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Indeed! I've often wondered why, for instance, we don't build brand new A-10 Warthogs. They provide the best close air support in perhaps the entire history of

Indeed! I've often wondered why, for instance, we don't build brand new A-10 Warthogs. They provide the best close air support in perhaps the entire history of military aviation worldwide (great range, extremely resilient to small arms fire, low altitude / low speed capabilities, etc.). Instead, the Marines Corps scrambles (no pun intended) to find a replacement after realizing that the JSF program wasn't real (it turns out that the F-35 will bankrupt the Milky Way Galaxy before being finished, not to mention it has too much wing loading to provide adequate close air support). Yet, the wonderfully designed A-10 Warthog languishes in military relic status. Why not make new copies these greats, with any of the little kinks worked out?

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
The A-10 is not a plane that will be useful for long. It is great against rebels with kalashnikows, but it is far too vulnerable to rockets. In 10-20 years, manpads will be commonplace, and the A-10 will be an easy target. Its a great plane, and the JSF is shit, but we need a different solution going forward.
- dsfyu404ed 11y ago
  The A-10 was meant to go head to head with Soviet armored divisions. It's built to be hard to take out with a rocket which is what makes it so great for CAS. MANPADS have been common for a very long time. The Mujaheddin used them with great success.
- swang 11y ago
  1. Manpads are already pretty common 2. A-10 has both jamming and flare countermeasures against infrared. 3. Anything terrorist groups can acquire are probably going to be infrared MANPADs. My guess is ISIL would probably have acquired MANPADs from the large cache of SA-7 MANPADs Gaddafi stocked, meaning they're all likely infrared MANPADs. A-10s are not invulnerable against MANPADs, but they're not helpless against them either. In fact, one of the biggest reasons the air force hated the A-10 was because it was "too slow" and could be "easily" hit by a SA-7
  - rjsw 11y ago
    The A-10 is too slow. It is just used in a similar way to other planes these days, to drop smart bombs, a supersonic jet can cover a lot bigger area to respond to requests from ground troops.
CydeWeys 11y ago
The main armament of the A-10, the GAU-8 Avenger Vulcan cannon, no longer does its job against modern armor. It still has all sorts of rockets and missiles it can be equipped with that do, but so do many other planes. It's fine in asymmetric conflicts like the current wars, where targets are slightly armored if that, but it will no longer serve its purpose in a war of first world nations.
- Phrodo_00 11y ago
  Yeah, but first world nations don't fight wars with each other, they mostly finance small nations and fight proxy wars. I'd say mostly out of a (justified) fear of WW3.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    And the A-10 is overkill for counter-insurgency. It doesn't have a primary mission anymore.
- gozur88 11y ago
  The GAU-8 won't penetrate the front armor of a modern tank, but I doubt it could penetrate the front armor of 1980s era tanks, either. However, there isn't a tank in the world that will remain operational after a properly executed A-10 gun attack from the top or sides. Don't get me wrong - I love the A-10, but it's pretty much obsolete at this point. Not because you can't use it to destroy tanks, but because there are much cheaper, safer, and more efficient ways to destroy tanks than low-and-slow strafing. A properly equipped strike aircraft can hit a tank with a laser guided bomb without ever exposing itself to AAA or MANPADS fire. And if we're just going to mow down groups of jihadis with rusty AK-47s we should be using something cheaper like the Super Tucano II.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    Armor design has advanced a lot since the 80s. I'm thinking the A-10 was actually significantly more effective against a contemporary tank than it is against a modern new production one. Sure, it could definitely still get a kill, but not as easily, and as you point out, other aircraft could do so more safely, without exposing themselves to danger.
jasonwatkinspdx 11y ago
The A-10 is great, but there are a number of reasons why we aren't building more of them. Chief among them is that the teams and facilities that produced them have been gone for decades now. It's not a product you can simply re-order. Of the planes in inventory, it's efficient and useful in low intensity CAS, but if you were ordering new for those missions you'd likely focus on something that's less overkill and lower cost like the super tucano.
- poof131 11y ago
  The super tucano is a great plane. Saddened me that the Navy and Air Force couldn’t get them operational in a much quicker fashion and on a much larger scale. They provide better ground support and targeting, longer on station time, and all at a substantially cheaper cost than fixed-wing. Plugging square, fixed-wing jets into round, low-threat-CAS holes cost the American tax payers billions. This is one of my greatest disappointments in military leadership.
- s_q_b 11y ago
  Ironically, after the request from JSOC and the Marine Corps for a modified Super Tucano (A-29B) was nixed, the United States' main procurement facility for this plan is still building them... for the Afghan airforce. Sure, the Super Tucano doesn't have the punch from the main gun or crazy survivability of the A-10. But in a battlespace where air supremacy is guaranteed, it has the advantage of being able to get a close-up visual on the target, and accurately fire ordinance tens rather than hundred of meters away from friendly forces. My personal understanding is that the Super Tucano was sacrificed on the alter of the myth of technological progress. Every airframe, every digital HMI, and every weapons system must be more technologically sophisticated than the last, even if that solution is completely unsuited to ongoing and forecasted combat missions. The fact that our most common enemies can't field a proper SAM site, much less a fifth-generation fighter, be damned. Of course there is also the cultural issue. That the great United States might have to admit that the South Americans know more than us about air warfare in counter-insurgency campaigns is anathema to both the military and the civilian government.
  - 11y ago
kjs3 11y ago
The A-10 is the P-51 of today. It was a defining weapon of it's time, but it became unsurvivable on a more modern battlefield. Ask the guys who flew the P-51 in Korea how awesome it was. The A-10 is extremely vulnerable to any number of modern tactical AA weapons, and it won't get any more survivable.
engi_nerd 11y ago
JSF costs are on a downward trend, and will continue that trend as production numbers increase[0]. For a financial breakdown of the projected costs of the program, see [1], [2](actual source for data in [0] and [1]). And the program is very, very real. I am aware of other programs which really existed to funnel money to more secret programs, but the JSF program is not one of those front programs. We don't build more A-10s because they no longer meet the projected operational needs of the USAF, which, along with the rest of the military, is changing strategic focus to the Asia/Pacific region. [3] Not to mention the production line is long since shutdown (32 years ago!) and the tooling either destroyed or lost. The knowledge to build them is lost. You do not simply build more. You have to teach yourself to build them again. This would take years. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/H5fTkIU.png https://i.imgur.com/H5fTkIU.png [1]: http://i.imgur.com/6cV6I7g.png http://i.imgur.com/6cV6I7g.png [2]: http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/04/F-35-2013-SAR.pdf http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/0... (The definitive source for F-35 cost data). [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/F35Lightning/comments/3a7yol/article_f35_unscathed_by_hostile_fire_in_green/csa3v76 https://www.reddit.com/r/F35Lightning/comments/3a7yol/articl... (full text of paywalled Aviation Week article)
- mangeletti 11y ago
  I wrote a similarly hyperbolic F-35 comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446079 earlier this year (the comment at the top). I'm half-way kidding in both comments, regarding my comments about the F-35, but on the other hand, unless my aforementioned comment about secret programs, etc. is at least partly true (meaning you're partly wrong), then the F-35 (or at least the opportunity cost of it) will surely turn out to be the fall of US military dominance. When we're spending nearly (or more than) $100MM for a jet that cannot even stand up against an F-16, a jet introduced in 1978. That's 5 years before I was born, so it's really weird to think about a jet from that long ago even flying today, let alone a pre-Nintendo jet dog fighting (let alone, beating!) a modern jet in 2015, that surely has orders of magnitude more computational power on board than did the entire world at that time. In other words, the scenario described is a bit like that movie, The Final Countdown, except the fighter jets on the aircraft carrier lose to Japanese Zeros :/ what a frightening situation to be in. All that said, I understand that we live in a different world now, and that air superiority isn't defined only by dog fighting capability, and that we also have to factor in that most modern dog fights would be over before either pilot could see the other with their own eyes, and that this is, in fact, part of the promise of the F-35. But, regardless of this, what was the value gained by the F-35 by making the wings so small? A slightly larger wing size could have increased fuel capacity, increased fuel efficiency, increased low-speed and low altitude capabilities, and made it a much better dog fighter, at no real expense to other features.
epaga 11y ago
The A-29 was meant to be exactly this. It's a sad story, well-told by Vice. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/low-and-slow http://motherboard.vice.com/read/low-and-slow
Marazan 11y ago
I love the A-10 but in keeping with the rest of the US military it got lucky which hlped it's reputation enormously. The US military spent the 80's allegedly training to fight a defensive war in Western Europe - but when you look at the wargames they engaged in what they actually trained for was an aggressive war in a desert (this isn't some wacky conspiracy theory, it's just basic incompetence by the people setting the military exercises, they looked at the crowded cluttered maps that represented Germany and despaired that they wouldn't get to use the 2 mile cannon range on their tanks in the wargames so the maps got altered until they were far to open to be Western Europe). The A-10 is perfect for CAS in a desert - in Afghanistan they didn't do as well as their lower agility compared to other jets made it harder for them to dodge mountains which affects their legendary ability to loiter.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago

The A-10 is not a plane that will be useful for long. It is great against rebels with kalashnikows, but it is far too vulnerable to rockets. In 10-20 years, manpads will be commonplace, and the A-10 will be an easy target. Its a great plane, and the JSF is shit, but we need a different solution going forward.

dsfyu404ed 11y ago
The A-10 was meant to go head to head with Soviet armored divisions. It's built to be hard to take out with a rocket which is what makes it so great for CAS. MANPADS have been common for a very long time. The Mujaheddin used them with great success.
swang 11y ago
1. Manpads are already pretty common 2. A-10 has both jamming and flare countermeasures against infrared. 3. Anything terrorist groups can acquire are probably going to be infrared MANPADs. My guess is ISIL would probably have acquired MANPADs from the large cache of SA-7 MANPADs Gaddafi stocked, meaning they're all likely infrared MANPADs. A-10s are not invulnerable against MANPADs, but they're not helpless against them either. In fact, one of the biggest reasons the air force hated the A-10 was because it was "too slow" and could be "easily" hit by a SA-7
- rjsw 11y ago
  The A-10 is too slow. It is just used in a similar way to other planes these days, to drop smart bombs, a supersonic jet can cover a lot bigger area to respond to requests from ground troops.

CydeWeys 11y ago

The main armament of the A-10, the GAU-8 Avenger Vulcan cannon, no longer does its job against modern armor. It still has all sorts of rockets and missiles it can be equipped with that do, but so do many other planes. It's fine in asymmetric conflicts like the current wars, where targets are slightly armored if that, but it will no longer serve its purpose in a war of first world nations.

Phrodo_00 11y ago
Yeah, but first world nations don't fight wars with each other, they mostly finance small nations and fight proxy wars. I'd say mostly out of a (justified) fear of WW3.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  And the A-10 is overkill for counter-insurgency. It doesn't have a primary mission anymore.
gozur88 11y ago
The GAU-8 won't penetrate the front armor of a modern tank, but I doubt it could penetrate the front armor of 1980s era tanks, either. However, there isn't a tank in the world that will remain operational after a properly executed A-10 gun attack from the top or sides. Don't get me wrong - I love the A-10, but it's pretty much obsolete at this point. Not because you can't use it to destroy tanks, but because there are much cheaper, safer, and more efficient ways to destroy tanks than low-and-slow strafing. A properly equipped strike aircraft can hit a tank with a laser guided bomb without ever exposing itself to AAA or MANPADS fire. And if we're just going to mow down groups of jihadis with rusty AK-47s we should be using something cheaper like the Super Tucano II.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  Armor design has advanced a lot since the 80s. I'm thinking the A-10 was actually significantly more effective against a contemporary tank than it is against a modern new production one. Sure, it could definitely still get a kill, but not as easily, and as you point out, other aircraft could do so more safely, without exposing themselves to danger.

jasonwatkinspdx 11y ago

The A-10 is great, but there are a number of reasons why we aren't building more of them. Chief among them is that the teams and facilities that produced them have been gone for decades now. It's not a product you can simply re-order. Of the planes in inventory, it's efficient and useful in low intensity CAS, but if you were ordering new for those missions you'd likely focus on something that's less overkill and lower cost like the super tucano.

poof131 11y ago
The super tucano is a great plane. Saddened me that the Navy and Air Force couldn’t get them operational in a much quicker fashion and on a much larger scale. They provide better ground support and targeting, longer on station time, and all at a substantially cheaper cost than fixed-wing. Plugging square, fixed-wing jets into round, low-threat-CAS holes cost the American tax payers billions. This is one of my greatest disappointments in military leadership.
s_q_b 11y ago
Ironically, after the request from JSOC and the Marine Corps for a modified Super Tucano (A-29B) was nixed, the United States' main procurement facility for this plan is still building them... for the Afghan airforce. Sure, the Super Tucano doesn't have the punch from the main gun or crazy survivability of the A-10. But in a battlespace where air supremacy is guaranteed, it has the advantage of being able to get a close-up visual on the target, and accurately fire ordinance tens rather than hundred of meters away from friendly forces. My personal understanding is that the Super Tucano was sacrificed on the alter of the myth of technological progress. Every airframe, every digital HMI, and every weapons system must be more technologically sophisticated than the last, even if that solution is completely unsuited to ongoing and forecasted combat missions. The fact that our most common enemies can't field a proper SAM site, much less a fifth-generation fighter, be damned. Of course there is also the cultural issue. That the great United States might have to admit that the South Americans know more than us about air warfare in counter-insurgency campaigns is anathema to both the military and the civilian government.
- 11y ago

kjs3 11y ago

The A-10 is the P-51 of today. It was a defining weapon of it's time, but it became unsurvivable on a more modern battlefield. Ask the guys who flew the P-51 in Korea how awesome it was. The A-10 is extremely vulnerable to any number of modern tactical AA weapons, and it won't get any more survivable.

engi_nerd 11y ago

JSF costs are on a downward trend, and will continue that trend as production numbers increase[0]. For a financial breakdown of the projected costs of the program, see [1], [2](actual source for data in [0] and [1]). And the program is very, very real. I am aware of other programs which really existed to funnel money to more secret programs, but the JSF program is not one of those front programs. We don't build more A-10s because they no longer meet the projected operational needs of the USAF, which, along with the rest of the military, is changing strategic focus to the Asia/Pacific region. [3] Not to mention the production line is long since shutdown (32 years ago!) and the tooling either destroyed or lost. The knowledge to build them is lost. You do not simply build more. You have to teach yourself to build them again. This would take years. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/H5fTkIU.png https://i.imgur.com/H5fTkIU.png [1]: http://i.imgur.com/6cV6I7g.png http://i.imgur.com/6cV6I7g.png [2]: http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/04/F-35-2013-SAR.pdf http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/0... (The definitive source for F-35 cost data). [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/F35Lightning/comments/3a7yol/article_f35_unscathed_by_hostile_fire_in_green/csa3v76 https://www.reddit.com/r/F35Lightning/comments/3a7yol/articl... (full text of paywalled Aviation Week article)

mangeletti 11y ago
I wrote a similarly hyperbolic F-35 comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9446079 earlier this year (the comment at the top). I'm half-way kidding in both comments, regarding my comments about the F-35, but on the other hand, unless my aforementioned comment about secret programs, etc. is at least partly true (meaning you're partly wrong), then the F-35 (or at least the opportunity cost of it) will surely turn out to be the fall of US military dominance. When we're spending nearly (or more than) $100MM for a jet that cannot even stand up against an F-16, a jet introduced in 1978. That's 5 years before I was born, so it's really weird to think about a jet from that long ago even flying today, let alone a pre-Nintendo jet dog fighting (let alone, beating!) a modern jet in 2015, that surely has orders of magnitude more computational power on board than did the entire world at that time. In other words, the scenario described is a bit like that movie, The Final Countdown, except the fighter jets on the aircraft carrier lose to Japanese Zeros :/ what a frightening situation to be in. All that said, I understand that we live in a different world now, and that air superiority isn't defined only by dog fighting capability, and that we also have to factor in that most modern dog fights would be over before either pilot could see the other with their own eyes, and that this is, in fact, part of the promise of the F-35. But, regardless of this, what was the value gained by the F-35 by making the wings so small? A slightly larger wing size could have increased fuel capacity, increased fuel efficiency, increased low-speed and low altitude capabilities, and made it a much better dog fighter, at no real expense to other features.

epaga 11y ago

The A-29 was meant to be exactly this. It's a sad story, well-told by Vice. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/low-and-slow http://motherboard.vice.com/read/low-and-slow

Marazan 11y ago

I love the A-10 but in keeping with the rest of the US military it got lucky which hlped it's reputation enormously. The US military spent the 80's allegedly training to fight a defensive war in Western Europe - but when you look at the wargames they engaged in what they actually trained for was an aggressive war in a desert (this isn't some wacky conspiracy theory, it's just basic incompetence by the people setting the military exercises, they looked at the crowded cluttered maps that represented Germany and despaired that they wouldn't get to use the 2 mile cannon range on their tanks in the wargames so the maps got altered until they were far to open to be Western Europe). The A-10 is perfect for CAS in a desert - in Afghanistan they didn't do as well as their lower agility compared to other jets made it harder for them to dodge mountains which affects their legendary ability to loiter.