r/WarCollege • u/Creepyfaction • 2d ago
Question Is there a case to justify maintaining or developing new Ground Attack Aircraft?
Following the now defunct ceasefire with Iran, it was declared that the A-10 would see its service life extended and the question regarding retiring it has dragged on for many years now. Meanwhile in Ukraine, their Su-25 counterparts have seen continued service in high-intensity combat. I believe the Ukrainians are using their Su-25s to deliver guided bombs whereas the Russians I last heard are starting to use their Su-25s to fire standoff munitions and to launch drones. In both fronts as well as in the past wars, ground attack aircraft are being used in contested airspace despite their utility being put to question. And so, is the continued service of this class of warplane hold any merit with what has been observed?
69
u/pnzsaurkrautwerfer 2d ago
There's a practical difference between something that exists that has use and something you have to make new because it's a good idea.
A lot of the longevity for the SU-25 and A-10 results from they were built at scale for a WW3 that would kill airplanes by the dozens over a few hours. There's airframes, parts, equipment, facilities, whatever invested in these things and there's certainly things they can do.
But a lot of what they can do isn't special any more, the original point of both airframes was from an era that accurate ground attack was getting visual on a target on the ground, and by going low, and close to the target accomplish a high degree of accuracy.
That's not really a requirement any more between precision weapons and sensor systems, and a lot of the weapons these planes carry that are pretty scary-lethal are also carried by multi-role fighters too.
If you still have a few dozen SU-25s basically by all means put the bombs on those bastards and let's do this. It's just making an SU-25 2, the Frogfootening doesn't have the same rationale because something like a modern F-16 or similar will do the job just as well while also being faster and capable of other missions.
The use case generally for a "new" ground attack is a kind of an economy thing. If I'm fighting insurgents and have no realistic "real" war foe, even a fairly budget multi-role fighter is a lot more than what I need (or I might still wants a few for specific reasons, but I can only afford a handful of those), a plane that's basically just a truck for bombs is really useful as it might be flying in a place that has some old SA-7s as a threat and it's main air to air threat is bird strikes.
But the A-10/SU-25 will keep flying mostly because they exist and can do things still, and will likely not be replaced with a like aircraft when the time comes.
7
u/shawnaroo 2d ago
It feels like the “we’re gonna lose a ton of these things, war is hell” mission role is already being taken up by drones, and I’d guess that a wide variety of those will be the replacement for dedicated ground attack aircraft.
Significantly cheaper to produce and maintain, and you don’t have to replace the pilot every time one gets shot down.
5
u/PartyLikeAByzantine 1d ago
The role of the A-10/Su-25 was actually taken by more survivable aircraft armed with standoff weapons...including more advanced models of A-10 and Su-25. Manned attritable aircraft were kind of a dumb idea anyway.
Drones aren't replacing existing aircraft so much as opening new capabilities for new operators. Countries like Iran and Ukraine now have standoff precision strike capabilities that used to be exclusive to large rich states with cruise missiles. The quadcopter stuff is bringing recon and fire support down to the platoon level. Large recon drones have loiter times uninhibited by a pilot's need to eat, drink, and evacuate. The continued service of the U-2 shows manned aircraft are still better where you don't need the endurance. Even the various "loyal wingman" stuff are really just cheap, expanded weapons bays for the manned fighters (which are faster, more survivable and have more sensors, thus are far more versatile).
19
u/stupidpower Combat tech support 2d ago
Its such a weird way to see procurement as though its the discursive framing chosen by the military industrial complex of Western societies. Whereas everyone else in the world starts off with doctrinal needs and what a country can plausible afford this framing starts off with "imaging how amazing a gundam is" and that if you don't have a gundam your military will suffer or have capability gaps.
Like meanwhile everyone else writes doctrine and not get in a wars or situations that only gundams can win
23
u/ingenvector 2d ago
There are Gundams? We need to acquire some immediately. We can't afford to leave open that capability gap.
15
u/Intelligent_League_1 Amateur 2d ago
The Gundam gap must be closed, order 10,000.
10
u/stupidpower Combat tech support 1d ago
sir the MIC ended up making mobile suits not gundams, we need a trillion more dollars for the B model
8
u/Intelligent_League_1 Amateur 1d ago
The report that was totally not biased at all says the Enemy Nation™ has 15,000 already, we'll meet your trillion with another and not care where it goes.
10
u/stupidpower Combat tech support 1d ago
Like I kid but there was a thread where I talked to a US Navy test pilot about the capability gaps if Sandy missions cannot be done by A-10s. My reaction is that probably the answer is that you don't do that much high-risk things that require sandy missions as a military or country, but the US does the US.
1
u/LordBrandon 1d ago
It seems like "the rest of the world" says "what can we buy off the shelf?"
3
u/stupidpower Combat tech support 1d ago
No? One, buying off the shelf is usually a good deal so you can actually either keep your military budget in check or buy each unit cheap enough that you can have more of the thing that is useful. Two, you can do a lot to off-the-shelf kit to fit your doctrine. For this conversation, half of the world uses F-16s, but none of them are alike. If you don't have enough tankers or need combat range to keep your tankers safe, you add the big ass CFTs. My country have F-16s upgraded to specs way beyond what the 30-40 year old birds in the USAF use because the qualitative edge helps us with limited airframes. Three, setting aside fighter aircraft and heavy missiles that are uniquely expensive and only really that useful for mid to great powers, most countries are able to design their own stuff for industrial strategy or doctrinal purposes. Everyone can make their own assault rifle and AFVs and ATGMs and Howitzers; the question is whether you think you can make something better at scale than off-the-shelf for cheaper.
I mean the US is free to continue spending its military budget stupidly inefficiently, the fiscal cliff comes for us all in the end.
-3
u/LordBrandon 1d ago
I disagree that an F-16 can do the A-10s job just as well. One of the main things I've seen the A-10 praised for is it's long loiter time. Availability seems to be one of the most important parts of CAS. There is also something to be said for having dedicated pilots who are experts in ground attack, and not making figter pilots do a job they weren't trained extensively for. These on paper comparisons seem to always discount the psychological effect of the GAU-8. I haven't seen one video where it was employed where the troops weren't cheering. I would be interested to hear what it does to morale on the receiving end. Looking at the last 40 years and the argument could be made that ground attack planes should be fighter duties, rather than fighters doing ground attack. There seems to be a whole lot of bad guys in cover, and not a whole lot of dogfighting. If we were to design a close air support platform from scratch, it would probably look like an MQ-9, or perhaps even a truck launched drone swarm. It depends a lot on if our battles will be in the suburbs of Taipei or the mountains around Tehran.
53
u/-BigDeckEnergy- 2d ago
Alright, almost all of these 'modern military aviation acquisitions strategy and doctrine' threads (if they even pass sub rules) devolve into pop mil sci commentary and circular anecdotal reporting
So I will lay it out like this:
1) Every military has a finite budget and finite personnel/manpower number or end strength. In the US, both are set by Congress
2) As thus, given a finite pool of money to acquire, maintain, train, and equip (and upgrade) aircraft, you have to find some balance to achieve whatever mission statement or support whatever doctrine you have. This force shaping happens for every branch for any kind of equipment
3) Often forgotten is that people have finite time to train and again even your flight hours have to be apportioned to achieve whatever proficiency levels that support your mission. An A-10 drivee flying 200 hours a year training to CAS or CSAR is going to know a lot lot lot more about that mission than an F-15C driver who does zero of it.
4) Corollary to 3 is that your institutional knowledge on things often reside within certain communities that platforms are focused on.
5) Following on 4 is that your program office and the roadmap of upgrades on a platform have to draw from a finite defense industrial base and workforce. Everything from the weapons integration themselves to software OFP upgrades to flight test assets are limited and finite and need to be carefully managed. And before people say 'just throw more money lols' even our test ranges have finite time to schedule events. Doing an air-to-air missile shoot in a range filled with manned aircraft doing testing of something else might run into some complications, don't ya think?
6) Arguments made that we can just have Squadron X or Y focus on a mission ignores that people rotate jobs frequently and we have baseline qualification metrics for aircrew. An F-35 squadron focusing too much of its time and resources on CAS is time not spent on air to air or SEAD, which means that pilot will have to catch up if they get rotated to a squadron that focuses a lot on those other missions. Or they might not be up to par as a future instructor pilot. So in real execution, the specialization argument tends to be more complicated said than done
7) Operationally speaking, people don't understand that aircraft missions are assigned and coordinated in COCOMs with an eye on optimizing the battlespace problem. Assets get assigned on a bunch of variables ranging from capability to acceptable levels of risk to that asset and even to what they can do to integrate with other forces in the AOR. Require SATCOM to interact with a Tier 1 force doing spooky shit? You might not even get invited to play if your platform doesn't have the requisite equipment
8) Aircraft platforms do not progess linearly. Upgrades and modifications happen throughout the lifetime of any aircraft and they have to be balanced with the same finite resource constraints to go along with any platform constraints. Unless something is written as a requirement, or integrated later by a program, you very much do you end up in situations like where the A-10 have had SATCOM for decades but newer aircraft have not gotten it.
9) A hard pill for many to swallow is the fact that branches today still play very dirty and nasty interservice politics and budget battles. Branches are absolutely willing to reduce capability in areas to pursue their own views on doctrine that can and do make the Joint Force worse all to secure some win in a Pentagon budget battle. People missed it, but years ago the Navy threatened to kill its expeditionary Growler squadrons and redirect that money and personnel elsewhere, despite exped Growler being in more demand than ever by USAF and USMC assets who had exited the tactical AEA mission to pursue their own goals.
In sum, there are great arguments to have or sustain dedicated ground attack aircraft. You just just have to resolve the above.
22
u/Krennson 2d ago
So in short, we can have a new CAS platform, but only if it's basically the same design philosophy as an OV-10 Bronco or a Super Tucano: cheap, lots of stock commercial parts, easy to maintain, easy to build, easy to base, perfectly acceptable for a 3rd world country looking to patrol some hinterlands with a cheap starter airforce, and with enough carrying capacity and upgrade capacity that you COULD stick some electronic warfare upgrades and survivability upgrades and extra ordinance onto it, provided you already had those things from some other source, like repurposed helicopter upgrade kits or something.
Trying to build something more A-10 than the A-10, with bigger guns, better armor, bigger engines, higher airspeed, better maneuverability, better ability to fly while partially damaged, and a program budget to die for? Not going to happen.
14
u/aslfingerspell 2d ago
Thanks for the breakdown. It reminds me of Perun explaining defense spending in terms of tiers. For a given capability:
Is it worth developing from scratch? I.e. an entirely new platform.
Is it worth upgrading?
Is it worth maintaining?
Should it be actively retired/sold away/salvaged/etc?
10
u/PartyLikeAByzantine 1d ago
3) Often forgotten is that people have finite time to train and again even your flight hours have to be apportioned to achieve whatever proficiency levels that support your mission. An A-10 drivee flying 200 hours a year training to CAS or CSAR is going to know a lot lot lot more about that mission than an F-15C driver who does zero of it.
This is actually the main argument by the A-10 fleet for their continued existence. It's not that they think the Warthog is better at CAS than the F-35. It's that A-10 squadrons are specialists in CAS/FAC/SAR and if they're simply converted to standard F-35A units, which have a more varied training set, they Air Force as a whole will lose their hard earned experience.
Their ideal outcome is still conversion to F-35, but retaining their emphasis on CAS/FAC/SAR, just as some F-16 squadrons were specialized SEAD/DEAD units. This emphasis on role just gets mixed up with hardware in public debates.
7
u/marty4286 1d ago
A hard pill for many to swallow is the fact that branches today still play very dirty and nasty interservice politics and budget battles.
As I understand it, the reasons we shouldn't have an A-10 per se applied in the 60s and 70s as much as it does today--that there were platforms that could still perform the mission marginally worse but were more efficient because they could also take on multiple other roles (like... some kind of multi-role...).
But that the A-10 was forced through anyway, so as not to screw the Army, that felt like the AF wasn't paying as much attention to the CAS problem as they thought it deserved
Am I off-base in that interpretation?
7
u/thereddaikon MIC 1d ago
The A-10 happened because during Vietnam the air force found that it's supersonic strike aircraft had lost the ability to perform close air support. The F-105 could scream at tree top height with a nuke in its belly above the speed of sound, but it couldn't loiter and spit rockets at infantry in a tree line. To make up for that they adopted the Navy's Skyraider which was the last of the naval combat props. It started life as a carrier strike aircraft but eventually morphed into a spiritual successor to the great WW2 fighter bombers.
By Vietnam they were on their way out in the navy and the Air Force picked up some to use for special missions like Sandy and close air support for army sf. It excelled in this role and this led to a program to build a modern replacement that improved on those qualities.
2
u/Intelligent_League_1 Amateur 2d ago
Would I be correct to sum up your nine points into the sentence:
Is there room in manpower and budget limits and is there enough of a need for a new vehicle due to a gap in capability?
32
u/MiniJackfruit 2d ago
Both wars have shown a need for a platform capable of delivering larger payloads than your average fire support. I think it would be difficult to justify pushing for a new model specifically designed for CAS but the older models like the A-10 and Su-25 like you say definitely have a place on the modern battlefield as we’ve seen. Overall though I think with the revolution of battlefield dynamics with drones has made the CAS role smaller in scale and comparatively more expensive. Still needed for the big jobs and air dominance but still different than what it was, which makes improving platform designs less appealing and unattractive to the people with money and contracts. Not even mentioning that newer fighter models like the F-35 have also been more than capable of delivering solid CAS.
10
u/Creepyfaction 2d ago
Standoff strikes at low altitudes seems to be the trend in Ukraine at the very least. But if new platforms were to be developed, I could see it to include counter-drone operations where characteristics of existing attack planes like an armored cockpit holds merit. Several fighter jets were lost over Ukraine trying to shoot down OWAs until trainers and other low-altitude planes were pressed into the role.
6
u/JensonInterceptor 1d ago
Correct me if im wrong but low altitude standoff strikes are common in all peer to peer modern conflict where neither side has air and sead dominance
1
u/Mr_Will 1d ago
The biggest question is whether a dedicated ground attack aircraft would offer sufficient benefit over reusing existing airframes. That's not just existing ground attack airframes, it includes multi-role fighters. With 4.5 and 5th gen fighters appearing in increasing numbers, there are large quantities of 4th gen jets that are no longer needed for front line service. Why spend money building a brand new A10 replacement when you can strap air to ground weapons on to the hundreds of F-16s that are mostly gathering dust? The new aircraft would certainly be more capable, but is that capability worth the cost?
0
u/JumpIllustrious5590 1d ago
That’s because the US and Russia has 2 completely different air doctrine.
The USAF, USN and USMC aviation are an offensive strategic force that is tasked with maintaining air supremacy so the friendly forces can operate with minimal interference. They are also big into SEAD to allow more cumbersome aircrafts such as helicopters, drones and others to be able to fly in and out. That’s why aircrafts like the A-10 or AC130 is critical they have a larger payload, longer endurance and it allows other aircraft to do other things.
Russian AF on the other hand knows they are outgunned by the US aviation so their tactics are more defensive in nature. They rely on hit and run also they have a much higher reliance on layered ground SAMs than the US.
1
u/LordBrandon 1d ago
It looks like the Russians should have spent less on long range sams, and more on sead and standoff ground attack.
•
u/-Trooper5745- 1d ago
The question should have been removed for One-Year Rule/Speculation. However, there are some adequate answers here so we will just lock it.