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F-35 To Face Off Against A-10 In CAS Test
An anonymous reader writes: Lara Seligman from Defense News reports that the capabilities of the Joint Strike Fighter are to be evaluated for close-air support (CAS) missions. She writes, "To gauge the joint strike fighter's ability to perform in a close-air support role, the Pentagon's top weapons tester has declared the sleek new fighter jet must face off against the lumbering A-10. The Pentagon's Office of Operational Test and Evaluation plans to pit the full-up F-35 against the legacy A-10 Warthog and potentially other fighter jets to evaluate the next-generation aircraft's ability to protect soldiers on the ground."
Airforce has been trying to kill the A-10 for years. Recently they tried to mothball them all and replace them with the defunct F-16 until the F-35 was ready ... congress killed that idea. The troops love the A-10 and the higher ups hate it ... do not expect a fair analysis.
Guarantee that you'll see a test which
-features some contrived anti-air defense that is somehow not good enough to defeat the F-35s rudimentary stealth but is good enough to be a credible thread to the A-10
-doesn't require the aircraft providing CAS to loiter, expend large amounts of ordinance, use the main gun extensively, fly low/slow or do anything the F-35 sucks at
-requires the CAS airfraft to sprint around at higher speeds than the A-10 is capable of
-reconstitutes the CAS mission to consist of dropping a small amount of ordinance from high altitude with no loiter
The F-35 will win, and the pork will continue to flow to the hundreds of congressional districts that get money from the F-35. The A-10 doesn't funnel billions of dollars to congressional districts- all it does is save the lives of troops. For that reason alone, it will be thrown in the trash and replaced with a useless but lucrative pile of garbage.