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I'm not telling you the A-10 isn't great. It is! If an engineer can look at a cutaway drawing of an A-10 without feeling a great swelling in their heart, are th
by JohnBooty 4y ago
I'm not telling you the A-10 isn't great. It is! If an engineer can look at a cutaway drawing of an A-10 without feeling a great swelling in their heart, are they even truly alive?
Yes, the A-10 is insanely superior for CAS, for all of the reasons you mentioned. If your enemy is so impoverished and cut off from allies that it doesn't have dirt cheap MANPADs or anything else from the last several decades of anti-aircraft technology.
There are of course mitigation strategies for AA. Combined arms are a thing. SEAD is a thing. Utilizing weather/darkness/terrain is a thing. Cutting your enemies off from arms shipments is a thing. Hammering them with CAS until they have proven they can actually thwart it is a thing.
It's just that a lot of those mitigations start to break down when your foe's AA is "a dude carrying a cheap, essentially fire-and-forget portable weapon who can duck back into a cave, a house, or a literal hole in the ground and instantly blend back in with the populace or otherwise become effectively invisible."
This isn't theory.
You can see countless examples for yourself of Russian choppers and slow (but faster than A-10, I think) Su-25 getting absolutely wrecked in Ukraine in exactly the manner I have described. As a result, the fight has largely turned into a ground war with Russia chucking missiles at Ukraine but only from safely within Russian airspace. And this is Russia's military we're talking about; they have copiously demonstrated that they're not particularly concerned about the casualties they're racking up. The US tends to be far more conservative and risk-averse.
You can say that the US would utilize combined arms, SEAD, etc more effectively than Russia. I'd agree; it'd be hard to do much worse. But the fundamental reality is that AA (particularly against unstealthy foes) has gotten really good, really cheap, really portable, and much harder to suppress.