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Possible Death of the A-10 WarthogFollow

#1 Sep 24 2013 at 3:43 AM Rating: Good
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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — As an old Warthog pilot, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Clarke III spoke in near mournful tones Wednesday of the likely mothballing of the venerable A-10 close air support aircraft and tank killer.

“Can we save the A-10?” was the question from the audience Wednesday at the Air Force Association’s Air & Space Conference here.

Clarke, director of the Air National Guard, came at the question in roundabout fashion. He loved flying the A-10 Thunderbolt, better known as the “Warthog,” Clarke said. He noted that the plane was “near and dear to land warriors” for its GAU-8 Avenger, a 30mm rotary cannon that is the heaviest such weapon mounted on an aircraft.

But the Air Force was “looking at reducing single mission aircraft,” Clarke said, and under the sequestration process “we’re not getting any more money – that option is out.”

The Air Force “has to have a fifth generation force out there” of stealthy, fast and maneuverable aircraft, and the low and slow A-10 just didn’t fit in, Clarke said.

“We’re on board with moving towards Air Force 2023,” the concept for the future of the force which has no room for the A-10, Clarke said.

Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, also declared his affection for the A-10, which happens to be an aircraft he has 1,000 hours flying.

“I love that old ugly thing,” Welsh said.

However, the chief of staff explained the service has to take part in finding over a trillion dollars in cuts to the defense budget over the next ten years because of sequestration. In this budget environment, he said the Air Force will likely be unable to afford the Warthog.

The A-10, developed by Fairchild-Republic in the 1970s, was credited with destroying more than 900 Iraqi tanks in the first Gulf War and has been a close air support mainstay in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

However, Welsh said the A-10 finds itself on the chopping block because “it’s a single-mission airplane, essentially,” and would struggle in more contested airspaces.

“We’re looking for every option for where you can cut money, every modernization/recapitalization program,” Welsh said. “If we have multiple-mission airplanes that can do the mission – maybe not as well, but reasonably well – you would look at eliminating the single-mission platform.”


Well ****.
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#2 Sep 24 2013 at 3:59 AM Rating: Good
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What? It's just a plane. An old plane. Put it out to pasture.
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#3 Sep 24 2013 at 6:54 AM Rating: Good
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There are have better newer planes now.

Also they're going to stop making the VW Van. Apparently Brazil, the home of the last VW Bus factory, says if VW makes anymore vans they have to have airbags and anti-lock brakes.

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#4 Sep 24 2013 at 6:58 AM Rating: Good
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I'd say sell them to Canada, then you kinda still have them in your ******** but really, they're too new for us.
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#5 Sep 24 2013 at 7:08 AM Rating: Good
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
I'd say sell them to Canada, then you kinda still have them in your ******** but really, they're too new for us.
Not quite time to replace the bi wing planes yet, is it?
#6 Sep 24 2013 at 7:56 AM Rating: Excellent
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There is nothing that even comes close to replacing the capabilities of the A-10 at the moment. It's literally a flying tank with a massive Gatling gun. We have no other aircraft that is as effective at destroying long armored columns. Helicopters are more vulnerable to gunfire, and event he apache carries a smaller Gatling gun. The Ac130 is definitely effective, but it is also slow and difficult to get in place in time to intercept a fast moving force. The A-10 contains a titanium bathtub armor setup that essentially makes the pilot invulnerable. The rest of the plane is designed with redundancy to take massive amounts of damage. You throw a F-16 or a F-35 in that same environment without a real gun and you end up with a dead pilot and a downed aircraft, or millions of dollars worth of missiles expended to do the same job that $1,000 worth of Depleted Uranium Gatling gun shells could do.

Is the A-10 design getting old? Sure. Could they make massive improvements to the design as it stands and come out with a better aircraft? Almost certainly. Composited radar absorbing outer skin to make the aircraft lighter and allow for more armor around the engines, newer, faster and smaller engines able to meet the same performance envelope while using less fuel, faster cycling gatling guns, better targeting and battlefield integration, all those would be fairly easy to build into a replacement airplane that looks a lot like the A-10 overall, and it's old enough we should be replacing it with a newer model. But we don't have anything even close to ready for that role, and given politics and the airforce being annoyed that the army has airplanes, we probably won't see a replacement anytime soon.
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#7 Sep 24 2013 at 8:07 AM Rating: Good
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I think the problem with the A-10 is more that there's not much, if any, need for what it can do. Maybe they should make an armored drone with that Gatling gun.
#8 Sep 24 2013 at 10:04 AM Rating: Excellent
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I vote drone with gun, or even better, many drones with guns. So long as they don't end up like flies on the tank's windshield.
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#9 Sep 24 2013 at 10:57 AM Rating: Good
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So many people posting logic in an emotional thread.

The death of the Warthog brings to mind the attempted murder some years ago of Grumman Aerospace Corp. by then Secretary of Defense **** "****" Cheney. He mortally wounded the F-14 Tomcat (Grumman) and the A-6 Intruder (Grumman), both Long Island aircraft. In so doing, he mortally wounded Grumman, which only survived by merging with Northrup.

But Long Island lost over 20,000 jobs thanks to Mr. Cheney. I know quite a few people who never recovered from losing their job. There were too many people with the same resume looking for work. Retraining did nothing for them. Their lives were ruined - lost homes, divorces, 45 year-olds moving in with their parents.

**** **** Cheney.

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#10 Sep 24 2013 at 11:01 AM Rating: Good
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Sure, but how else are we supposed to afford all those new tanks?
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#11 Sep 24 2013 at 11:04 AM Rating: Good
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Sucks for them but it's hardly **** Cheney's fault if Grumman wasn't making airplanes worth buying anymore.
#12 Sep 24 2013 at 12:14 PM Rating: Good
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Sucks for them but it's hardly **** Cheney's fault if Grumman wasn't making airplanes worth buying anymore.
The thing is, they were. Those two had a dozen years left in them, and the Navy wanted them. The F-14D was a ******* sniper. It had 1,000 mile range and could stand back and fire a missile with a 190km range. It had brand new GE engines that were so powerful they could not go to afterburner during carrier launch. Grumman was famous for its flight electronics and that plane had the latest and greatest. Hell, the Navy didn't just want that plane, they were in love with it.

If it hadn't been killed off, it would have given Grumman the time to design a new generation replacement aircraft. But, Cheney wasn't interested and he said so. He called the plane 1960s technology when it was really cutting edge technology.

Eh, like many Long Islanders my age, I just can't let go of what we once had. Because what we had was something that was considered by many others to be the best. And we never found out why he hated Grumman so much that he tried to kill it.

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#13 Sep 24 2013 at 12:33 PM Rating: Excellent
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There are still thousands of Soviet era Main battle tanks in the worls, in the hands of people that don't necessarily like us. The reason our tanks rolled over the Iraqi armor so easily was due in part to our A-10 fleet. Ground Attack aircraft is probably one of the roles a drone is well suited for, but there is definitly a need for some sort of ground attack aircraft that can operate in a cost effective manner like the A-10. "go strafe everything that moves" gets awful expensive with missiles.

Getting rid of them after we just finished rebuilding all the wing boxes is especially dumb.

The Tomcat retirement was all political. The Super hornet is not necessarily a better aircraft. The tomcat should have been retired, but replaced by a navalized version of the F-22, not a non-stealth fighter that didn't really offer much improvement, or a single engine stealth fighter that is going to kill pilots until they remember why we put twin engine fighters on carriers. The F-18 fan club has very powerful friends in congress and navy high command though. Don't get me wrong, i like the hornet and the super hornet, but the fact that it got the F-14 killed always irritated me.
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#14 Sep 24 2013 at 1:09 PM Rating: Good
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
There are still thousands of Soviet era Main battle tanks in the worls, in the hands of people that don't necessarily like us. The reason our tanks rolled over the Iraqi armor so easily was due in part to our A-10 fleet.
Sure, nobody is going to disagree with you on that. But that was 5 days of fighting and they haven't been used since so that's 12 years of maintenance on a fleet of jets which makes those $1000 in Gatling gun rounds a lot more expensive.
#15 Sep 24 2013 at 5:40 PM Rating: Excellent
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You don't use a sniper rifle every day, but when you need one, You really need one. A newer, easier to maintain design is certanly warrented, but for military hardware maintenance costs are secondary to ability to fulfil mission objectives. Sure maintaining only one aircraft is cheaper, but a cheaper program that can't get the job done effectivly isn't a good program.

Plus there is the whole fact of the bad guys being terrified of the A-10. you can't buy that kind of publicity.
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#16 Sep 24 2013 at 6:30 PM Rating: Decent
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Obama's scared of his own plane?
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#17 Sep 25 2013 at 6:40 AM Rating: Excellent
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
You don't use a sniper rifle every day, but when you need one, You really need one.

Luckily sniper rifles don't cost a fortune to maintain and are used more often than once every couple decades.
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#18 Sep 25 2013 at 7:01 AM Rating: Good
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MSRP $11,214.00 for the full thing, including modular accessory rail system, though. Smiley: frown
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#19 Sep 25 2013 at 7:51 AM Rating: Good
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
You don't use a sniper rifle every day, but when you need one, You really need one. A newer, easier to maintain design is certanly warrented, but for military hardware maintenance costs are secondary to ability to fulfil mission objectives. Sure maintaining only one aircraft is cheaper, but a cheaper program that can't get the job done effectivly isn't a good program.

Plus there is the whole fact of the bad guys being terrified of the A-10. you can't buy that kind of publicity.
You're still looking at a decade of maintenance for a few days of action. Sure it does the job better than anything else but it's such a narrow job that there have to be alternatives.

As for the fear factor, I doubt the A-10 is a huge factor when you also have drones, missiles, Apache's and in general bigger, better and more of everything than everyone else.
#20 Sep 25 2013 at 8:06 AM Rating: Excellent
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Decades of maintenance for a few days of action applies to 90% of military hardware. It's not there to be used regularly. It's there to be used for a specific purpose when required. We don't blow up submarines with our anti submarine aircraft everyday either, lets scrap them! Heck, what about all those midair refuling aircraft and troop transports. We don't need them every day, off to the chopper! Our main battle tanks? we have too many of them so everyone is scared to bring theirs out to play, lets melt them down and make golf clubs out of them to sell to china. We don't use our Nuclear deterrent every day, who needs it?

The A-10 does the job better than anything we have currently, for less money. You think maintenance on a jet is bad, try maintenance costs on a bigger fleet of jet powered attack helicopters.

There is not an existing cost effective alternative to the A-10 at this time. Apache's have that slight under armor issue compared to the A-10. A missile will do the job, but it costs a lot more than a handful of shells do.

Also, you know the maintenance costs on the A-10 are the lowest out of all our aircraft currently in service right?
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#21 Sep 25 2013 at 9:30 AM Rating: Decent
Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
Also, you know the maintenance costs on the A-10 are the lowest out of all our manned aircraft currently in service right?


FTFY.

In a world where drones can already do most of the work without risking any soldiers' lives, I'd say the money is better spent developing remotely operated weapon systems than maintaining a fits-the-bill-once-per-decade technology. Drones cost, on average, $4~7m each, while a base A-10 costs ~18m. Pilot and mechanical training for the drone program is substantially less than for the A-10 also.


#22 Sep 25 2013 at 10:35 AM Rating: Excellent
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Nope.

The two X-47B prototypes, which are currently the only "fighter class" drones in existance that could be arguably modled into an A-10 replacement, currently cost $400 million each, give or take. An RQ-4 Global hawk costs about $105. A MQ-9 reaper, which is propeller driven and not fast enough, costs about $6.5 million, but a platform that is fast enough for the role, jet powered, and large enough to carry the Gatling cannon is going to come in right around the same price as an A-10. The life support and ejection systems are expensive, and removing them frees up weight and space, but the computer components and servo mechinisms that replace them are also somewhat expensive. Also you have to factor in the cost of the $25.5 million control module, which can support 4 drones, which makes a MQ-9 purchase cost somewhere closer to 12.8 million. the MQ-9 isn't big enough or fast enough for the A-10 role, so I think you would be up closer to at least 15 million if you just scaled up the airframe, swapped in some faster engines and the weapons system

Also, stealth drones cost more to maintain than a non stealth warthog. Because the paint is very very expensive and any paint chips render your stealth coating useless.
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#23 Sep 25 2013 at 10:37 AM Rating: Excellent
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
...but a platform that is fast enough for the role, jet powered, and large enough to carry the Gatling cannon is going to come in right around the same price as an A-10.

You don't need to emulate the A-10 bolt for bolt, you just need a workable method of blowing up or disabling tanks.
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#24 Sep 25 2013 at 10:48 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
...but a platform that is fast enough for the role, jet powered, and large enough to carry the Gatling cannon is going to come in right around the same price as an A-10.

You don't need to emulate the A-10 bolt for bolt, you just need a workable method of blowing up or disabling tanks.


Like a guy on a jet powered hang glider dropping satchel charges.

Edited, Sep 25th 2013 12:48pm by Shaowstrike
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#25 Sep 25 2013 at 10:50 AM Rating: Excellent
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What's it cost to keep a guy in a hanger for ten years between tank columns?
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#26 Sep 25 2013 at 10:52 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
What's it cost to keep a guy in a hanger for ten years between tank columns?


Food/room/toiletries would be cheap, it's the price of the on-call private hooker that would kill the program.
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