to function the minute the aircraft is stealth. If the computer doesn't know the distance, bearing, or velocity, it cannot compute and will not be able to hit the target.
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But that doesn't change the fact that you're playing "Batman utility belt" with these weapon systems. We started with MANPADs and now we're talking AA guns, but in either case the stealth-capability of F35 defeats both so it doesn't matter. Are you gonna pull any other weapon out of your bag of arguments? We're like 3 or 4 arguments through weapon systems that would have made the A10 fully irrelevant and you're still struggling to make a coherent case on what weapon would reliably hit an F35.
Put a hundred rounds in few seconds (so 5-10k projectiles) on the sky where the plane will be in 3 seconds, they will create basically impenetrable cloud and yes you can quite easily shoot down F35 flying during day flying low enough just by visual lock.
One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag
If you had a large scale integrated sensor network, then yes you can triangulate an F35 and track it.
Except the F35 would switch to Wild Weasel mode and start shooting down your sensors (aka, SEAD missions) until it was safe to approach closely.
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That's the thing, if the F35 is already in your face to take direct gunfire like that,bits because the commanders are already sure that all advanced radar sensors are destroyed by HARM missiles.
That's the power of a stealth CAS fighter. It's got way less ammo and runtime than an A10 but stealth more than makes up for it.
Ie not performing CAS. As stated near the start of the thread, nor AC-130 nor F-35 would perform CAS against anything more dangerous than a flipflop army with a complete lack of AA capabilities.
QED
F35 can perform both Wild Weasel and CAS missions. F35 is also cheaper than the AC-130 and responds faster due to much higher speeds (proper supersonic Jet vs Turbine).
Even in a CAS scenario, some scenarios will prefer an F35 over the AC-130 is the enemy is lightly armed and response time is a priority (traveling at 1200mph or faster vs 299mph means the F35 responds 4x faster)
Next gen weapons are going to make F-35 stealth irrelevant in a handful of years.
F-35 is visible on low-frequency radar for hundreds of miles along with general heading and speed.
Most missiles are using 30+ year old technology. Since then, the cellphone economies of scale in both R&D and manufacturing have made CMOS cameras both incredibly good and incredibly cheap. Meanwhile, modern AI technology seems like a match made in heaven for interceptor missiles because you get all of the accuracy, but there's not much to cause the edge case interference we get with something like a self-driving car.
A missile with a $80 cell-phone chip would have enough processing power to run cameras to visually spot the fast-flying plane in multiple light spectrum ranges, lock in, and dynamically adjust to any changes the plane might take all while being mostly immune to modern chaff interference.
In our theoretical interception, low-frequency radars triangulate a stealth plane within a 50-100km cube (30-65 miles). Verify that you don't already have air assets that can take on the threat. If not, SAM sites shoot fire and forget missiles into that general area without even needing to turn on radar. The missiles fly into the given area and attack any fast-moving plane(s) they see. It is even possible to send back telemetry and add that to the training models making the missiles even better the next time.
The Ukrainian war is being fought with T-55 tanks, originally produced in 1948. I think you're overestimating the speed of progress in practice. New weapons take time to mass, decades to gain relevance.
F35 making earlier weapons obsolete is a big enough deal on its own. All weapons discussed in this thread so far are basically irrelevant. Of course new weapons will come eventually, but its generally better to negate the current stockpile of weapons around the world (and force our enemies to research/build new weapons) rather than sending 40 year old A10s out there and pretending that we don't have any better tech ourselves.
WW2 saw the creation of HEAT and the 1970s saw the perfection of HEAT with stuff like the TOW ensuring that any near-peer conflict turned any tank into a necessary, but risky infantry support platform. Modern drones and fire/forget ATGMs have made this even more true.
> New weapons take time to mass, decades to gain relevance.
This is primarily a function of how governments and government contractors work. When you eliminate barriers, you can get something like the famous P-51 which went from design to working prototype in a mere 102 days.
We are seeing something similar with the Lancet drone where a complete redesign has been completed and shipped in a few months and has radically shifted the game in Ukraine. We saw something similar with the FPV drones employed by the Ukrainians.
> rather than sending 40 year old A10s out there and pretending that we don't have any better tech ourselves.
A-10 would be more survivable in the current Ukraine war than the F-35 (which probably couldn't get off the ground most of the time due to the runway conditions).
In the SU-25, targeting the engine means blowing up right next to the cockpit, wings, and munitions resulting in an extremely high loss rate when hit.
In the A-10, the engine is away from the wing and pilot with the wing standing between the engine and munitions. The upward position of the engine also makes it harder to target in the first place. This is why there are quite a few images of them returning with damage to one engine and little else.
The fact remains: the big war you're talking about is being fought with incredibly obsolete weapons.
If the T-54/55 is going against tanks, it has already losing because those should have been taken out with ATGMs and HEAT drones. If it's going up against trenches, inaccurate fire while moving doesn't matter because the tank will be getting super-close anyway. If it's firing at APCs, then stopping really doesn't put it in any danger and they're in for a very bad day.
Until we can work out the point defense issue vs drones, cheaper "disposable" tanks aren't a terrible idea. That new tank design could probably outperform the T-54/55, but the tank you already have that is good enough to support infantry assaults is better than having to make another and leave it to rot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Cheap bullets firing airburst rounds effectively negate drones in a close range. The issue with MACE is that it remains vulnerable to helicopters and other more advanced weapons. Etc. etc.
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But that's... fine. Its war. Each weapon has a cheap-and-effective counter. If you know what the opponent is bringing to the frontlines, you can kill them easily.
Your argument style is fundamentally flawed. You're arguing about counter-weapons as if they're the main threat. You should instead be discussing the capability the tank brings to the frontlines.
* Immunity to all small arms fire.
* Immunity to anti-personel mines (and I've seen plenty of Leopards clearing up anti-personel mines by just rolling over them, providing highways for infantry to travel through later).
* High-power gun that kills a vehicle every 6 seconds
* Advanced therman and night-vision sensors enabling accurate 3mile or 5km shots.
* Resistance to artillery: infantry die to shells that are within 100m of them. Tanks require a more-direct hit, closer to ~5m instead. This forces inaccurate enemy artillery to expend far more shells to kill a tank rather than a group of infantry.
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Tanks have always been vulnerable to airplanes, helicopters, and now drones. That's never changed in their 100+ years of use and history. Taking to the skies is the tank's greatest weakness. But against any ground thread (including against lesser tanks), the tank reigns as the supreme anti-ground unit in the world.
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Just because tanks negate AK-47 or other small arms fire doesn't mean that the AK-47 is useless. It just means that you've complicated the frontlines and have forced the enemy to bring multiple weapons to the frontlines to combat effectively. The more weapons you force the enemy to carry, the better. IE: Combined Arms combat.
You bring soldiers (who lose to snipers / AK-47s). You bring light-armor, that defeats those. You bring medium vehicles (like IFVs) to defeat the lighter-vehicles. You bring tanks to defeat the medium vehicles. You bring air-assets (helicopters) to defeat tanks. You bring jets to defeat the helicopters. You bring artillery to defeat different bits. Etc. etc. etc.
Not really. It's true that anti-air has prevented aircraft from dominating the battlefield, but both sides still use jets and helicopters to come in at low altitude, fire off a bunch of rockets, do a quick U-turn (releasing a bunch of flares) and run away.
Both sides use MI-8s and SU-25s. Not sure if Ukraine has MI-28s, but Russia does. Both sides use glide bombs to hit fortified defense lines.
The Russian KA-52s in particular have been very effective lately because they have guided missiles and night vision equipment, and don't even have to be very close to the front.
If MI-8s, MI-28s, SU-25s, and KA-52s are all being actively used in this war and aren't immediately shot down, I don't see why an A-10 would fare any worse in that situation. Might not be a game-changer, but not useless either.
The A-10 was built for a war in Europe that never came. You can see how well the equivalent SU-25 Frogfoot fairs against Manpads in Ukraine today.
Modern radar can detect and track low flying aircraft just fine.
But modern radar is much more sensitive, and the noise-handling algorithms better - basically it's much more able to distinguish "I hit some trees with my beam" versus "metal". Combine that with modern transmitters which can also produce tighter beams and all the other electronic goodness, and the net effect is that you can scan just as low as you can see in all directions and filter out everything which is boring (i.e. the ground doesn't actually move very much, so really it's a fixed background on your radio image).
The other element of this, is AWACS: AWACS radars are higher, and look down. So not only do they go much further, but there is no "below radar" with them - they can be operated from much further away, and have all the same advantages (i.e. much better signal return discrimination). An AWACS will see you on radar long before you're in weapons range (hence the body of them orbiting near the Ukraine border these days).
The final element is that "flying below radar" was also just plain never that effective. You can test this by asking how often it's actually been done, if it's so effective. If it worked all the time, then that's what military's would train to do. Instead the only real advantage it provides is it reduces light of sight, and that's not uniformly applicable - i.e. a radar on elevated terrain would be able to spot aircraft making low approaches around it because it can just look down and pick out the airplane-like returns and ignore the ground scatter - and said radar can be far behind the lines.
There have been no doubt thousands to tens of thousands of missions flown over the past year and a half by Russia, but only around 28 SU-25 losses and 36 KA-52 losses[0]. At 19 months into the war, that's 1-2 per month which would be more than acceptable losses. Even looking at total aircraft losses per side per month, the worst case is Ukraine with 307 losses over 19 months or 16.2 per month.
Perspective is important. We lost 2,714 planes in the Korean War[1] over 37 months. That is 73.4 aircraft per month or a little more than 4.5x as many each month and it was considered acceptable losses.
I don't care to add up all the things, but even in far less heated wars with basically zero anti-air capability, there are still a ton of aircraft losses[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_during...
[1] https://dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/dpaaFamWebInKoreanAirBat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_accidents_and...
Unless this includes UAV's (which would be a bit strange) I don't see how this is even possible Ukraines airforce doesn't even have 300 combat aircraft.