This is assuming that the aircraft are not currently on station for support, which I believe has been the case for most of the recent conflict in Afghanistan. That’s typically how Army rotary wing operations are conducted; a rotating coverage over an area for a given time, to support the ground forces as needed. In such usage, the aircraft that has loiter time and the capability to carry a healthy supply of ordnance is far more useful than an aircraft that only has a couple bombs and has to leave for the tanker after 5 minutes.
Naturally, given a situation where a tasking has to be created, pilots briefed, aircraft equipped, etc. in order to rush out and meet an immediate requirement is going to favor aircraft that can either move quickly or operate close to the action. I’d imagine this was a huge drive for the Marines and the F-35B, after experience with the AV-8B. At the same time, as you say, there’s a definite advantage in having assets that belong to you branch without having to play games with another branch; this has been another factor for the Marine’s desire to keep their own assets in-house.
From all this, we can tell it’s one of the great advantages of drones: they have a ridiculously long loiter time, are incredibly cheap, and they usually carry enough munitions to handle the needs for most engagements. Though once again, they aren’t a perfect solution for everything.
That is also the simultaneous weakness of the A-10 and their crews: they do nothing but ground attack. It gets difficult to go to Congress and grovel for more money to maintain operations and cover more missions with fewer aircraft; being able to cut a very narrow, specific aircraft from the budget in favor of one that can do all of them (even if it does some poorly) is very appealing to budget-minded generals. Having the capability is extremely useful, but there’s a price paid for that, one which doesn’t make much sense if the culture is always worried about a peer or near peer conflict over the horizon. The argument is whether or not maintaining such a capability is worth the potential trade for what’s seen as a more capable platform overall.
Much of what we do and employ nowadays comes from very hard lessons learned in Vietnam and similar conflicts; Desert Storm was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to modern warfare. One could make a very good argument that Desert Storm might have been a spectacular example in the conduct of war, yet an absolutely horrid example of the conduct of policy in relation to war – and, ironically enough, very similar to Vietnam in relation to war and policy.
America has an awesome millitary. Their politicians have a hammer, so they make nails out of things. It’s counterintuitive to have a tool and not use it. But some tools are made not to be used (IE nuclear weapons) and that’s a thought that gets lost on a lot of us.
In my experience, it was pretty rare to have air on station and available. Unless a major operation was going on, you really didnt see much air support, fixed or rotary. In 2004, during Phantom Fury, there were seemingly limitless air assets. In 2007, this wasnt the case. I was involved in 200+ combat patrols, and we had air on station maybe 5 or 6 times, with 1 bomb actually coming off the rails. Of those 5 or 6 times, the FAC came with us and it just seemed like he was playing with his toys. “Show of force” was my favorite. Most times it was faster to call a GMLR strike out of Fallujah, or use mortars/artillery rather than wait for air to be diverted.
Things may have changed since then, but it was pretty hard to get approval for a weapons release, even when you were in contact. The whole hearts and mind thing kinda put a damper on the “fun”.
Funny GMLR story (short):
Night patrol, receiving fire from a house in southern Ramadi. Decision is made to let a GMLR loose. Through the telephone game of coordinates and sector/house numbers, HQ gets a rocket launched from Fallujah, destroys house, firefight over. Go back the next morning. House is leveled. Only problem is the house next door is the one with bullet holes/casings all around it. They blew up the wrong one.
Drifting off topic and somewhat sacrilegious, but the military tends to reinforce that “hammer” mindset. It’s a lot easier to think about how to blow things up than it is to figure out how to keep a conflict from blowing up to begin with. Some of this is, of course, due to poor foreign policy and an inept Department of State, who tend to make a lot of mistakes and leave only military options on the table, with few palatable peaceful options. There are so many variables that come together to create a conflict and so few systems and people that are capable of looking at these variables, then presenting them to the people who need to make decisions. I know a couple people involved in such systems, and guess what: they can’t get funding because the military won’t release the funds.
There’s no simple or easy way to do things in such a complex environment like war and policy, but many people don’t have the patience or understanding to approach it in such a way that keeps military force from coming to the table.
Air power ain’t cheap and applying it in that kind of environment is kinda difficult. If we consider the total number of A-10s in service, then figure only a fraction of those are available in-theater, coupled with the fact a lot of folks are specifically requesting them, they’re not going to be available all the times to everyone. A limited resource like that is going to be held in reserve for the really important stuff where the capability it brings will be used to full effect.
I also don’t believe things changed a whole lot from '07 onward, but once again I’m really only familiar with rotary wing operations, which were applied very differently by the Army.
On the general topic, I’d say the A-10 in it’s original form was a reasonable solution for what the expected threat was. Hordes of Russians coming across Germany. The Abrams and M-60’s are going to handle the majority of the tanks, and the Maverick’s on the rails were there for cleanup. The main utility in my eyes of the A-10 was terrorizing the secondary formations and the IFV/APC parts of a MRD, there isn’t much that’s not a tank that can stand-up to the GAU-8. It was our best attempt at designing something that could survive in the FEBA against what we thought was the Soviet SAM/AAA capability (we were probably over optimistic, but it’s not the first time that’s happened).
Fast forward 50 years and the A-10 offers certain advantages and disadvantages for it’s modern roll, as it has changed and adapted over the decades. In peer/near peer (or even an enemy who has modern air defenses) it’s gonna have rough time of it. In the current situation of complete aerial dominance, it’s over kill. For that matter a C-130 with a pallet of LGB’s and a targeting pod strapped to the side would honestly handle the majority of the CAS mission in terms of precision and loiter time. Fixed orbits of B-52’s on 12 hour shifts could do the same thing. The catch-22 here is that anything designed for a peer/near peer conflict is WAY overkill for the actual conflicts we’re fighting and supporting, and vice a versa.
I’ll differ on that one. The Harrier was the first aircraft to allow a fully digital push button 9 line, and the first aircraft to actually do so in combat. Literally the FAC/JTAC would punch his information into the radio, hit send, and the aircraft would handle all the rest in regards to setting up a target WP, ingress points, etc. It was one of 2 jets in the NATO inventory during the immediate post 9/11 era that was authorized to bomb soley based off of a waypoint and it’s INS with troops in contact. The angle rate bombing system (ARBS) while functionally a CCIP/CCRP style bombing system was apparently considered extremely accurate back in the days of dumb bombs and no GPS. This is not even getting into the targeting pod, and being able to self lase, drop GPS guide munitions etc.
On the contrary, my recollection of A-10 development wasn’t so much a reaction to the “Fulda Gap” scenario as it was a way for the Air Force to make the Army happy with regard to Vietnam and the lessons learned therein. As the Army had decided the Air Force was not going to take CAS seriously, the AH-56 and later AH-64 were put on the drawing board, which caused something of a stir to the Air Force leadership – that was budget that would be taken from them and given to the Army, which they absolutely couldn’t abide. When the Air Force got the A-10 on board, there were calls from congress about whether or not the Army really needed the AH-64, as the A-10 was supposed to solve all the Army’s requirements for CAS. Both proponents might’ve used the Warsaw Pact as a boogeyman for congress, but they were both designed with the intent of shoring up a capability gap that was clearly proven by Vietnam.
Once again, I feel the need to point out that Allied Force was a near peer conflict in which A-10s participated and one which they came out on top of. The mission planners know what the A-10 can and can’t bring to the table and they’re not going to throw them right into the teeth of the most advanced and deadly AAA out there; such is wasteful of resources. It’s the same as taking a KC-135 and expecting it to be able to fly refueling missions over contested airspace – you just don’t do it. This is one of the more annoying things I hate to argue about when it comes to the A-10, as if everything it does has to hang on whether or not it can go toe to toe with SAMs. It’s not meant to, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used in conjunction as part of a team. Understand the limitations, what it brings to the table, and use it as necessary.
Once again, you might be safe up there at 30,000ft dropping bombs willy nilly, but the guys on the ground aren’t too happy about being in contact and the only thing you’ve got to help them will level 10 city blocks. There’s something to be said – both psychologically and realistically – for something that can come in and lay some rounds down right in the enemy’s face. In fairness, such can also be accomplished by something like an A-29, but by the same token it’s not quite as survivable as an A-10.
It’s nickname in service for a time was the Tadpole. I wonder how much it would suck to know you got blasted into oblivion by a Tadpole. Sort of like how they used to call the Flogger the Cheburashka before the name stuck to an infinitely uglier aircraft.
NATO’s Greatest Hits, 1999, fresh with lessons learned from the Persian Gulf vs. a bunch of aging, export MiG-29’s in poor condition and 1970’s era export Soviet IADS doesn’t really strike me as a near-peer conflict…
Yet, as I recall, they popped an F-16 and an F-117 with that equipment. Not too bad for 1970s Soviet export equipment. If it’s good enough to take out not one, but two high tech aircraft, I’d argue that’s very much near-peer.
What I found points it to being a VA-165 aircraft in 1990. There were some experiments with camo paint at the time that was easily applied and removed, but I can’t find out much beyond that. Picture was taken on the USS Constellation.
I would argue that is not near peer, but that should increase one’s respect for what near peer or peer actually is. The Serbs were able to do that with a crumbling decades old IADS that had been beaten up five years previous and was awash in an over concentration SEAD assets, imagine what could have been done with actual modern assets.
I wouldn’t call most of Serbia’s – especially at the time – air defenses as crumbling. The majority of their air defenses that they lost were older SA-2 and SA-3 fixed sites; in comparison, the modernized SA-6s only lost three radars in comparison to the hundreds of HARMs launched at them. This is beside the point however, because A-10s were not lost in any operations over the former Yugoslavia, when according to everyone against the A-10 they should have been the first to be turned into smoking wrecks since it supposedly can’t handle anything more lethal than a BB gun. The losses of F-16s and a F-117 (in addition to one F-117 damaged) indicates that the technology the Serbs had access to was more than adequate for taking out A-10s.
What I’m getting at is the whole peer or near-peer thing is completely bogus argument in the face of what the A-10 does. The guy at the top is not going to send any assets out to fight in an environment where they’re likely to get taken out. Contested air space means that sometimes there will be superiority and sometimes there won’t be. When there’s not, and chances are low that assets will be destroyed, that’s when an entire force is utilized – not just onesies or twosies. If hostile forces are employing the latest and greatest, you don’t fight to their advantage. We’d all like to believe an F-35 with stealth and supercruise can operate unimpeded in such an environment; problem is, that such technology only reduces the probability of a loss. A 90% probability of loss isn’t great odds and no commander worth is salt is going to risk that unless the reward is absolutely worth it. It’s great to have that option, just as it’s great to be able to deploy some A-10s for old fashioned bomb trucking and gun running.
Given what the A-10 does and its track record, I’d be more concerned about losses to short range SAMs and MANPADS over super high tech gee-whiz uber-super-duper Russian/Chinese missile tech. And so far, it’s done pretty good against those threats.
I don’t think it was so much luck as they were very clever in what they did and were effective at exploiting the tactical and strategic holes left by NATO planners. They did take out a second F-117 afterward (6 May, 1999), and although that didn’t become a shoot down, it was withdrawn from service. In contrast, an A-10 that took a hit to the starboard engine from a MANPADS had the engine popped out, a new cover mounted, and was ready to go again in a matter of days.
