smsgtmac wrote:Ack! Missed this one...
aaam wrote:Something else to keep in mind:
AF never really wanted the A-10, tried to get rid of it until reality intruded in the form of Gulf War I, and hasn't been completely sure of what to do with it ever since.
A subset of one of the Great CAS Myths. Completely unfounded.
(See:
http://elementsofpower.blogspot.com/201 ... -part.html)
I can't get the page to display in Firefox or IE, maybe it's temporarily having problems. So I can't comment. I'll just note that:
AF didn't strongly push the A-X/A-10 until Army said that they would be able to do CAS and dive bomb with their forthcoming AH-56. AF then repeatedly lobbied that the AH-56 should be canceled, the A-10 should get the money and besides, it's their role anyway so Army shouldn't get to play. When Army dumped AH-56 on its own, they were caught by surprise, and weren't really sure of the A-10's role (if you'll look back anti-tank wasn't originally one of the primary goals of A-X). There's lots of contemporaneous information on that. Even the late, great Jeff Ethell in a documentary highly supportive of the A-10 noted this.
By the mid- '80s, only a few years after its introduction, AF started a program and competition specifically to replace the A-10, called CAS-X. This kind of petered out when it became apparent that USAF wanted whatever aircraft was best for the job as long as it was the F-16 (the A-7F started out as part of the CAS-X operation).
Even when DoD was relatively fat with money in the '80s, the largesse didn't find its way down to the A-10 program very often. The higher thrust engine program was repeatedly blue pencilled. Don't forget that prior to Saddam's Kuwait sojurn, the A-10 was scheduled to be removed from service , except for those being kept as OA-10 (relatively) fast FACs. They were already sending them to the desert when the invasion changed everything. I personally know people who were involved in trying to bring some of those back. They were shocked at how much it would cost. Not because the A-10 was a poor design, but because when they were put out there they were stripped so much and preservation was lacking to the point that it wasn't affordable to do so.
As an aside, they tried to do the latter to the SR-71 but that didn't quite work, a tale for another topic.
Note that I'm not picking on the A-10 or those in the field who flew and maintained it