Not only that, but the planes remain the cheapest front-line tactical jet to operate

They’re close enough. I just hope “Mother One” gets that homing beacon up and running before Clint Eastwood runs out of fuel.

By the early 1980s, the USAF wanted to explore an alternative to the deep battlefield interdiction and strike mission.

1. I’m not very good at generating click-bait articles.
1a - Any time you post “F-35 BAAAD! A-10 GOOOOD!” or “AIR FORCE, BAAAD” articles (And if you read those in Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein voice, then you are now), you’re pretty much guaranteed web traffic. It doesn’t even have to be a good article, it just has to…

Actually, reshape the US Army to be more like the Marine Corps, starting with Rotary Attack Aviation. Army Aviation gave up direct fire support after Vietnam, instead focusing on tank killing (thus the Apache and it’s tactics of firing from hover) whereas the USMC never stopped training to provide direct fire support…

Edit - TF34, not TF30. TF30 was the POS “temporary” engine the F-14A was stuck with until the GE F110 came to be.

1. That already happens. F-16, A-10, F-15E, B-1B, Hornet, Super Hornet and Harrier units rotate through all the time.

2. It also helps which aircraft can arrive to a call first. A flight of F-15Es can carry more bombs and get to a spot a lot faster than a flight of A-10s can. F-16s pretty much replaced the A-10 as the…

Would you like to talk about how in 1966, the Army was generally satisfied with AF support, but in the course of their ongoing experimentation and development of Air Assault and Air Mobility doctrines, were actually EXCLUDING the AF from certain missions and for ‘fulfillment’ by helicopters? Or how most remarkably,…

The problem is, we’ll likely never see a conventional war against a country with modern weapons again.

You know that F-16s do the bulk of CAS, right? They’ve been doing it for 25 years now.

The Air Force Brass that are sabotaging the warthog need to be made to put their family jewels on the line if they want to claim the F-35 can replace the A-10.

Other than Gulf I. They were pretty gung ho about destroying Iraqi tanks and infrastructure. Insurgents- not so much.

F-35s will do CAS just like how F/A-18s, F-15Es, and F-16s - which are performing the bulk of CAS now - do it. CAS is a mission, a training curriculum, not an aircraft.

is it replacing the F-16, which is already performing the bulk of CAS missions?

I think its a failure on the part of the Air Force to emphasize that CAS

The A-10 is hilariously cheap to operate.

Not to mention the JTACs, PJs, CSAR crews, all those airmen who drove convoy duty in Iraq...

Thanks to modern IADS and MANPADs, the A-10 IS technically unfeasible. MANPADs are the reason A-10s don’t go into Syria.

The A-10 was never retired. When the sequester hit back in 2013, the AF budget was slashed dramatically. Something had to go, and the A-10 is a redundant system (it only provides roughly 20% of all ground attack missions, the rest of the fleet can - and already is - doing the same thing). Now that the defense budget…