“716 were built, only 281 remain in inventory.”
OK. So now I’m putting you in the hypothetical position of a pentagon USAF 3-star general and your job is to balance the budget priorities for the USAF. $48 million to re-wing and update (say 50%) of your 281 flyable A-10 airframes is chickenfeed. An easy ‘Yes’. But then you have to balance that with the needs to replace a big chunk of your F-15 & F-16 fleets with F-35’s. And THAT gets you very quickly into the training of future pilots. Each fighter pilot is going to cost you about $10 million before he hits his/her first operational squadron. 281 X $10M over say 5 years. Then there’s spare engines, fuel, training budgets. Again it’s not a huge percentage of the budget, but it is still a single-mission aircraft.
To put it into a sports analogy — would you trade your 1st round pick in 2020 for Tom Brady? The A-10 is the Tom Brady of ground attack aircraft. But it’s old and there isn’t a lot of mileage left even if you are a huge fan.
Well, so far we haven’t found multirole aircraft to be able to sufficiently do the A-10’s job, so it kind of falls apart there.
On the other hand, the big supersonic fighters are going to be losing stealth over time as technology is advancing. Already you can tell if a stealth craft is operating in an area, even if not quite good enough for a missile lock just yet, to give one example.
Does it still not have radar warning? It’s really good in air space where you have air superiority, other than that...