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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.
It's staged because the F-18 kicks the ass off the F-35, and the cost of operation of the F-35 sucks as well, even though we're stuck with it.
Just watch, the evaluation criteria will be designed to have the F-35 come out on top, even though it lacks the armor of the Warthog, which not only jeopardizes the crew but the astronomically expensive asset as well.
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.
I suspect that as the article says, there will be pros and cons of each. Obviously the A-10 has been very successful in this role, while the F-35 benefits from decades of technology advancements.
The A-10 is robust. The F-35 gives the pilot a much better view the of entire situation. The A-10 can put a lot of fire down in a small area as it flies low and slow. The F-35 can start applying fire earlier, while it's still further away. The A-10 is a proven system that has stood the test of time. The F-35 doesn't have to run away when an old Russian surplus fighter is detected in the area.
I really like the A-10 and generally I appreciate systems that have stood the test of time - newer doesn't mean better (aka the fundamental belief that means I'm a conservative) .
ALSO, when improvements are made, when someone "does it better", that's also new. SOMETIMES the new thing IS better is significant ways. We'll see what happens in the testing.
The F-35 IS expensive _per_unit_. The A-10 does one job, and there are several other aircraft that do different jobs. So the A-10 sits on the ground while there is air-to-air taking place, waiting while another aircraft handles that. IF the F-35 does four different roles, replacing four different types of aircraft, that cuts the effective cost by 75%. It wouldn't be parked on the tarmac waiting for a time when CAS in needed with uncontested skies. It could, supposedly, when the skies while also bombing enemy airfields , then do close air support.
Let's see how it actually does in testing before we declare the result.
They keep lowering the bar. Next it will square up against a drunk guy with cataracts in a weathered Cessna.
Table-ized A.I.
200 years from now, we'll still be paying for it.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
A jdam is a complete package of dumb bomb, sensors and guidance package. Think of it as the short range JSOW (all of the above + large fins that let it glide long range to target. Source - I'm a former EOD tech.
The A-10 flies at about 420 MPH. Even 1980s fighter jets fly at mach 2, about the same speed as the bullets from the A-10 gun. An A-10 going after a fighter is literally the same ratio as a scooter going after a Ferrari.
Don't misunderstand, scooters are good. They are useless for chasing down sports cars, and an A-10 is just as useless for engaging enemy fighters. The fighters would (and do) fly by as if the A-10 is standing still.
Actually, even fighters from 1950's can fly at mach 2, BUT:
Even those 1980's fighters won't be flying at mach 2 at 95% of their time. They can only fly at mach 2 at high altitudes on straight line, full afterburner, wasting huge amount of duel.
Practically all dogfights happen at subsonic velocities. When you start doing high-g manouvers the velocity drops to subsonic very quickly.
> no known aircraft can survive the A-10's gun. It is the most powerful dogfight cannon
The bullets from the A-10's gun go about the same speed as the fighter. So if somehow, magically, the A-10 got on the fighter's tail and fired, the bullet probably couldn't catch up to the fighter. If it was fired off angle, it might hit the fighter at 30 MPH relative speed - not enough to dent the sheetmetal.
Survive that A-10s gun? No jet fighter in the last 40 years can be HIT by the A-10 gun unless the fighter is either a) parked or b) intentionally flying toward the A-10 without shooting it down.
This part is so incorrect....
The speed of bullets from GAU-8 is 1070 m/s.
Top speed of the worlds fastest jet fighter(mig-25) is ~890m/s flying on straight line on high altitude, with afterburner, but only ~333 m/s on low altitude.
Top speed of most modern jet fighters is in the class of 700m/s. (high, straigt line, full afterburner)
Common speed of modern jet fighters during dogfight is about 250-350m/s , 3-4 times slower than the bullets from GAU-8.
A-10 is actually quite good plane for shooting down slow low-flying aircrafts such as helicopters. It can use AIM-9 missile from slightly longer range, and from the close range the GAU-8 is very deadly. And because it can fly lower and slower it can more easily hit those slow low-flying targets than faster, higher-flying aircrafts can.
Makes perfect sense - it's equal to the F-16 for air-to-ground and almost as good a fighter as the A-10.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> It's a little late for testing with several of these deployed in Europe.
You are confusing the F-22 Raptor with the F-35 JSF. The F-22 has recently been deployed to Europe because of the russian attack on the Ukraine. The F-22 is a twin engine stealth fighter with extremely high operating costs and not exactly stellar reliability/availability levels, even after 15 years of service, but at least it works and is VERY capable.
In contrast, the F-35 JSF is a single engine stealthly fighter-bomber, which hasn't been deployed anywhere yet, still being essentially a prototype with many tech problems, despite 100 of them having been assembled. Most problems stem from the fact that it is actually based on a russian prototype called Yak-141, whose design the drunkard Yeltsin sold to USA (L-M) for 300m USD in the late 1990s. L-M company had no experience whatsoever in vertical landing planes and relied on this tech import to compete against Boeing-BAE-Rolls-Royce, who bidded with the X-32 prototype as a very distant successor of the Harrier. L-M won, but proved unable to integrate a russian-derived airframe with western electronics. On the other hand, Pentagon was asking for too much, landbased, marine and naval fighter in a single basic arframe, constant mission creep, etc.
It's staged because the F-18 kicks the ass off the F-35, and the cost of operation of the F-35 sucks as well, even though we're stuck with it.
You didn't read the rest of the story, which states "In order to make the comparison fair, the A10 will be fuelled with paraffin wax and weedkiller, have a large number of anvils bolted to it, and will be dragging a large boat anchor. 'We hope this at least evens the odds a bit so the F35 will look OK', a Pentagon spokesthing was quoted as saying".
You didn't read the rest of the story, which states "In order to make the comparison fair, the A10 will be fuelled with paraffin wax and weedkiller, have a large number of anvils bolted to it, and will be dragging a large boat anchor. 'We hope this at least evens the odds a bit so the F35 will look OK', a Pentagon spokesthing was quoted as saying".
Sadly the A-10 will still come out on top as it can probably run on paraffin. It's also maneuverable enough that the pilots will turn the boat anchor into a weapon and swat enemy fortifications with it just before purging the boiling wax on their position. And still have enough fuel to loiter longer than the JST.