The A-10 Thunderbolt II is a single–seat, twin turbofan engine, straight wing jet aircraft developed by Fairchild-Republic for the United States Air Force (USAF). Currently, the USAF uses this warplane in Syria and Iraq.
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“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But there are idiots in the US that think that it should be replaced by the F35. Of course, these are the same idiots(?) who pocket billions of dollars in defense (sic) funding.
The plane does well when antiaircraft defenses are minimal or none existent. It it flies in a heavily defended area…..like Central/Western Syria, it would take heavy losses from the ground. The gun is terrific, however, how many times are you going to have the opportunity to fly over long columns of vehicles unimpeded. They would have been good taking out the tanker fleet ISIS was using to transit its oil to Turkey.
No other aircraft can supply such effective close air support as the A-10 can. In addition cannon it can carry a very large payload of various weapons.They can also also take a large amount of damage and still return to base! They wings have been upgraded to give it a longer life. Perhaps many want to replace it because it is not a fighter/bomber. But at the same time the defense dept. will not allow it not allow it to be sold to other countries? Is it because it is so effective!?
That aircraft (a further upgraded version of the A-10) should be in production. That unnecessary abortion of an aircraft (F-35) should be scrapped.
The US does need a new stealth fighter, the enemy may not even detect what hit them! The program is costly, but I’m sure it will work out over time. Many will be produced and sold to other countries. It is easier to maintain than the F-22 raptor.
There’s several counterpoints to be made here:
The first one regards the usefullness of stealth. The advances on radar and missile technology mean that stealth can’t really be considered very decesive if confronting a nation with an advanced air defense system. On the other hand there’s also the fact that most conflicts the USA could fight in the foreseeable future will be against irregular militias and terrorist orgnaizations which will probably at best employ anti-aircraft cannons and MANPADS and stealth has no effect in their frankly low effectiveness.
Then there’s the fact that we will have to wait and see if the F-35 would be as succesfull in the market as claimed, the aircraft is well overbudget and some had already doubted about it’s real usefullness. We will have to wait and see.
And finally I would like to comment on the fact that, in spite of being based on the same platform each F-35 variant only shares around a 35% of it’s components with the others.
The #1 job of F-35 is dominance of airspace, hard to detect with aircraft radar systems. As to ground based radars, maybe they can get a rough location but the AA missiles do not use the same radar band, hard to get an exact fix (or so I have read). I am concerned about their limited internal payload. They can be fitted with more on hardpoints but will be less stealthy. As to the F-35 replacing other aircraft, first it will have to prove itself. In air to air role, it should be outstanding.
Actually, it’s primary role is as a stealth fighter-bomber. Air dominance is the F-22’s game. F-35s are pretty terribly designed as far as air-to-air.
There are not enough raptors to fulfill mission. Read that F35 can bring down enemy air, and they may be surprised by this tech.
There aren’t enough F-22s to fulfill that mission because the aircraft was so massively overbudget that Congress cut funding well under what the Air Force had planned for and requested, leaving them to fill the gap with F-35s. It was not intended for that role, but rather has been forced into it. It’s poor manoeuvre and power, and low speed do not support it as an effective air combat platform, and during testing, it has performed unfavourably in WVR combat against legacy aircraft. It’s whole design is predicated on the false paradigm that it can win in BVR and thus avoid WVR. However, the low overall effectiveness of BVR missiles and the limited payload of the aircraft make that a mere fantasy, one the US military air services have been pursuing to their detriment since they tried it in Vietnam with F-4s. Against aircraft with IRST, good ECM and better manoeuvre, it is nothing but a hapless target that can;t even fly fast enough to escape it’s inevitable demise.