Naaa, Obama would rather chance loosing an F-22 FIGHTER rather than one of those expensive A-10 ATTACK warthogs.
A real tactical expert, he is!
/s
I was a contractor on a job on the Whidbey Island AFB back in the ‘80’s working on rooftop Air handlers right next to the runway from which these guys kept coming and going. I was sorry when the job was completed.
The A-10 belongs in the Army’s inventory, always has.
Give them to the Army, they would know what to do with them.
The Wartho. Go ugly early. Love that plane.
It’s a world driven by procurement fever in the generals who, once their sinecure is completed, move over to consulting.
The Warthog is the nimblest,graceful, ugly, bad ass out there.
Replace the A10 with an untested aircraft that will be in dev till 2018.... What could go wrong?
The F35 can’t survive even a 1/4 of the damage the A10 has routinely suffered during close air support missions. Who could forget the famous photos from gulf war one of A10’s shot to pieces with literally chunks of metal hanging off. The F35 is a product of greed and corruption in an industry with little accountability and oversight. When it fails, we will see a bunch of hearings full of twatwaffle congress pukes feigning anger and disgust while lining their pockets with industry handouts. Our servicemen and women will die all for some suit wearing douchebag to afford a new home with an ocean view.
Love the picture.
Seeing one of these wartys fly side says through a mountain pass with cannons blazing is amazing.
They keep floating aircraft that are wholly unsuited for the role as replacements.
Like: the F16, and the F35.
Neither can take the punishment that the A-10 can and return home.
But the higher ups keep repeating the same mantra, same lunacy every time: Plane X isn’t designed to take hits, but to avoid them.
As if wishful thinking and magic can make an aircraft in close support not be hit.
And THIS is a situation tailor made for an A-10 to rip the crap out of.
Cluster munitions and that GAU-30 ripping the crap out of things is the closest vision of Naar that any muslim can get without actually heading there.
Even inert training rounds fired out of the GAU-30 would be impressive.
They'll need a replacement, but the current Iraq-Syria theater is not a safe environment for these planes. It was assumed that they would be swatted down like flies while stemming an invasion of thousands of Soviet bloc tanks streaming through the Fulda Gap, but that the sacrifice would be worth it, because they were trading machines and men for time (to send hundreds of thousands of GI's to continental Europe before the Eastern Bloc armies overran it). There's no reason to risk a single A-10 doing treetop level gun runs against these rebels while Iraq's and Syria's truck-mounted SAM batteries are still at large.
“...where it could be used to fight Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria...”
Is it nuclear-capable? That’s what we need, and what those cockroaches need to worry about.
Shoot half the wing off of a F35, what do you get? A dead or captured pilot. What do you get when you do the same thing to an A-10? One more bombing fun, before returning home.
I was going to say the same thing. They should be building about 5k more with continual updates in technology incorporated into them.
That stuff gives me a Hog-on.
Could still happen.
The same thing which makes the A-10 so effective, low and slow, also makes it vulnerable.
It has gotten to where it is too vulnerable.