iirc ALL of the tooling, jigs, machinery, etc to produce an A-10 was destroyed years ago...
Posted on 01/14/2016 9:49:39 AM PST by SandRat
The Pentagon "is finally coming to its senses," said U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, welcoming reports Wednesday that the military is backing off plans to retire the Air Force's A-10 fleet, including planes based at Tucson's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
The plans, leaked from the Pentagon, indicate a change of policy from the Obama administration's last two budget requests, which called for retiring the entire A-10 program, McSally said. Congressional pressure, including support from McSally and her predecessor, Rep. Ron Barber, kept the planes on active duty.
"It appears the administration is finally coming to its senses and recognizing the importance of A-10s to our troops' lives and national security," the former A-10 pilot said in a news release.
The Pentagon has not yet submitted a 2017 budget request, but insiders are pointing to ongoing deployments of the jets in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria as factoring into the decision to maintain the program, according to reports.
(Excerpt) Read more at tucsonsentinel.com ...
Don’t you worry. You have it right. Ignore him and ask anyone who has used close air support. You’ll find that your opinion is about right.
The 35 is a monument to procurement corruption and to careerist officers.
Another problem is over-complexity.
All the great missiles we equipped a/c with in RVN weren’t worth a damn, with the occasional exception of the Sidewinder. Nothing worked as well as the gun they finally put back in the Phantoms.
Also, enroute to RVN, carriers and their air groups would often stop in Hawaii. The famous “HANGman” (Hawaiian Air National Guard Korean-era F-86 driver with nothing more than .50 cals) would meet all the hot USN Phantom pilots over Mana Loa for some air to air. He would even go against them 4-1 (4 Phantoms v. the HANGman!)
Nobody ever beat the HANGman in his 20 year-old beat up Sabre!
I don’t necessarily blame you. This is no different than the election of Obama. When people are only offered one point of view, it’s no surprise that most of them take it.
I’m not trying to be a commercial for how wonderful the F-35 is. I work at a base that supports military aircraft. I work literally side-by-side with uniformed military on a daily basis. I have personal friends in the F-22 and F-35 program directorates who can’t even tell me what the capabilities are due to OPSEC and so much of it is restricted for security reasons. But I’ve sees the F-35 do things that would make your hair stand up. And it has sensors that make an E-8 JSTARS jealous.
You’re (obviously) free to have your own opinions, just be careful what you read in the paper. The F-22 was total garbage until it started showing what it can do at airshows. The F-117 was garbage until it completely devastated an entire country’s military without getting so much as a scratch. The F-14 was a piece of crap until it started shooting down top-of-the-line Russian jets without even breaking a sweat. The F-15 was an overpriced dog but here we are 40 years later and the F-15 has taken ZERO losses in combat. They told us that the AWACS was total junk and it turned out to be the single greatest development in air combat since the invention of radar. Bottom line: the media LIES.
If you’ve got anything to say to me, let’s have it—BOY.
McSally is a former A-10 Pilot. She knows Tucson and D-M AFB. She flew in Afghan & Iraq Retired as a Full Col. Then ran for Cong. to take Gabby Gifford’s Seat as Dist 2 Rep.
The fact is, if an F-35 is slowing down and getting into a turning dogfight with an F-16, he’s fighting the opponent’s fight instead of his and the pilot is probably screwing up badly. You don’t hear about the fights where it goes up and takes out an entire flight of F-16s before they even know they’re dead. But one training flight when it was flight-restricted for an engine inspection and suddenly, oh my god, it’s total garbage and can’t even take out piper cub.
It amazes me how many people are pulled into a barrage of MSM garbage. I expected more from a bunch of Freepers. But when it suits you, you act just like a bunch of democrats at Salon.com.
I have the feeling, the USMC would havw liked to have had that for C.A.S. duty in WWII.
We heard the same thing about the F-16 in 1978. The “electric jet” is falling out of the sky in droves (it did take a lot of losses in its first 10 years of service). It has too much electronics, too much complexity, how is a guy supposed to fix something that requires a degree in electrical engineering just to read the drawing?
The A -10 is one ugly beast. No wonder the ground troops love it and it is so feared by the enemy.
I’ll tell you straight-up. sorry for post #41. Getting a little jacked up, getting emotional, I’ll take the hit for that.
So it hasn’t occurred to you that it’s a media smokescreen? If we listened to the media on everything, we wouldn’t have fielded a new weapon system since the Korean War. I’m not some great advocate for the F-35 but the news media coverage of this is ludicrous. Honesty, I had expected a bunch of FR people to be a little smarter about this.
The fact is, the F-35 is taking all kinds of criticism for not doing things well that it was never designed for. Take the CAS mission. The powers-that-be put the AF in a nightmarish can’t-win position: do the media/communists’ bidding and walk away from a brand new 5th generation weapon system or walk away from the 45 year old A-10, you CAN’T have both. It’s like putting a gun to your head and telling you to choose between losing an arm and losing a leg. USAF knows that the F-35 going down in the weeds to gun tanks is a joke. The only reason they even entertained it is because the alternative is to completely walk away from the CAS mission. In the late 1980s, they put a 30mm gun pod on an F-16 to see how it would do in the A-10’s mission. It was, predictably, a complete disaster. The F-16 and A-10 are as different as a Caribbean Island and the moon, as are their missions.
As for the F-35 going against other jets, the same thing was said about the F-14 Tomcat. It has a crappy TF30 engine that fails and kills crews on a regular basis, it can only pull 6.5g, how the hell is it going to take anybody out? But then it did. It went out and killed the best front-line Russian jets, it wasn’t even close, IN A DOGFIGHT. The F-14s mission is to come in high and fast and hit the enemy with a 100-mile Phoenix missile shot or AMRAAM like the high-speed interceptor that it is. The last thing you ever want to do in an F-14 is to slow down, turn corners, and get into any kind of turning fight with an F-16. You’ve gotta fight YOUR fight, not get sucked into the other guy’s. The whole “F-35 lost to an F-16” is a lame-ass MSM smokescreen. The F-35 at the time was on flight-restriction due to an engine inspection. It was flying on waivers to even be up there, and we don’t know what kind of training environment it was in. This reminds me of the time that an SR-71 crew gave an F-15 crew the exact time, direction, and speed that it would overly their base. Because the F-15 got within missile range of the Blackbird (an actual missile launch had no hope of hitting him), Air Combat Command puts out a press release, “F-15 successfully intercepts an SR-71 blackbird” with all the requisite chest-thumping that you’d expect. Of course, the next time an SR-71 flew overhead and the F-15 unit was only given which 4-hour period it would fly over in, the F-15 was never in the same area code as the SR-71.
You gotta be careful which stories you decide to hang your hat on. You’re going to trust the Huffer Post and NBC, who lie every minute of the day and tell us that global warming will make the earth unlivable in the next 20 years? Really? If you’re going to get your military opinions from them, you’re beyond help.
Agreed, but how long has it been since USAF/USN faced a wholly competent enemy AF?
In VN, most opponents flew outdated MiG-17, and their top guys got loads of kills.
In Korea, our F-84 was no match for the MiG-17, and with the F-86, it was a tie. We got more kills due to better pilots v. the Norks, but against the “secret” Russian pilots flying for the Norks, the kill ratio was even.
In DS, even against the Iraqis, the F-15 drivers admitted the fights were not one sided.
I love our a/c, think the F-22 is great, but would you want to be in a knife flight against a skilled Su-35 pilot?
Stealth is great..... until the Pentagon says all shots must follow eye-ball range confirmation that enemy is really the enemy.
All very good points. To me, the F-22/F-35 is your first-strike weapon to take out their air superiority while B-2/F-117 takes out command & control. Then the F-15s/F-16s come in to mop up and maintain air superiority. But that’s just me. For CAS, the A-10 is the only thing that works. 40 years of trying and failing is proof of that. The A-10 is designed to take hits down low, no other system is. I say build more new A-10s. The original company is out of business, use the tooling and prints to contract somebody to build more.
By the way, I think the A-10 retirement plan got tripped up on the sunset clause. The A-10 is being upgraded to A-10C as we speak, you’re not supposed to do that to a system that’s retiring within 5 years.
It's like having your mother-in-law hovering overhead, IF you are not the target.
So cool!
iirc ALL of the tooling, jigs, machinery, etc to produce an A-10 was destroyed years ago...
Active Duty ping.
If I was a grunt in SWA, I would love it that there were A-10s around if needed.
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