My rant/fantasy regarding the A-10(A&B) Warthog.

American "tech" prior to WWII was primarily in large industrial equipment, railroad technology, automotive and aviation technology. As you note, the true "long suit" was mass production, far more Americans had far more access to these goods (and thus experience using them) than anyone else.

The "high tech" German, Italian, British and other equipment was generally available in tiny quantities, and often not easily reproduced. British Napier Sabre engines, for example, were ideal examples of "Baroque" technology. Despite the massive power output and small size (due to the amazingly complex layout), American engineers focused on simplifying the Rolls Royce Merlin for mass production, and churned out "Packard Merlin's" in vast quantites and for a fraction of the cost. Even American tanks were generally inferior to those of other nations, but except for the T-34, US tanks were produced in far greater quantities, and were simple and rugged enough to be maintained in the field by their crews (German tanks were often disabled by simple mechanical failures that could not be fixed on the spot).

Moving to the here and now, a pilot flying against a defended target that is protected by smoke and other countermeasures will have a very difficult time of it. One place where PGM and drone technology (even at today's prices) is you get multiple chances, vs one airplane going in for a gun run. Like I said, the Russians have essentially swept the Ukrainian airforce from the sky with MANPADS; do you really want to see Western pilots going into the teeth of a real GBAD system?

Daryl wrote:When I was in charge of some military procurement we tried to cut costs by using off the shelf items as much as possible. Just two examples out of many -

Ruggedized lap tops (for maintenance field manuals etc)were painted khaki with some components encased in epoxy, had 286 processors in the Pentium era, and cost over $5000. Against much opposition I bought good quality civilian ones for under $1000 that were actually more reliable in the field due to domestic use developments (toddlers are harder on equipment than the Taliban).

A helicopter pitot tube is a hollow metal pipe about the size of a large pencil that measures airspeed. We were quoted $800 from the manufacturer (S***ky). Took one to a good metal turner to duplicate and sent exhibit A and B back asking if they could tell us which was which? They replied that it didn't matter as the real criteria was airworthiness certification, and if we did use non certified parts and a helo crashed anywhere for whatever reason they would ensure that we ended up personally blamed. Did more research and found the original supplier who would provide them for $80 with certification. Not a trace of embarrassment from the main company (Just business Boy!!). Next fleet we bought European.

Yeah. Companies that sell to the military (and government in general) do often seem to jack the price because they can get an exclusive contract to sell so they gouge the government's endless pockets.

Zakharra wrote:

Daryl wrote:When I was in charge of some military procurement we tried to cut costs by using off the shelf items as much as possible. Just two examples out of many -

Ruggedized lap tops (for maintenance field manuals etc)were painted khaki with some components encased in epoxy, had 286 processors in the Pentium era, and cost over $5000. Against much opposition I bought good quality civilian ones for under $1000 that were actually more reliable in the field due to domestic use developments (toddlers are harder on equipment than the Taliban).

A helicopter pitot tube is a hollow metal pipe about the size of a large pencil that measures airspeed. We were quoted $800 from the manufacturer (S***ky). Took one to a good metal turner to duplicate and sent exhibit A and B back asking if they could tell us which was which? They replied that it didn't matter as the real criteria was airworthiness certification, and if we did use non certified parts and a helo crashed anywhere for whatever reason they would ensure that we ended up personally blamed. Did more research and found the original supplier who would provide them for $80 with certification. Not a trace of embarrassment from the main company (Just business Boy!!). Next fleet we bought European.

Yeah. Companies that sell to the military (and government in general) do often seem to jack the price because they can get an exclusive contract to sell so they gouge the government's endless pockets.

Hated that SSS (Sole Source of Supply). Had a fiberglass weather protector that slipped over the feedhorn of one of our tracking radars (used for flight training). Cost $5800.00(US) to replace if it got damaged. This was in 1982.
The original design was produced in 1949. One of our Airmen worked in a body repair shop prior to enlisting.
He got the spec manual and repaired it for under $40.00, due to new technologies in fiberglass and epox coatings.

Once you get the bureaucracy involved you are adding layers of management and complexity (and cost), but the added value rapidly plummets.

Take rockets. ULA launches payloads to orbit on 1950 era tech Atlas rockets for $400 million a pop. SpaceX utilizes similar technology (the Falcon is conceptually similar to an Atlas, much of the detail difference lies in fabrication. An engineer form the 1950's would have little trouble figuring out how a Falcon-9 works) to launch similar sized payloads into orbit, but charges $50 million a pop. Quite the differential for essentially the same product and service.

In the private sector, comms giants like Comcast rapidly drop prices and unthrottle their Internet service wherever Google Fiber shows up. There still is a long way to go, however. A friend in Korea brags about how basic Internet is only $20/month but comes in "50 times faster". While I have some doubts that the speed differential is that great, the speed and cost differential is quite significant, especially when competition comes into play.

1st I won't respond to Tenshinai repeated lies claiming I'm lying, or anything else on his posts, that said,

Thucydides wrote:SU-25 Frogfoot CAS aircraft (which are close analogues to the A-10, even to the point of resembling the "second place" entry in the competition that created the A-10 in the first place).

the SU-25 is not anywhere close to an A-10, it lacks the redundancy and protection. It was the closest thing the dictatorial communists, with their conscript (if they die will just draft more) attitudes, were willing to make. I'm not surprised they are being swept out of the sky like gnats (as the "A-29"s would be). The main problem with the A-10s expense is not the purchasing cost but the maintenance/refurb cost. many (if not most) A-10s come back from combat missions shot up. some have come back missing a wing (yes - missing nearly an entire wing, with just some useless scrap attached to the wheel housing) and in 1 case the entire tail behind the engines, blown clean off by a SAM, (the pilot was even interviewed on the military channel). no SU-25 could do that. The A-10 was designed to be almost completely redundant. even the position of the engines is critically different, above and behind the main fuselage with the tail positioned below and behind them. this makes targeting the engines next to impossible. the twin engines themselves are independent and redundant (most high performance twin engine jets have the engines linked for increased performance and shared links) the A-10 runs each engine separate and (physically) apart so if anything dose happen to one it likely wont effect the other, which is enough to get the plane back to the hanger. the twin vertical tails are also positioned to help mask the engines against missiles and ground fire from the rear with the plane being able to maneuver and fly with the loss of 1/2 the tail (or even the whole tail as was found out the hard way).

Thucydides wrote:it is reasonable to expect a scaled down form of railgun to be mounted on a large aircraft sometime in the future. These could engage targets from hundreds of kilometres away given proper line of sight.

this would not be a "CAS" role but a "gunship" role like the AC-130 however a smaller rapid fire RG may be in the near future and will requires a platform that mounts a large volume for a gun, (like that needed for the GAU-8 perhaps) a railgun refit A-10 - that's a sweet Idea.

Thucydides wrote: if you can successfully spoof high tech weapons with smoke, etc., why would you not be able to spoof the MK-1 eyeball...

uh - you can - That's that's why battlefield smoke was 1st invented, but the difference is, that MK-1 eyeball is attached to a brain instead of a computer chip that can't think for itself and the human pilot can asses the situation and figure something out. (as an example) In the Falklands a flight of A-4 Skyhawks, from the Veinticinco de Mayo, were attacking the British fleet. One of them was flying circles trying to avoid the crisscross of SAMs. As he came around one loop the pilot noticed the fantail of a ship coming into view. he hit his bomb release and blasted the ships stern. A drone would not be able to outmaneuver a SAM let alone realize an unplanned opportunity to attack falling into it's lap.

Ensign Re-read wrote:Plus, in warfare, you don't fight the weapon, you fight the man. The A-10, right there in your face, has a much more intimidating presence than a (essentially) invisible drone.

http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/466762/bagram-pilots-save-60-soldiers-during-convoy-ambush.aspx

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/a-10s-saved-the-day-in-botched-afghanistan-raid-b78367f4fd0e

and the A-10 is too distinctive to fail to understand the treat it poses (especially if you managed to survive it once)

The SU-25 is an analogue (i.e. fulfils a similar role), not a direct copy. Still, the similarities are close enough to make a valid comparison, and the fact the SU-25 is having great difficulty in Ukraine against modern MANPADS flying similar missions and similar mission profiles is a pretty good indication that A-10 pilots in the same situation will have similar difficulties.

While a human pilot *might* be able to make that 1 in a million shot in a contested environment, it is far more likely he will get a missile or burst of gunfire up the nether regions. Even on a cost comparison basis, a maned aircraft and the human pilot are very expensive items, you can get far more "chances" at a target for the same cost (or engage far more targets at the same time), so the calculus does tend to favour UCAVs and smart weapons. Given that drones, cruise missiles and smart bombs can be equipped with a selection of "senses" that human pilots lack, such as laser seekers, millimetre wave radar, thermal imagers, TV cameras, GPS, inertial navigation and perhaps other things I have not thought of, it also presents the defender the pretty pickle of *what* countermeasures do you take and what do you leave out?

For historians, it is intereting to contemplate the fact that the specifications of the AX (from which the A-10 was developed) were written in 1966 and development started among the competing companies in 1967. The "second place" design was the YA-9, which you can see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YA-9

and compare it to the SU-25, which you can see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-25

I can't remember the title or author of a military SF short story that started with a female pilot flying a ground attack aircraft as a member of a regular UN military seeking to stop a border war between two African dictatorships. She shot up this and that and after running out of munitions discovered an ammunition dump hidden in an underground mine. Without hesitation she dove her plane into the entrance setting off an enormous explosion. The story then went on to say she took off her VR helmet and crossed to another console to take over another armed drone loitering on automatic in the vicinity.

As an aside, we tasked a study into the relative merits of using female pilots in helo combat missions. There were advantages and disadvantages but essentially they balanced out so there was no realistic reason not to deploy them. The senior officer in his summation was confident enough to address one potential problem that the blimps had raised - what about the female hormone cycle and its effects on decisions. His pithy response was "If you are facing an enemy pilot in a combat situation would you prefer that they were experiencing PMT or not?" All the married men who read that got the point.

Daryl wrote:I can't remember the title or author of a military SF short story that started with a female pilot flying a ground attack aircraft as a member of a regular UN military seeking to stop a border war between two African dictatorships. She shot up this and that and after running out of munitions discovered an ammunition dump hidden in an underground mine. Without hesitation she dove her plane into the entrance setting off an enormous explosion. The story then went on to say she took off her VR helmet and crossed to another console to take over another armed drone loitering on automatic in the vicinity.

As an aside, we tasked a study into the relative merits of using female pilots in helo combat missions. There were advantages and disadvantages but essentially they balanced out so there was no realistic reason not to deploy them. The senior officer in his summation was confident enough to address one potential problem that the blimps had raised - what about the female hormone cycle and its effects on decisions. His pithy response was "If you are facing an enemy pilot in a combat situation would you prefer that they were experiencing PMT or not?" All the married men who read that got the point.

Then we have Major Mariam Al Mansouri's participation in F-16 bombing raids for the UAE.