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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

>CAS is a job best done by relatively slow, but well armored aircraft flying low and slow.

That was true, but it's not true any more. Modern targeting pods (like the Siper XR pods on the B-1) mean you can get the same situational awareness from much farther away. Between targeting pods and laser guided weapons the A-10 is obsolete.

Low and slow is dangerous. Aircraft defenses (lasers, flares, chaff, ECM) haven't been evolving as quickly as threats at low altitudes. Not by a long shot. You're fine against a dozen guys with rusty AK-47s and RPG-7s, but once you start fighting armies equipped with something like Pantsir or NASAMS you're in big trouble.

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There's two points here:

Have fast planes with targeting pods proven more effective than A10s thus far in practice? (I don't know, I'm asking.)

How many potential enemies have high end AA missile systems? It's all very well to argue that a weapon system can't defeat X, but is X what we'll be fighting in practice?

The M1 Abrams turned out not to be especially useful in Iraq although it remains superb for defeating a Russian offensive in the Fulda Gap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap).

I think the US needs to figure out what its strategy is before it picks weapon systems. Since the end of the cold war we seem to have lost the plot both in terms of strategy (what do we want? how should we get it?) and tactics (how will we employ available resources to obtain desired results). If anything, our strategy seems to be dictated by our tactics which are dictated by resources which are decided by pork barrel politics.

This is hardly surprising -- when Senator McCain "schooled" Obama on the meaning of strategy (as Grand Tactics) he demonstrated that top policy makers literally don't even know the meaning of the word.

Recap: the A10 is very good for fighting counterinsurgency against people with relatively shitty equipment. Do we think we should be fighting a lot of such wars? Why? If the answers make sense, then sure, keep the A10.

A-10s having been flying with targeting pods (Litening and Sniper) and dropping laser and GPS-guided weapons for years. So how exactly has their presence made A-10 obsolete again?

Can't say I know very much about this, but if you can see and hit things well from a distance why go close? And if you don't need to go close, why do you need something that is built to go close over something that can carry more ordinance or fly for fewer dollars per hour or get there quicker? Surely it costs something (speed, flight range, maybe) to get the ability to go close and if you don't need that ability you can use that cost elsewhere.

Closer means less reaction time.

Sometimes standoff is good and necessary. Stay out of threat range, not be seen or heard by the enemy as you follow them with your targeting pod, etc.

Sometimes standoff is pointless. Friendlies on the ground are in a knife feet with the enemy less than 100m away and they need air support. Now close, and slower to better maintain SA on who the friendlies are and who the enemy is -- and the ability to deliver weapons with lower Risk Estimate Distances and/or Collateral Damage Estimates is critically important. The GAU-8 does both. The F-16 gun is useless. A laser guide bomb in this scenario may present too much risk for fratricide.

A-10s can carry more ordnance, for a longer time over a target area, and need less tanker support to do so, than an F-16. And for less $/flying hour. It does cost speed. A-10s don't go anywhere quickly. But it can perform CAS in a standoff roll, or in a close-in fight equally well.

Making a presence does influence the tactical decisions made by the enemy.

Here's a simplistic example. If the enemy isn't aware that your side has CAS, he may believe that it's a good idea to attack your side in a certain way. He may get killed in the process, but that attack may result in some losses on your side.

If, on the other hand, the enemy is made aware of your CAS, he may opt to play it safe and not risk his assets by attacking you that way.

It's like when you play chess: some pieces control some areas of the board without doing anything. Just by being where they are, they restrict the opponent's actions.

Because you can get situational awareness and targeting without ever having to get close to your target. A multirole fighter (or better yet, a B-1) with a pod can carry out the CAS mission just as effectively. You don't need a dedicated ground attack aircraft.

Why not C130?

There is a C-130 variant for ground attack, as well as kits the marines use to turn a C-130J into a ground attack craft. But the C-130 is very big and very slow, so you need absolute dominance of the skies and you need to make sure you've cleared out all the ground based AA.

85 ton B1 vs. 35 ton C130.

It doesn't matter that much if you are going 720 knots or 320 knots if you get shot by BUK missile traveling 2000 knots. Both C-130 and B1 can fly above small caliber Anti-air artillery range and above MANPAD range with ease. Nothing can fly above BUK, you would need stealth to operate at those environments.

The only threat where B1 is clearly better is if you get shot by Flack 88. But that's not going to happen. So B1 gets phased out as too expensive platform.

And yet, A-10s are currently deployed to Middle East fighting ISIS and Europe to saber rattle Putin. Not very obsolete.

There are a myriad of incorrct assumptions in your argument, but I'll focus on one. Pilots flying multi-role aircraft have to train for those multiple roles. They have to remain proficient in multiple mission and skill sets, many of which do not overlap. Do you think multi-role F-16, F-15E, and B-1 pilots/WSOs get extra training resources (flying hours and sorties) over A-10 pilots, who only train for really one mission -- CAS? Newsflash…they don't.

It appears you think CAS is nothing more than finding targets in a targeting pod. It is not.

>And yet, A-10s are currently deployed to Middle East fighting ISIS and Europe to saber rattle Putin. Not very obsolete.

Which pretty much any other aircraft in the arsenal can do. And obsolete doesn't mean "useless". It just means there are better options.

>There are a myriad of incorrct assumptions in your argument, but I'll focus on one. Pilots flying multi-role aircraft have to train for those multiple roles. They have to remain proficient in multiple mission and skill sets, many of which do not overlap. Do you think multi-role F-16, F-15E, and B-1 pilots/WSOs get extra training resources (flying hours and sorties) over A-10 pilots, who only train for really one mission -- CAS? Newsflash…they don't.

You have a myriad of incorrect assumptions in your argument here, but I think the fastest way to blow hole in it is to point out the A-10 only accounted for 20% of CAS missions in Afghanistan. Pilots of those other airframes are certainly training for CAS - they're doing 80% of the missions.

>It appears you think CAS is nothing more than finding targets in a targeting pod. It is not.

Your whole argument boils down to "I know something you don't". Maybe you should expound, as the only supporting point you provided is simply wrong.

In COIN missions, when operating very close to the enemy, you often need to get close enough to for visual confirmation. The truth is, with guidance you can hit a dot at an arbitrary distance. But without visual, it's awfully hard to be sure what that dot is.

Visual confirmation allows ordinance to be fired at tens rather than hundreds of meters. The perfect replacement for the A-10, which (let's face it) is major overkill, despite being a truly awe-inspiring machine, is the turboprop South American anti-cartel aircraft the A-29B Super Tucano.

The other proposed replacements for the A-10's CAS duties are the F-35 JSF, and the Sikorsky S-97 Raider, which is an overpriced under-armed light attack helicopter.

The problem is that now that the A-29B isn't being built, the A-10 has to be decommissioned in order to justify the Raider and and the F-35 CAS.

And with Putin's "frozen conflicts" strategy expanding, it never hurts to have a aerial gun that can punch through Soviet-made tanks like tissue paper.

On the flip side, you're not any safer putting drones up against jamming technology, like GPS jammers and so on. China proved that tech when they put one of our stealth drones down in Iranian territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

There's certainly a middle ground between blowing up dudes with rusty AKs and fighting high-level proxy wars but honestly that barrier is paper-thin, nations like Russia and China will always be escalating that. It's always an arms race. Drones can react faster (for now) but humans can react appropriately.

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