The Hog That Saves the Grunts [A-10s To Be Decommissioned?]

The New York Times ^ | May 27, 2003 | Robert Coram

[RocketWolf]

Elect Hillery! in 04: transfer the A10s to the BATF to fight socialism's real foe, whitemale voting gunowners.(they did it with the OV 10)

[colorado tanker]

IMHO one of the lessons of the Iraq War was that attack helicopters are more vulnerable than we thought but the A-10 is even more valuable than we already knew.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Heck, rumors have been abounding for the last decade that the AF was trying to retire the 'hog.

[skinkinthegrass]

The A-12, "stealth" replacement for the Intruder, was killed in 1991 by Cheney.

Sorry, Was it that long ago....time travel alert...reading too many old Popular Mechnnic I guess.

[Moosefart]

LOL! NONE.
The hog is a one of a kind that was designed to do its job and come home....period. Looks don't count when yer arse is on the line.

[SauronOfMordor]

"Perhaps the Army can get a friend in the Congress to transfer all the A-10's and A-10 support equipment to the Army" That would be a violation of the Interservice Agreement between the Army and Air Force.

An act of Congress would override any Interservice Agreement. And if the "Interservice Agreement" was just a gentlemans agreement between the respective brass, SecDef could just tell them "it's cancelled".

Personally, I would be in favor of having the Air Force lose all air-superiority and ground-attack roles, keep just strategic bombing, and transfer most planes to the Army.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The best thing that the Air Force can do is to transfer the A-10's over to the Marines . . .

. . . who have a tradition of flying effective close air support.

[Young Werther]

Right idea, wrong armament. Mounted with the Airborne Laser which is designed for missile defense and you have one very potent weapon. The North Koreans have been shooting laser beams at our troops in order to blind them.

Imagine if our response were a kilojoule laser which would vaporize a human being. Like popping ants with a magnfiying glass. Heck those North Korean troops would start running North and wouldn't be stopped, except by maurauding polar bears!!!

[Rokke]

It never ceases to amaze me how many military tactics "experts" we have on FreeRepublic. With everybody correctly describing the USMC expertise in CAS operations, you'd think that just one or two of our "experts" would examine how the USMC performs CAS. If they did, they would quickly conclude that the Marine Corps has no interest in the A-10. The 3 MAW performed CAS just beautifully in Iraq without a single A-10. Instead, they used AV-8B's, F/A-18's and AH-1W's in very much the same way the Air Force executes CAS using its F-16's and F-15E's. In case all our "experts" haven't noticed, moving slow and low around the battlefield is a not an effective CAS technique if you plan on using your CAS platforms more than once. The Army proved that in spades with the archaic tactics they used to employ their Apaches. The USMC AH-1W proved attack helicopters can still be effective CAS platforms. If the Army was REALLY interested in CAS, they would have used their Apaches in a CAS role instead as deep strike pin cushions for every Iraqi with a pea shooter. And even the beloved A-10 got shot to bits when it was employed at low altitude over a significant surface to air threat. Yeah, it is really exciting that almost all the Apaches and Hogs that took battle damage were able to limp back home, but that was the last time each of those CAS assets flew for weeks/months/ever. The fact that seems to be lost on the armchair military experts of this world, is that one of the best ways to win a war is to avoid getting shot at all. The days of trench warfare are over. Get over it. The CAS experts of our military (the USMC) do not want A-10's. They want fast, flexible, capable systems that can accurately put ordinance on target everytime, then get reloaded and returned to the battlefield without having to be patched and taped back together because some cigar chewing Patton wannabe thinks the only way to kill tanks is to fly an aircraft beneath its tracks.

[Ready4Freddy]

The Army Air Forces had by far the highest casualty (death) rate of all the services in WWII.

"In 1942 the brass transfered the one P-38 group in England to Africa any way.

Yet, the P-38, after considerable modification, became THE Zero killer in the Pacific. What it lacked in manuverability it more than made up for in speed and range.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

No we didn't. Aviators don't serve as FACs first. Butter bars learn to call in strikes and artillery at Basic but FAC duty, which isn't an automatic, comes much later.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

[P-38s] were a big success in Africa and the southern Pacific . . .

. . . especially after Charles Lindberg showed the pilots in the Pacific how to double their gas mileage . . .

[WhiskeyPapa]

Well the American pilots knew how to fight the P-38 in the vertical. Also, the Japs didn't really believe in team work; it was all the lone wolf thing for them.

[WhiskeyPapa]

Even the early P-38's could be very effective Zero killers, and Ki-84 killers, and so on.

The P-38L's and M's were very deadly though.

one of the high scoring German pilots said a P-38 in the hands of a good pilot was the most deadly fighter there was. That might have been Steinhoff. Adolf Galland barely escaped with his life in a bout with a P-38.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

I bet if you check, you'll find that the P-38's killed a lot more Jap Army planes than they did Jap Navy planes; the Zero was a Navy plane of course.

The Flying Tigers also faced few if any Zeroes.

Walt

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

There's no gainsaying the fact that if you can effectively hit the target (and miss the friendlies) from a safe altitude you'd rather do it that way. For that matter, you'd rather use robots/UAVs to locate the targets, too--why risk letting anyone get hurt?

That approach would eliminate the A-10, all right--but in favor of B-52s dropping thousands of precision-guided spears to direct hits, targeted by info from drones a lot slower, lower, and smaller than the A-10.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

Quite a few, actually. Here's one Marine Hornet that had a SAM fly up it's port exhaust, flew home, was repaired and fought again soon after.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/Hornet/index-20.html

[Radioactive]

Let me buy one or a hundred.

I'll have them just in case.

Why decommission a great aircraft as the HOG?

Money, Money & Money.

With the likes of the Osprey, It's a wonder how anything like the Hog was even built. Seems as if the old idea of "Hey we got a budget to use up" is in effect.

[WhiskeyPapa]

Even having a few P-38's in the mix helped break up the mass formations that the German came to favor. The GAF would mass 8, 16 or even 32 fighters and then rush in on the bomber boxes from the nose. A few P-38s (or any escort) made that hard to do. The escorts also forced the Germans to withdraw the ME-110's, which had considerable success against the US heavy bombers for a time.

One of the things that maddened the US bomber crews was how the fighters would hang back behind the leading bombers and only come in AFTER the Germans made the first rush. Oddly, the Flying Tiger pilots noted the same behavior in the Jap escort fighters they faced.

Walt

[uglybiker]

Ugly, But Well Hung

Hmmmm....I just might have to change my tag line.