Posted on 01/26/2018 8:58:53 PM PST by Leaning Right
Pairs of A-10s flying out of Whiteman AFB scream over Lake of the Ozarks nearly every week. Nearly everyone outside stops to look up when they fly over.
All ou4 military branches suffer from scope creep, which is why budgets don’t cover wants, which leaves needs and have to have so underfunded. The bean counters use money for wants, not have to haves or needs
FYI: 20mm, not .50 Cal.
And yet the idiots in the Air Force who get erections over overpriced, under-produced money pits with wings want to kill the finest ground attack aircraft ever produced and replace it with a bunch of buzzing mosquitoes.
Scrap the generals. Keep the Warthog.
It’s not complicated.
The F-22 is a strategic air superiority fighter, like the F-15 it replaces.
The F-35 is a tactical air superiority fighter, like the F-16 it replaces.
Correct. The Key West Agreement of 1947 is overdue for scrapping!
Actually, the Hog has a 30mm cannon.
They say that memory goes first. I forget what goes second...
Great video.......As a side note, I’m about 8 miles from Selfridge ANG and they have 22 A-10s on base
The Air Force doesn’t like the idea of close support aircraft to protect troops on the ground compared to the glory of air to air combat.
IMHO the air to air fighter jockeys may soon be obsoleted by drones. But that is another argument.
There is no substantial amount of AF brass who want the messy work of close air support. They believe they can handle it from 20 thousand feet with guided bombs. Guided bombs are great for static targets, but a close support mini cannon with a pilot strapped onto it is a truly fearsome thing to enemy troops.
This close ground support of army and marines is a fight that the AF didn’t want, but they didn’t want the Army or Marines to have their own air force either.
Congress was convinced to move the planes in the military mostly into the AF to consolidate costs, training, and maintenance etc.
I thought the F35 is supposedly supposed to be able to do the same job as the, A-10, as well. Although it has fallen way short in everything it is supposed to be able to do.
The Luftwaffe had but 1 or 2 Stuka units on the Eastern Front by 1944. They were getting shot down in bunches. The FW-190A and the HE-129 were carrying the load in ground attack missions. If they’d had more Henschels there wouldn’t have been any Stukas. It was obsolete.
All questions that require a level of HUMINT to answer. We never seem to have that. When we do, some leaked or politician (I repeat myself) gets them all killed.
“Always been kind of curious as to why the F22 was supposed to be baddest thing to take to the air, a few short years ago, but now we need the F35.”
Simple really. Most of the program money is spent on R&D & Test. The buy is a contracted price — make money or not. Lockheed-Martin won the contract for the F-22A and later the F-35A/B/C. When congress terminated the F-22 in favor of the F-35 it was basically the same prefered direction that Lockheed wanted. Aerospace comanies are essentially big Engineering firms. If they could make profits without actually delivering aircraft I think they would.
30mm, not 20mm.
Yep. Brain cramp on my part.
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