I think the Specter gun ships could probably do most of the A-10’s jobs but they sure look to me like they are just huge targets flying around in circles.
I am sure they have defenses but I wonder what they could be. I often hear them flying around at dusk or night. They have a very distinctive sound.
Not really. The Spectre gunships (AC-130) is very vulnerable to ManPads and even AAA. It needs to be flown in what is known as a “permissive environment”. The A-10 because it maneuvers on the deck and has a lot of lift for tight banking can evade a lot of that stuff, or survive a hit.
One of the reasons that they adapted the big cannon into the Spectre was that the mini-guns were too short in range and the plane needed a better stand-off weapon to avoid the radar control guns (ZSU-23/4).
BLUF - if you can not break Mach 1; pull G’s until your eyes blur, and look high speed on the ramp the AF doesn’t want you.
CAS wins wars, like it or not. You win wars by taking territory away from your enemy and holding on to it. We tried something else in Vietnam; 58,000 plus names on a war tells me that what we did there was wrong. Saigon is now Ho Chi Min City.
For the last 12 plus years the fighters have had a floor below which they aren’t supposed to go. Specter and the Hogs lived, fought, supported, and survived well below that floor.
BTW - the F-16 need to be re-engined - flying all of those air born alerts CONUS under Operation Noble Eagle burned up the engines and airframes.
BTW - when is the first wing of F-35s going to be operationally ready? I mean the latest slip not the one sold to Congress.
What are our grunts supposed to do in the mean time when things turn to heck and the ground fight is danger close?