countryside, pivoting on their wingtips as
they weaved gracefully back and forth. They
looked magnifi cent, and deadly, and I have
no doubt that they could have destroyed the
bus with a short burst of beautifully precise
gunfi re. But if I’d had a camera I’d have had
time to dig it out of a bag, slap on a lens
and track them long enough to have taken
a series of pictures. By contrast, the pair of
Harriers I saw a few moments later were
gone in a fl ash, vanishing almost before I
heard them.
In the Cold War days, the A-10As could
have had a fi eld day against Warsaw Pact
tanks, if ever they had come thundering
over the North German Plain. The ‘Hogs’
would have operated in conjunction with
a variety of attack helicopters and a whole
spectrum of other air assets, and would have
been engaged in trying to turn the enemy’s
highly integrated air defense system into a
more permissive environment, suppressing
and destroying enemy anti-aircraft weapons
and radars wherever they could be found.
And if an A-10A pilot ran out of luck and
came up against a ZSU-23-4 quad-gun
anti-aircraft vehicle, his armored titanium
cockpit tub might well have saved him from
disaster, and his tough, robust aircraft, with
its multiple-redundant systems and heavily
protected control runs might well have
made it home, absorbing damage that would
have downed a lesser fast jet. In Operation
‘Desert Storm’, Thunderbolts limped home
after suffering direct hits from shoulder-
launched SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, oneafter losing one of its podded TF34 turbofan
engines altogether.In harm’s way
While an A-10 might survive signifi cant
damage to drag itself home, no commander
would deliberately put his aircraft in harm’s
way, because some Thunderbolts would not
survive such damage (there are no guarantees
of survival, even in an A-10). Even those
aircraft that did stagger back to base would
require major repairs, putting them out of
action for months.
As the US has become progressively less and
less willing to take casualties, its armed forces
have become ever more risk-averse. Where
possible, the USAF has moved away from
employing tactics that might risk pilots lives,
or worse still, result in them appearing in
some terrible jihadist terrorist video. So maybe
the low-level CAS mission has become less
acceptable politically as well as operationally.
When coupled with the advent of advancedtargeting pods, it is easy to see why many
senior offi cers struggle to see the negatives of
operating at medium altitude.
The fact is that the A-10 has only fl eetingly
done the job it was actually designed for:
getting ‘down and dirty’, in the weeds, using
its powerful cannon to rip enemy armor to
pieces. More often the A-10C has been used
like a standard tactical fast jet, operating at
medium level and delivering just the same
kinds of ordnance — primarily laser- or
inertially-guided bombs, with occasional
recourse to direct-fi re weapons like the
AGM-65 Maverick missile. This is a job that
the A-10C does in much the same way as
any other fast jet, compensating for its slower
cruising speed with a generous number of
hardpoints for weapons.
In some respects the A-10C is arguably
inferior to other contemporary fast jet types.
Quite apart from its lower speed being a real
tactical disadvantage in some scenarios, the
aircraft has regularly trailed its contemporaries
in the area of connectivity. This makes
it something of an anachronism in an
increasingly network-centric environment, in
which every aircraft platform should ideally
be a sensor, a shooter and an ‘enabled’ node
on the network. Even without its famous low-
observable or ‘stealth’ capabilities, the F-35 is
a golden example of what a modern, network-
centric sensor/shooter should be.
A shorter kill chain and a faster OODA
(observe, orient, decide, and act) loop will
not just be an advantage, but an absolute
necessity in operations against fl eetingUSAFhttp://www.combataircraft.net May 2015 3534-37 A-10 Opinion C rev.indd 35 20/03/2015 11:38