I'm no expert(casual aviation nerd) but I'm under the impression that the gun exists mostly for completeness and isn't expected to be used regularly. The F35 is meant to conduct air support a10 style, but will use missiles instead of bullets, since it can't really carry a huge cannon like the a10.
Since air support "A10 style" these days means "dropping smart weapons from high altitude", the F35 will be doing it the same way. Doing anything at low-level is expected to lead to the aircraft getting hit by a MANPAD.
FACS (the guys on the ground to direct the aircraft fire), as far as I have read, say that it is quicker to get a slow mover like an A-10 or helo updated on the situation, familiar with the layout of the terrain, and make sure they know where the good guys and the bad guys are before they let the fly-boys start firing / dropping.
One of the things that is supposed to make the F-35 as capable as an A-10 in CAS/COIN (counter-insurgency, despite the wildly different approach, is it's "Sensor Fusion" system. Basically it gives the pilot so much information that it offsets the "fast-mover" disadvantages (and then some). Whether it lives up to the claim is no something I can comment on.
Of course, when it comes to recent wars, everything the US military uses is massive overkill and massively expensive (apart from drones, maybe).
There is a popular view held that the Airforce brass doesn't like CAS/COIN (They all about killing MiGs) and that prop planes aren't sexy enough which is why this program has been taking so long.
It has nothing to do with sex appeal. A prop plane used for CAS/COIN will siphon funds away from the F-35. That's fine, as long as you don't need to engage in combat with a near peer competitor like China/Russia etc. Planes like the Tucano (and the A-10) will NOT survive against a modern AD. Nor will Apache etc; witness the performance of the Apache when used in 2003. When assaulting the Republican Guard positions at Karbala (with rudimentary AD), the Apaches suffered an incredible amount of casualties:
"Of the 29 returning Apaches, all but one suffered serious damage. On average, each Apache had 15-20 bullet holes. One Apache took 29 hits. Sixteen main rotor blades, six tail blades, six engines, and five drive shafts were damaged beyond repair. In one squadron only a single helicopter was fit to fly. It took a month until the 11th Regiment was ready to fight again. The casualties sustained by the Apaches induced a change of tactics by placing significant restrictions on their use.[11] Attack helicopters would henceforth be used to reveal the location of enemy troops, allowing them to be destroyed by artillery and air strikes.[3]"
The A-10 was designed for a hot war in Europe and would have been nothing more than a “speed bump” for a Soviet invasion in the Fulda Gap, let alone a modern peer.
The problem is really casualty aversion - we lost 10’s of thousands of airmen in WW2 and that’s not sexy. The fighter mafias in the USAF and USN are real things, driving the specification of unrealistic capabilities in fiscally constrained universes.
Fiscally affordable wars are going to require less bling and a higher tolerance for losses.
Extending your thought we should expect F-35 shortcomings to lead to tactical limitations due to operational risks leaders will be unwilling to take when facing a real peer.
Yes, we've imposed tactical (and strategic) limitations due to operational risks in our current wars/engagements. The B-2 for example, will never fire a shot in anger since there are so few airframes. It'll be retired in short order after the deployment of the B-21.
Same with the F-22. Other than a token deployment to the Mideast with a sortie or two in Syria, they won't see combat unless we get in a hot war with a peer. And until recently, they lacked the required capabilities to attack ground targets. No need to risk them for bomb truck missions.
My real worry is that our risk aversion will cause a conventional war to go nuclear in short order, when a more robust conventional military would be able to prevent that. Imagine if we lost a CVN to the Chinese? 5000+ sailors and airmen dead.
> Planes like the Tucano (and the A-10) will NOT survive against a modern AD.
That wasn't in their design briefs.
They're for low- (and maybe medium-) risk areas; they're not for Day 0 (or perhaps even 1) operations.
But "victory" is often achieved after a bit of a slog over hill and dale, and high-end gear may not be need for for all of it. Yes, the tip of the spear may need pricey kit, but the baseball bat of suppression may be able to do with a bit less.
As long as your wars are expeditionary in nature you're fine with a low end force. But in a peer conflict, these are useless. And they siphon away pilots (something the USAF is short of), while simultaneously making it easier to get into an expeditionary fight.
> There is a popular view held that the Airforce brass doesn't like CAS/COIN (They all about killing MiGs) and that prop planes aren't sexy enough which is why this program has been taking so long.
This may be getting in "jurisdiction" issues, but if the USAF doesn't really want to do CAS/COIN, why can't the Army do it?
The USAF keeps think clear at >3,500 feet (1000m), and Army CAS planes mops things up for the folks on the ground. If extra muscle is needed USAF ordinance can be dropped or an AC-130 be requested.
You've just complicated your logistics and added a whole bunch of personnel requirements for the Army to have any significant amount of planes for use in combat. Not to mention, the Army has helicopters to perform this exact same function already.
Well for one, the Army would have to start worrying about bases with full landing strips, pilot training, the bureaucracy and command structure that would be required to run the squadrons. They would need mechanics that know how to repair them, people that know how to arm and refuel them.
You end up doing a good amount of work just to try and protect a very expensive plane from Air Force politics. Ideally, the Air Force would just settle on an inexpensive prop plane that could perform the same missions as the A-10 at much less of the cost.
I'm not knowledgeable on how effective a helicopter is for CAS.
The A-10 is quite MANPAD resistant. Look carefully at the engines and tail, and remember how nearly every MANPAD operates.
Almost every MANPAD uses an IR seeker, not radar. The A-10 engines are mostly hidden from the ground, inside a wrap-around tail. There are few angles from which the exhaust can be seen. It is in fact a very simple form of stealth. The aircraft turns of course, changing the view and causing simple heat seekers to loose the aircraft. Of course, the aircraft also carries flares and other decoys, and it can be accompanied by a Growler.
If the A-10 does get hit, it will probably be fine. It has quadruple-redundant controls. It can fly with the loss of an engine, half the tail, and 2/3 of one wing. MANPAD explosive charges are small. The A-10 engines are spaced apart from each other, making it unlikely that a hit on one engine could disable the other. Experience shows that the aircraft is tough: they often return to base after getting hit by a missile even larger than a MANPAD, such as truck-mounted Russian equipment.
The A-10 might be MANPAD resistant to the SA-7 (Grail class and variants), but it wasn't designed to survive anything newer. Yes it has redundant control mechanisms/engines, titanium bathtub and tails. But it's still easy to target with IR, not to mention radar.
And against a modern AD system, it'll be toast. Whether it's a Tunguska or worse, it can't survive on the modern battlefield until these systems are attritted via SEAD.
They survive pretty well. Don't expect perfection. It's war. Check out the loss rates for WWII bombers over Europe, but we sent them anyway and they worked fine.
The A-10 of course is capable of SEAD. It carries the equipment. However...
There is no requirement that the A-10 go alone. It can be accompanied by the EA-18G or F-22.
If it mattered, we could have the A-10 carry the AN/ALE-50 towed decoy system. The threat isn't serious enough to bother, but we could.
I'm sure the crews in the 8th AF who attacked Schweinfurt in WW2 would disagree. Until the P-51 and P-47 were able to escort the B-17s start to finish, the attrition rate was terrible. Daylight bombing was completely unproductive; the only good thing was that the escorting fighters eventually degraded the Luftwaffe.
The A-10 is not tasked with SEAD. The only weapons it could use in that role would be Mavericks, CBU, dumb bombs, and the GAU. It carries the ALQ-131 pod, but that's only for self-defense (jamming). Also, the operational envelope for ALE50 is too high to be useful for the A-10, unless it's going to just be used as a bomb truck at medium altitude. Plus it only has two "buddies" so it's of limited use.
If you can get your hands on some of the literature regarding it's intended deployment in Europe if the GSFG rolled through Fulda, you'd be horrified at it. Both it and the Apache would have attrition rates that would never fly with today's voters.
And it's not that the threat isn't "serious enough to bother", but that it wouldn't be cost effective to increase the A-10s survivability. If the conflict gets too hot, the USAF simply won't deploy the A-10.
Sure, the attrition rate was terrible, but we sent them anyway. That is war. Under the right conditions, today's voters will tolerate the same. Human brains haven't changed that much. We don't tolerate the losses when playing around in Vietnam or Iraq, but another Pearl Harbor will put us right back in the mood.
Until such a conflict, our enemies have weak air defense.
So either way, the A-10 works. Either we are in the mood for serious war with serious losses, or we're fighting an enemy that can't put up much of a fight.
Sent them anyway as the brass's belief in the Norden bomb sight was far in excess of its ability. Tests had been in perfect steady level flight, in perfect visibility in the desert. Daylight raids had horrific losses, yet were repeatedly shown that in practice accuracy was no better.
Night raids would have cut losses markedly and achieved no worse accuracy.
> another Pearl Harbor will put us right back in the mood...
Yeah, well, they kind of said that with the WTC attack, and I guess it's carried us through on a multi trillion dollar war against a bunch of countries that never attacked us, and a growing surveillance hellscape. Pretty sure most people are sick of it. I know I am!
Another attack on US territory; well, if they took out certain areas of the government, I'm about at the point where I would welcome them as liberators.
And the purpose of that gun is no longer valid as it won't take out modern tanks. Also if you are fighting modern tanks you would get shot down by MANPADS.
There is a reason why CIA never seemed to give away anti-aircraft weapons while they throw anti-tank weapons at Syrian rebels. Despite manpads would be so valuable against the old Syrian air force.
With current ammunition the gun will not quickly and reliably take out modern tanks.
Guided ammunition has been done for 12.7 mm ammunition. The A-10 carries 30 mm ammunition, so it would be no problem to supply it with guided ammunition.
Mission kill can be achieved by splitting a tread, pitting the surfaces of the sensor lenses, or ripping off an antenna.
Even the most modern armor will fail when repeatedly hit.
MANPADS are not a serious threat. That is just FUD.
FUD? Tell that to the VVS squadrons flying SU-25s in Afghanistan. These were extremely robust aircraft similar in many ways to the A-10. Facing the Stinger, they had high casualties, forcing them to bomb from higher altitudes and use PGMs instead of strafing and dumb bomb attacks. This was 36 years ago. MANPADs have gotten better in this period.
One was taken down by 12.7 mm ammunition. Clearly the Su-25 was not an extremely robust aircraft. It even has turbojets (hotter exhaust than turbofans) that are completely visible from the ground. A bit of armor around the pilot doesn't make an aircraft equivalent to an A-10.
USAF has many options when it's about gunning all terrain options:
C130, yeah, that plane can literally wipe an entire convoy of cars, tanks, and landforces with thousands of heavy rounds, same as the A-10.
Apache helicopters and A-10.
And the list goes one.
I don't think it's wise to use fighters to attack land targets, more than blowing bridges or targeting tanks with missiles. The amount of rounds and the guns used in these fighters aren't suitable in my opinion. Yes, you can fight with it but that doesn't mean it's practical.
A AC-130 cannot carry "thousands of heavy rounds", it is a plane not a battleship; it has a couple of dozen 105mm "heavy rounds" and a few hundred 25 or 30 mm projectiles. In the modern world, automatic cannon rounds are not classified as heavy.
An AC-130 Spectre, for example, carries 8 cannons: 4x GAU-2B/A (Army M134) 7.62mm "minigun" to tear apart any lightweight vehicles, soldiers, helicopters and more. Another 4x M61 20-27mm caliber dealing 6000 rounds per minute. Let me know where is your definition of "heavy calibers" and quantities.
It carries over a thousand rounds which is 5x-10x what most planes carry; Plenty to mission kill a lot more more than a few ground targets (granted that depends on what is being targeted, but they are not going up against many T-70s at the moment.)
Maybe we have different defnitions on "not much ammo" ?
The gun is extremely precise, so precise that is useless: if you miss the first shell, all will be misses. They intentionally made it disperse the projectile to cover an area, not 1 square meter.
For current third-world proxy war purposes its not very useful; but in a real war its an expected possibility that missile & countermeasure tech accelerates such that an F-35's current missile armament's range may shrink to dogfight range, at which point you need a cannon.
Of course a ground-attack plane shouldn't be dog-fighting in the first place but you gotta have that multi-role capability
Yes. In the sense that current gen figters are often called upon to strafe ground targets, in the absence of air targets. Even in less asymmetrical warfare, its very common for there to be not very many ground targets for periods of time, and then a whole bunch all at once. This means that while we can have dedicated ground attack planes to take up the baseline loads, it's useful to have fighters able to take up the slack on any variable load spikes, even if they aren't quite as good at it, they can be used for other things when demand isn't quite so high.
Not really. The F-35 might replace the A-10 in the CAS role but it will not be achieving it in the same manner.
Whereas an A-10 may roll in for a gun-run at low altitude the F-35 will be dropping precision SDBs (Small Diameter Bombs) from high altitude instead.
I would be astounded if the F-35's gun gets anywhere within spitting distance of "regular" usage, especially since getting into gun range puts your exceedingly expensive plane into range of MANPADs.
I agreee that it is a requirement of the design but I have serious doubts it will ever be actually used that way.
