Yeah, possibly. What is indisputable is that the mooted replacement (the F-35) is as useless as tits on a boar for close ground support.

Realistically, the F-35 isn't the replacement for the A-10, drones are. Slow enough to look around and, much like the A-10, if they get shot then the pilot lives through it.

Sure. Drones are the future of air power, anyway, but the question is what do we use for CAS until the drones are ready? If the A-10 is mothballed, it's nothing but unsuitable fixed-wing aircraft until the drones are Good Enough. And if the last twenty years of hot wars have taught us anything, it's that air superiority and bombs dropped from B-52s is nowhere near sufficient.

Apache is the CAS solution. Operated by the Army, too.

Most drones only carry IIRC a single hellfire missile. Not particularly useful against Infantry, and a 1 shot and you're done.

An aircraft like the A10 (and a helo like the Apache, as noted below) has a huge benefit over a drone in its ability to stay on station. As also noted above, other aircraft like F16, F15, etc move fast and generally come in, take out a single target, and move out. A10 can circle, move slow, and continue taking out targets as they appear.

You may take out one or two armored vehicles visible on the battlefield, only to have more pop up over a ridge after your CAS has departed. An aircraft that can stay on station has a tremendous benefit.

Survivability of course matters in something like Close Air Support, with a long on-station time. As I recall, the armoring on the A10 is staggering (Wikipedia says 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of armor just for the cockpit and main aviation systems).

With the Apaches as well, the advent of the Longbow mast (360º radar mounted above the main rotor) after Desert Storm gives it an incredible ability to stay out of view, and pop up just long enough to get a weapon off. I believe the concern with attack helicopters though is tremendous susceptibility to fast movers, and even ground attack by RPG (Al Qaeda in Somalia perfected the art of short fuse detonation of RPG rounds near the rear stabilising rotor. See: Black Hawk Down)

I should note as well that as I recall, the Navy & Air Force ran into similar problems in Vietnam as may happen soon. They phased out most of their prop aircraft in favor of much faster jet bombers (and strategic bombers like the Aardvark that couldn't provide CAS). They ended up using carrier launched A-1 Skyhawks – an aircraft first built in 1945 – for close air support and helicopter rescue escorts (Often seen in vietnam era film as "Sandies").

Infantry support seems to be something that historically the military continues to forget until they suddenly need it, and scramble to stopgap a solution from whatever is laying around. It wouldn't be surprising if the A-10 comes back from the dead in some future conflict for just that reason.

One of the interesting points made in that long Vanity Fair piece about the F-35 [1] is that drone operators just don't have sufficient field of vision to make assessments that a human pilot loitering over a battlefield can. I don't doubt that we'll get there eventually, but I think it's a pretty interesting argument (albeit one advanced by an A-10 pilot.)

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-figh...

That's a truly fantastic article. And a bit scary, considering I have a family member training to fly one.

> Most drones only carry IIRC a single hellfire missile. Not particularly useful against Infantry, and a 1 shot and you're done.

Typical payloads on MQ-9 Reapers go up to 4 Hellfires and 2 500 pound bombs at one time. It's still a lot less than an A10 but it's enough for many situations.

> An aircraft like the A10 (and a helo like the Apache, as noted below) has a huge benefit over a drone in its ability to stay on station.

airframe per airframe, sure.

dollar per dollar (either production costs or operations/support cost)? Less likely.

It truly baffles me just how many very effective and specialized planes are supposed to be replaced by the F-35, which, it seems, can't really do any of those tasks right.

There's a very good reason why there were so many specialized aircraft in the first place.

The problem is that the F-35 costs a gazillion dollars, and (partly because it costs a gazillion dollars) the program is too politically wired-in to cancel. So they have to cut other planes to make room for it, and the only way to do that is to claim the F-35 can do the missions those other planes currently do.

Which it can't, of course, but since admitting that would require keeping the other planes, which would require canceling the F-35, which can't happen, everybody has sort of agreed to pretend it can.

Norman Augustine: Augustine's Laws

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days per week, except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

(From Joseph Tainter)

Diminishing returns to complexity. Drones would, of course, be one way of addressing this phenomenon.

One of the reasons is that the last time we tried this, the TFX, we ended up with one useful airplane type and mission, the F-111, and after a long pause went back to specialized types like the F-14, F-15, F-16 and the A-10.

Hope we don't declare victory with the F-35, field it, and then suffer in our next serious war....

All this reminds me of when bozos start talking about "convergence" in the technology sphere. The US: doomed by middle management.

Not just the US. Netherland stupidly insists on following the US in this, despite it being abundantly clear that the F-35 (or JSF, as it's usually called here) is a fiasco. But it's American, therefore it must be superior to anything else.

Our airforce is usually a bit more than 100 fighters. Always has been. Now we're going to get about 30 F-35s, and they're going to be slower and less maneuverable than our old F-16s. But they have stealth, and some other fighters that we don't have can take off and land vertically, so it's all good I guess.

I seriously think this is going to be the end of western air supremacy.

Taking everything literally, tits on a boar could actually provide fairly good close ground support

Isn't the Spectre Gunship (AC-130) also in service and suitable for a similar role?

Yes but limited range and larger risk of ground-to-air defences.

After an AC-130 was shot down in Iraq, they only fly at night.

Given it was designed as a tank killer, but it has done an amazing job of supporting our ground troops in a way the F-35 is never going to fulfill. The amount of time and continued fire support it can give has not been matched.

Not to mention the robustness of that damned machine...

> The aircraft is designed to fly with one engine, one tail, one elevator, and half of one wing missing.

This is almost certainly the military equivalent of an urban legend, but I remember hearing a story once about an A-10 that ate an anti-aircraft missile. The missile entered the engine nacelle. I don't know whether the missile detonated or not, but, according to the story, the plane turned around, flew back to base, ground crew replaced the engine, and the plane returned to service.

My dad always said that he'd take one A-10 covering him over an entire squadron of F-16s.

That's mostly because A-10's were specifically designed for engaging ground targets, while F-16's were originally designed for air superiority and later evolved into a multi role platform.

Every time someone tries to retire something from the Cold War, turns out we need it after all.

Ughh, why does the CIA always pop up to say this? b^)

More like we grab something from the cold war that probably wouldn't have worked as intended and use it for doing something that wasn't even imagined.

> I think it would make a good candidate for a new class of a drones fleet.

It would (a drone fleet could have an even better "hang time" than an A10) but afaik there's no such class right now, and there's definitely no plan to build drones around the Avenger.

The Avenger is probably overkill anyways for modern warfare. At this point its advantages over a lighter Gatling-style cannon were probably more psychological than physical - the enemy doesn't have tanks.

I could see the US military fielding a drone built around a 20-mm Gatling gun to fill the void left by the A10, if they really felt that bullets were better than Hellfires for the role.

Why do with a missile what can be done with a bullet? Hellfires are pretty pricey...

> if they really felt that bullets were better than Hellfires for the role.

Well, Drones currently carry a single hellfire (at best), the unit cost is $68000 and the anti-personnel version is pretty nasty (it's a thermobaric warhead). A gatling-type cannon provides better precision, more staying time and much cheaper (even for the A10's 30mm, rounds are ~$750 per hundred for HE to ~$1300 per hundred for DU, 20mm rounds are $300 per hundred for HE to $500 per hundred for SAPHEI, you can literally get a truckload of high-caliber rounds for the price of each Hellfire).

>Well, Drones currently carry a single hellfire (at best)

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-9_Reaper - at least 4 missiles.

As it is, drones are only going to get bigger and better performing.