A-10 Warthog vs. AH-64 Apache

Those come home, too (ok, it didn’t lose the whole wing, but that’s a big old hole). They’re designed to be able to limp on with only one engine, one tail fin & elevator and half a wing sheered off, as they were expected to have to fly into walls of Russian flak.

True but it really depends on what kind of defences the ground forces have, the Russians in particular have SAM systems with a large range in both altitude and distance so the attacking aircraft couldn’t just lob missiles safely and with impunity. If they’re forced to get down low and dirty to avoid those the A-10 is less vulnerable, but thats not really a healthy environment for any aircraft.

Obviously, I’d take out the enemy air defenses before I attack. In fact, I’d use the same fighter jets that take out the enemy’s fighters and SAMs to later take out the enemy’s tanks - all they need to do is fly back to base and load up on a different type of missile.

I think that’s the main problem with the Warthog - it’s overspecialized. I’d rather have a weapon that does lots of things pretty well than a weapon that does one thing really well.

You inspired me to look up the ‘Wild Weasel’ entry on wikipedia and interestingly it states that “The Wild Weasel mission is now assigned to the F-16 Fighting Falcon” and “the A-10 Thunderbolt II “Warthog”, primarily tasked with CAS missions, lacks the avionics to perform a true SEAD mission in its original “A” variant, and the newer “C” variant, with conversions beginning in 2005, has yet to meet an enemy force possessing significant air defenses beyond man-portable SAMs.”

So I guess the F-16 would be the plane for the job.

“I’d rather have a weapon that does lots of things pretty well than a weapon that does one thing really well.”

That could make for an interesting Great Debate thread in itself, some people say one problem with the F-35 is that it is trying to cover too many areas and doing none of them well.

That’s a negative, Ghost Rider.

Yup. All other things being equal I’d rather take two specialized weapons who can each do their own thing awesomely and be bad at the other than two average things in most cases.
Don’t you guys know min/maxing is the root of all cheese ? :smiley:

I think it depends on what the weapon is facing. For instance, you want your fighter jets to be better than your enemy’s fighter jets, because that’s what they’ll be fighting and you want them to win. Same thing with tanks - you want them to be better than the enemy’s tanks. But ground attack craft don’t fight other ground attack craft, so they don’t have to be better than what the enemy has - they just have to be good enough.

Hence, a weapon like the F-16 or F-35, which is as good as it possibly can at air-to-air combat and good enough at ground attack, is better than the Warthog, which is as good as it can be at ground attack but crap at air-to-air, because if you’re mission is ground attack, the F-16s can do the job, but if your mission is air-to-air, the A-10s are useless. And an aircraft that is just sitting on a runway is a waste of an aircraft. You got a war on? All of your aircraft should be working, all of the time.

It definitely depends on the defense, and how it interacts with the combat situation.

As was mentioned A-10 (and all other fixed wing combat a/c) losses in the Afghanistan and Iraq (recent one not 1991) wars have been negligible. Combat helicopter losses haven’t generally been very heavy either, but non-negligible. Fixed wing a/c using guided weapons, electro-optical systems and data links to ground forces have generally been able to say out of the lethal envelope of any weapon the enemy has. This is nothing special about the A-10, in fact it’s arguably less capable in that regard than fast jets, properly equipped for the mission with the right doctrine, training, comms equipment for ground forces, etc.

But helicopters in irregular warfare tend not to be able to avoid lethal envelopes of enemy AA weapons including small arms and machine guns. The man-portable AA missile threat was never huge in either of those wars, but a threat mainly to helicopters to the extent it existed. Helicopters must defeat those weapons with IR countermeasures rather than being able to stay away from them and still perform their missions.

But in a higher threat environment with effective medium/heavy SAM’s and enemy fighters, and a conventional warfare defined front line, the helicopter may be less vulnerable than a fixed wing attack plane, especially a slow fixed wing plane. In that environment the helicopter can, terrain allowing, use ‘nap of the earth’ tactics to keep ridges or hills between it and the enemy, popping up briefly to fire, without as much chance the enemy will pop up right near the helicopter as in unconventional warfare. Likewise in a high intensity conflict enemy fighters might have more trouble finding very low flying helicopters while also watching out for the threats to them, than finding fixed wing attack planes.

The classic* A-10 concept of a tank buster in high intensity warfare v an enemy with excellent air defenses was never proved out in combat. And no other Allied country bought into the idea enough to buy the A-10. It wasn’t a US refusal to sell it.

*was going to say ‘original’ but not really. The A-10 was the product of a competition to produce a less vulnerable attack plane for the Southeast Asia close support mission; adding on the big gun and anti-tank missiles was a later evolution as requirements changed before the program came to full fruition.

The A-10 doesn’t have a radar or any sort of way to know what’s going on beyond visual range, whereas the Apache (the Longbow variant) could be equipped with one. In theory the Apache could know that the A-10 is there before vice versa.

To go down what Alessan mentioned, hasn’t the advent of guided anti-tank/anti-vehicle missiles such as Hellfire and Maverick essentially negated the importance of specialized platforms such as Apache and A-10, when any platform that can tote a payload of Hellfires and Mavericks (and has the sensors to target targets) will do? In that sense a Predator could take out a convoy of enemy tanks and AFVs just as well as an A-10 or Apache.

But for close air support, where you might need things like Zuni rockets or Minigun, and your target may be 100 scattered ISIS terrorists rather than a neat tidy convoy of vehicles awaiting your Mavericks, then the Apache and A-10 still matters.

But for the anti-tank role, Predators or F-16s would be just fine.

But ground attack and CAS has its own “great !” parameters - ability to loiter in an area for a long time, ability to hug the terrain, resistance to small arms/RPGs/MANPADS, how much “Fuck You” can be carried by a single plane (which determines how long the CAS mission can last, or how thoroughly a bombing target can be vaporized, or how many secondary targets can be hit), ability to evade or otherwise be unnoticed by the enemy fighters & air defense or pre-emptively destroy them, amount of ground sensors and the presence of a guy onboard who only has those to deal with, ability to ID ground forces in a confusing scrum…

If the F-16 could do what the A-10 or the F-15E do it would, but it can’t, so it doesn’t, no matter what Dos Gringos sing :). Notably it has low cannon ammo ; precious little fuel ; it can’t go very slow without stalling ; and the low internal fuel stores mean that fuel pods must be carried on a majority of missions, which reduces the amount of bombs/missiles/rockets it can take off with.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge F-16 fanboy. But it’s not a dedicated bomb truck and never will be.

A reminder that the ability to blast targets with it’s Avenger minigun is predicated on an opponent whose most sophisticated air defence is a truck with a machine gun mounted on it.

The A-10 had to be withdrawn from low level attack in the **first **Gulf War as they were taking too many losses. It spent most of the war plinking tanks from 10,000 feet just like an F16 with it’s vaunted cannon so much dead-weight.

MANPADS haven’t got any less deadly in the intervening years, quite the opposite. A modern Igla is about as twice as dangerous in all aspects, including warhead size, as an SA7.

Wasn’t the A-10 designed to be able to withstand 23mm hits from Shilkas? What were the Iraqis using that presented such a threat?

I would have thought the gun would still be useful even at 3km altitude. How low does it need to go?

Really hard to absorb missile hits though, especially as missiles get smarter and even small man portable ones’ guidance algorithms aim for the middle of the plane, don’t necessarily hit the tailpipe which many a/c (not only A-10’s) survived in the past.

The A-10 is a kind of cultural symbol about the close air support mission. As an actual weapon it’s either no better than properly equipped fast jets in the real close air support mission in permissive environments, and its survivability highly doubtful in non-permissive environments.

MANPADS. A 23 mm shell from a shilka weighs under 200g. An A10 is designed to be ‘Resistant’ to such shells, important N.b. here, Resistant, *not *invulnerable. The warhead, not the missile, just the amount of HE in a SA7 is six times as large. A modern MANPAD like the IGLA has twice as much again and will blow an A10 out of the sky. An A10 is heavily armoured for a plane, but that’s still not very well armoured.

The A10 (and AH64 really) was designed to be launched at an advancing Soviet armored column and hit it hard enough to stop it in its tracks, when the breakthrough must be stopped and you had no tanks of your own left/close enough to do it properly and you might as well send those pilots out to do something before those tanks are parked on your runway. It might have been successful at this but there was no expectation that most or even any of them would actually return home alive for the next breakthrough. All the fancy air defenses Iran or whoever has today, the Red Army had in the 1980s too.

“How can we resist the onslaught of the Red Army for a little bit longer before being surrounded and wiped out and have to start using nukes” is a different problem than “How can we keep up a low intensity war against enemies with only machine guns and trucks without spending that much money or taking any casualties at all”.

Re: replacement with the F-35

Do I understand correctly that the F-35 could do a sufficient job of defending against MANPADS and more sophisticated tube anti-air? If so, in what ways?
Aside from the warhead, how is the modern IGLA better than it was in the past?

Fast jets are not susceptible to MANPADs. They fly too high and fast for the most part, if troops on the ground can even see them at all. You need something guided by radar to have any hope of hitting them, that’s where the stealth comes in.

A fast jet using EO/IR sensors, data links to forces on the ground and guided munitions just won’t come down close enough/long enough to the ground on a close support mission to be much of a target for a SAM limited in size to being man portable. That’s not specific to the F-35, true of current fast jets assuming the same equipment. Even A-10’s now refitted with that type of equipment would not fly into ‘MANPADS’ envelopes. But they are less capable of avoiding them, with dubious offsetting advantages.

That’s assuming a ‘semi-permissive’ environment, enemy has modern MANPADS but little else in the way of air defense besides small arms and MG’s. A pretty realistic case.

But if the enemy has medium and heavy SAM’s, fighters, high capability self propelled AA guns (Shilka is a 50 yr old system) etc, then a plane like the A-10 just isn’t going to work. Again, it was planned to use this plane in the situation of the 1980’s v Warsaw Pact forces, but never proven to really be viable in actual combat, and again no Allied country ever bought into this concept (nor was even the Soviet Su-25 really the same).

Again, the A-10 has become a kind of talisman for (supposed) USAF bias against the CAS mission, perhaps a reasonable debate. But the plane itself is only marginal more useful in permissive environments than fast jets, no more useful where enemy has good MANPADS, and would be useless against a true peer opponent.

On the nature of Man portable SAM’s, without bogging down on any particular model now but using the original Strela of 45 yrs ago (large scale combat debut in Vietnam) as baseline, they have more kinetic capability (harder to keep out of their way), have more effective warheads but mainly more sophisticated guidance systems resistant to simple, or in some case any*, IR countermeasures. They also have ability to hit a plane in the middle, not on the relatively tough tail pipes. At least one A-10 survived a direct tailpipe hit by a missile, plenty of Israeli and other a/c survived single Strela hits also, on their tail pipes, not right in the middle of the plane.

*there is no known ‘soft kill’ countermeasure to weapons like the Swedish RBS-70 and descendants, laser beam riders, nothing you can do to fool the missile anyway, it’s looking backward at the laser guidance beam not at the plane. You might develop a system to confuse or attack the guidance unit back on the ground. Better just to stay out of its reach. Or eventually perhaps hard kill missile protection systems for a/c, directed energy weapons or miniature anti-missile missiles, will be introduced.

As the Indian Air Force found out in 1999 when they tested that theory, fast jets (a MiG-27 and a MiG-21) are absolutely vulnerable tomodern MANPADS

Correy El I thought the problem with RedEye and SA-7 type first generation MANPADS was that even a hit did not often cause a shootdown due to the rather small warhead?