Posted on 04/03/2018 10:16:14 AM PDT by blam
I’ve heard a 20 mm gatling from a distance - and I was standing about 20 yards away from a parked ANG fighter when - at an unexpected moment - a single 20 mm round was fired for bore sighting purposes.A 30 mm gun would be about (3/2)3 = 27/8 or about 3½ as much gun as a 20 mm.
A-10 Rocks.
“A 30 mm gun would be about (3/2)3 = 27/8 or about 3½ as much gun as a 20 mm.”
I now know why the libs in congress want to retire the ‘Warthog’;
It is scary looking,
It’s not built for sport shooting and hunting,
It fires 30 mm ‘bullets’ from ‘clips’ that are just way too large
It reminds of a book I read years ago.
In Vietnam the commies put up a sign in Vietnamese for their ground troops: Don’t shoot at the skinny helicopters. Cobras had the tendency to return fire.
“...why is it that we can’t duplicate (and improve) the A-10, even without the original Tooling...” [Kickass Conservative, post 3]
“...Which has the advantage today, a ground based Russian integrated air defense system or the A-10?” [Wildbill22, post 37]
Because no airframe is built the same way, today. It’s not the production machinery that’s the limiting factor, it’s the skilled labor. The workers who made the originals have long since retired. Or died. There is no going back. Lighter, cheaper, stronger, more durable, longer-service structures can be made.
The A-10 entered service before modern modular systems and digital avionics were invented. Propulsion and aerodynamics have advanced in the interim as well. The aircraft cannot be backfitted, modified, nor upgraded to come up to the newer standards, without spending more than newer systems would cost. Newer systems that are already more effective.
Much is made of the GAU-8 gun but it’s actually the least effective, shortest-range system on the A-10. Other systems - many of them precision-guided munitions - provide higher probability of kill, at greater ranges, against harder targets, for less weight (which means any aircraft can carry more of them).
Forum members need to stop thinking in terms of maximizing the performance of any single system. The military has not been organized to fight that way since 1947 at least.
Wildbill22’s question was answered long ago - in favor of the integrated air defense system (IADS). The best route to future success lies in integrating all systems into a mutually supporting, mutually aware network. Each element knows what every other element is doing, and may then act to prevail in the situation. Each individual subsystem may attain only average to good performance, but because they are linked, degrading the performance of the overall network is much more difficult.
Same here. I had to read it three times before I decoded it. Why so much use of acronyms when unneeded?
I hear they are retrofitting A-10s with tazers and bean bags.
Maybe, but can it stop a convoy on the road to Baja?
Well, as a sailor and now an IT guy, TLA are all the rage...
If it can’t be a TLA, make it a FLA...
TLA - three letter acronym
FLA - four/five letter acronym
This is kind of the answer I was looking for, but still trying to understand. So perhaps this; Instead of the A-10 -vs- Tunguska and Integrated Air Defense network, the answer is to know where exactly the Tunguska is and nail it with a mach 6 round from a railgun from a destroyer 20 miles off shore? (or equivalent PGM that could penetrate the air defenses). That would make sense, but my point stands that the Russian air defense technology seems to have advanced beyond anything that can realistically combat it outside of exotic tech like stealth or hypersonics.
Forum members need to stop thinking in terms of maximizing the performance of any single system. The military has not been organized to fight that way since 1947 at least.
Another good point and question. I am no expert, just fascinated by the subject of warfare.
We didn’t take on the German Tiger tank in WW2 in a frontal armor attack because that would have been suicide, we ran around it with our Shermans, and bombed the hell out of it with artillery and aircraft. So the conclusion/lesson is, and correct me if I am wrong, not that we should or have to match every item of equipment in capability but to use it in the most effective way and to have equipment with the most flexibility....????
*** “The A-10 has a grease problem. It doesn’t grease the right palms in anywhere near the amounts required for political support” ***
The biggest Problem the A-10 has is that it WORKS and SOLVES Problems... fewer problems = fewer bureaucrats and less Govt
Make thousands more of them ... give them to the Army and Marines. Watch freaking heads explode when their cushy jobs go away and entire Departments are dispensed with.
I figure that will happen in the Pence Administration
*** “Practically every military contractor in DC has one on the payroll, it’s almost a requirement at this point” ***
Yeah... Too many Gun Free Zones
“...my point stands that the Russian air defense technology seems to have advanced beyond anything that can realistically combat it outside of exotic tech like stealth or hypersonics.” [Wildbill22, post 51]
It’s not the technology, it’s the organization, doctrine, and training for the armed services in question (Russians have many more individual services than does the US). Speaking very broadly ... there are a number of ways to counter IADS but details cannot be discussed here. Not very current at any rate: I used to deal with this daily, but left active duty at the end of 1999.
Academics, intellectuals, and a great many civilians assume a degree of clarity and predictability exist in action (so do many members of the armed services). And they love to fasten on a particular system (often the one they were assigned to, on active duty) and sing its praises to the exclusion of all else. Practitioners have learned that nothing happens in isolation, and that battles are more chaotic than anyone realizes going in. Makes us hesitant to discuss hypothetical questions ... flies in the face of what most Americans believe - we stand for open government and freely discussed policy. Quite apart from security concerns, practitioners are guarded - hypotheticals rarely account for enough variables to make them worth the effort.
“...The biggest Problem the A-10 has is that it WORKS and SOLVES Problems... fewer problems = fewer bureaucrats and less Govt
Make thousands more of them ... give them to the Army and Marines ...”
The perennial American conceit. We want national defense, but persist in believing it can be had on the cheap.
And making more A-10s would be more costly than buying newer systems that are more effective and will enjoy a longer service life.
The Air Force is powerless to give them to the Army nor USMC anyway. Those types of armaments are limited to where they are by public law. Congress sets roles and missions for the armed services, and must change the law before anything else can happen.
“...We didn’t take on the German Tiger tank in WW2 in a frontal armor attack because that would have been suicide, we ran around it ... So the conclusion/lesson is, ... not that we should or have to match every item of equipment in capability but to use it in the most effective way and to have equipment with the most flexibility....????”
Great question. There are no clear-cut answers for every situation.
And the projectile/armor interaction is not a yes/no question. The physics of a hostile encounter depend greatly on particulars of range, impact angle, etc, as much as the manufacture and materials used in armor, projectiles, and guns - plus system design of guns and the armored vehicles themselves.
The fearsome capabilities of Nazi Germany’s Tiger I and II tanks looms large in the lore of US armored forces, and among civilian enthusiasts. But the truth is, there were neer enough Tigers to affect the outcome - less than 1350 Tiger Is and less than 500 Tiger IIs. In contrast, the Soviets produced nearly 49,000 T34s for WW2 alone, and US industry produced nearly 50,000 M4 Sherman tanks for use by Americans, British, Free French, and the Soviets.
The Tiger did perform superbly in one-on-one nose-to-nose engagements, but (despite what was shown so compellingly in the film “Fury”) armored forces rarely fought in such an isolated fashion. And while it was well-built and reliable, it was difficult to repair when it did break down. Its interleaved road-wheel configuration proved less tolerant of mud than earlier designs, and it was so large and heavy that special transport arrangements had to be made, to get it to the fight. High fuel consumption also limited its range in the field; and it often proved too large and heavy to negotiate local roads. Each individual Tiger was so costly that total production suffered limitations - so much so that many military historians have since concluded that the Germans would have fared better, had they concentrated on turning out larger numbers of their Panther (Panzer V) - of which they built some 6,000.
US Army Ordnance officials did not sit idly by while tank crews were getting slaughtered; they conducted a number of tests during summer and autumn 1944, firing US anti-armor rounds against captured German tanks after field effectiveness had been found wanting. Before then, US forces had not engaged the most recently fielded German armored vehicles, and technical details had been assumed, that were not the case. Upgunned M4s - already in production in limited numbers - were rushed into action, and major efforts to produce heavier tanks mounting larger guns were undertaken. Before solid evidence appeared, designers and production engineers had to in some case taken their best guesses about what to make and how; crystal balls for these sorts of activities are typically murky.
Flexibility in a system is always worth having, but it too comes at a price. A system capable of taking on several different varieties of adversaries and besting them is going to cost more than a system designed to beat just a single adversary.
These are just a few of the considerations that leaders and other decisionmakers must consider when selecting systems to acquire (not to mention how many of each, and how to organize and train crews). And the questions thus generated are the daily preoccupation of operational test and system developers. A solution that looks obvious in retrospect may not be so easy to see, beforehand. Foreseeing what may happen and selecting the best course of action takes a level of imagination that seems magical - before the event actually goes down.
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