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Comment by siod | Hacker News Reader

It might have been originally designed to kill tanks, but it's incredibly well suited to current asymmetric warfare.

- Massive Payload capacity; it's a missile truck, 5x what a reaper can bring.

- Cannon can hit infantry in closer quarters than any explosive missile/bomb.

- Armoured and extremely tough, designed to survive small arms fire, loss of wing, loss of engine.

AC-130 might be the king of CAS but it's also crewed by 13 people and has a top speed half that of a hog... which is important when people need support _now_.

The US airforce don't like the A-10 because it's a platform that primarily does grunt work for the army and they'd rather spend that money on their own missions.

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> AC-130 might be the king of CAS but it's also crewed by 13 people and has a top speed half that of a hog... which is important when people need support _now_.

It's also not suited for very low flying, it wants to perform large circles around the target to get the side-guns pointed at it. And the AF made it even less suited for very low flying as the J revision reduces the armor dramatically compared to previous variants: where H had enough armor for 37mm J is only armored against 7.62, and not even all posts (gunner is unarmored).

This.

The M2 Browning .50 machine gun ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning ) is more than a century old, and still very widely used. Originally, it was an anti-tank weapon...then tank armor got thicker. It became primary armament on fighter airplanes...then enemy fighters got faster and better-armored. Then it was...

Being very flexible and useful in current-day military operations is why the M2's still around. (Though being mostly below the radar of the US's stupid rival-service-branches politics, and always-gotta-have-new-shiny-stuff mentality sure helps.)

> Massive Payload capacity; it's a missile truck, 5x what a reaper can bring

If you need a bunch of munitions, bring a B-1 or B-52. Those things are GREAT at annihilating a whole training camp.

> Cannon can hit infantry in closer quarters than any explosive missile/bomb.

A small (18lb warhead) hyper-accurate missile is better than a cannon than can easily shoot way off. If there's a bad guy hiding behind a building, you want to frag the guy, not shred the building.

> AC-130 has a top speed half that of a hog

What's better than something that can take off and get into position quickly is something that's already there and watching the situation - MQ-9s are GREAT at that, and AC-130s are almost always providing overwatch when they're up.

> Armoured and extremely tough, designed to survive small arms fire,

Important if you're constantly flying very low. Why are you constantly flying low though? MQ-9s and AC-130s don't need to do that.

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