Possible Death of the A-10 WarthogFollow

You need a platform that is large enough to carry the primary A-10 weapon, which is the primary replacement role, as well as the A-10's missile load if we are talking a replacement aircraft. Or you could make a drone swarm with smaller guns and fewer missiles per airframe, but then you would need to factor the cost in for the whole replacement swarm. The MQ-9 is not capable of carrying the 620lb General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger or the 1,500 rounds of depleted uranium shells, let alone the missile loadout. Period. it isn't big enough. So you would need a bigger airframe of some sort. The only ones we have that are big enough and fast enough right now are the Global hawk, which would need a wing redesign or the X-47 which would need a complete redesign to accomodate the cannon.

The A-10 offers a cost effective method of blowing up or disabling tanks and entire convoys of vehicles. it's a very inexpensive weapons system overall compared to others, very survivable, which is important because even if you don't have a pilot to worry about, if you are losing a drone every mission you are still going to run out of drones very quickly because the drones aren't that much less expensive, not to mention the whole "what happens when someoen decides to just EMP the **** out of your drone controllers and jam your command and control signals" issue.

Find a cheaper method of disabling and blowing up tanks, and then it makes sense to scrap the A-10s. That cheaper method is likely a redesign of the existing A-10 to make it less expensive to operate than it already is. But right now, we don't have one, there is a need for the capability, and there will be a continued need for the capabilities offered by the A-10.

For reference an AH-64D costs 18 million.

You keep trying to replicate the warthog, mounting GAUs onto illfiting platforms.

If the goal is to drop armor collumns you could build a drone that mounts a recoiless rifle, and fairly cheaply have a force of them to rip up heavy armor. Prefferably you'd make them modular so you could swap them from scout, anti-tank and anti-infantry roles.

This. It is not necessary to replace the Warthog, only its primary function, which can certainly be done with cheaper hardware and fewer personnel today than it took even 10 years ago.

Well, it's "attack a ground based target in the next X years" rather than specifically armored columns. Basically anything thats not a large bunker


So, trade 1,500 shots per weapon for a single shot tube? The GAU-8/A is an incredably effective weapons platform, with a low failure rate, it works well, it's cheap to manufacture, and we already have lots and lots of parts for them. It, along with the armor is the primary reason the A-10 is the most effective ground attack aircraft we have ever built. Sure you can slap the entire missile load of an A-10 onto an F-16 or a F-35, but the gun is what makes it effective. Recoilless rifles are not really reloadable mid air at this point. You could probably design one that would work, but it doesn't exist today.


And Seat belts!

We attack alot of them with A-10's too. A-10's work better than other aircraft on moving target convoys, but they can drop gravity bombs with the best of them too.

Sure. But it's understood that we can, in fact, attack ground based targets without them do so presently. Not every time but enough to demonstrate that we can do it successfully.

The specialized role that the plane seems to serve is attacking heavily armored targets. This isn't something that comes up every day and it could be reasonable to figure that the few times you need to use an over-and-above, more expensive solution would still be more than offset by the savings from eliminating the A-10. Especially when budgets are being constrained by the sequester. If you really want to save it, get to work eliminating that factor.

The combat role is Close air support, or CAS. Basically "shoot anything that moves that isn't our guys, and shot anything that gets near our guys" Either attack or defense. Drones armed with helfires take over some of that role, but the ability to get from point A to point B quickly and blow stuff up is what makes it so valuable. It's a combat system. you can't just put the aircraft in mothballs and get rid of the pilots and then dust them off later and expect to use them right away when we need them quickly. Gambling that we won't need our weapons is the best way historically to garuntee we will need them and won't have them when we do.

The A-10 brings range, loiter time, firepower, and survivability to the game. An Ah-64D eats fuel and can't stick around as long or cover as much ground. Drones don't have the firepower currently. Conventional fighters don't do well in the fly around in circles protecting an area role because they burn through more fuel due to their engine configurations being optomized for speed. There aren't enough Ac130's. Anyone who thinks we don't need a good close air support aircraft to protect our ground forces and to cut enemy supply and armor lines doesn't understand the close air support role. It's the same reason nfew people really "got" the P-39 aircobra during WW-II until the Soviets started using them to devistating effect against German armor.

Getting rid of the Sequester would be a great idea. The idiots who let that go through as is simply amaze me. I'd love to get rid of it, but unfortunatly they won't let us use the A-10 to do the job.