The A-10 Warthog May Be Kept Out of Retirement by Law

Most of the conversation about the A-10 seems to focus on the fact the Airforce need to free up resources for the F-35, and the combination of the F-16, F15, and F35 can replace the A-10 completely. I believe this to be false, and doubly so when the F-15 and F16 are also suppose to be replaced with the F-35.... The worst aircraft ever designed by the US Military..

Plus, consider that this is a plane expected to take fire. Everyone loves he story of the A-10 that kept flying with half a wing blown off... But imagine being the crew. I'm sure they'd rather be in a vehicle that wasn't hit in the first place, or controlling it remotely.

That said, the biggest failing has been ignoring the new role of NATO in the ME.

But yes, there should be a joint project for a fixed-wing CAS gunship drone to replace the A-10. The Avenger weapon is overkill, you could build a vehicle half its size around a Vulcan. Do the same role as an A-10, but without risking crew and the other a smaller, modern, cheaper vehicle.

Like Dale Storr's OA-10, which took a single Strela hit and went down? The A-10 is certainly more likely to be mission killed by MANPADS and AAA than other aircraft (which are liable to be destroyed outright), but those that survive are not useful for combat--Kim Campbell's A-10 was grazed by a Shilka and rendered combat ineffective; after she landed it in manual reversion, it was shipped back to the US and required months of intensive repair. That's great if your objective function is maximizing the number of airframes that are eventually flyable again after being damaged, but godawful if your goal is to actually use them to perform CAS.

>The A10 is simply put the most effective CAS tool the US Military has or ever had.

I completely agree with this, but tools only benefit you /if you can use them/. A-10s cannot survive in contested airspace, and if the not-at-all-fearsome Iraqi Army spanking them so hard that they ended up with a 10,000 foot hard deck didn't clue politicians in on that, maybe a few videos of modern SHORAD like the Pantsir which are available for $peanuts will.

>just because they might be against an enemy with better anti-air doesn't negate the need for boots on the ground, which require CAS for maximum survivability

The CAS you get is better than the CAS you don't. If your primary CAS tool is the A-10, then being against an enemy with even the slightest anti-air capability means that you don't get any CAS at all.

>Most likely the Stealth B2s or RQ-170 Sentinel would be sent in first to quickly take out as much of the AAA as possible

The RQ-170 is a phenomenally expensive unarmed recon drone that the US operates a handful of. The B-2 is useful for striking an enormous number of fixed targets, but is not designed or intended to be employed in a SEAD/DEAD role against anything more mobile than theater-level air defenses. No SEAD weapon in the world is capable of striking air defenses that it isn't fired at, and as a result anything flying at low level is vulnerable to SHORAD whose operators use the advanced tactic of parking it in a treeline and waiting until they hear a jet to engage it.

Interesting that modern system like Pantsir seems to cover the F-35 case too: "Aerial targets include everything with a minimum radar-cross-section of 1 cm2 and speeds up to a maximum of 1,000 metre/second (Mach 3) within a maximum range of 20,000 metres and heights up to 15,000[7] metres". I don't think that F-35 RCS is less than 1 cm2.

Giving that and also that stealth isn't much of a stealth if there is a network of radars, including airborne ones, it doesn't seem like F-35 would be any better than A-10 in CAS against modern military, while against bearded guys with AKs in desert the A-10 is just more powerful and cheaper.