Comments by "Gort" (@gort8203) on "Congress Tells USAF to Leave the A-10 Alone – But Should it be Retired?" video.

Morale is not priceless, and is actually very costly when serving it at the expense of actual combat effectiveness leads to more casualties and defeat.
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@Verminator4 You are correct, sir. USAF knows what it is trying to do, and the guy who did a dissertation on CAS should already understand that low and slow manned CAS is the way of the past, not for the future or even the present.
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Funny, the Navy and the Marines have been providing close air support with fast movers all along, and nobody has demanded they acquire an A-10 or equivalent. The fact is that the A-10 is obsolete, and CAS is provided by fast moving jets and high altitude bomb trucks. Trolling along low and slow to eyeball targets is a death sentence over a modern battlefield. But legions of keyboard air warriors truly believe they are so much smarter than the U.S. Air Force.
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Keeping the obsolete A-10 is a sentimental mistake, and those wedded to this airplane need to wake up and smell the coffee of the 21st century. You don't keep an airplane because it performed great service in past wars, you keep it because it will perform great service in the next war, and the A-10 is not suited for the war USAF is trying to equip itself to fight. USAF doesn't need to procure something to replace it because it already has. Guided munitions are the current and future way of CAS.
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@Unstoppable Specimen PGMs are not prohibitively expensive and the USAF way of battle is now built around them. You probably have a GPS in your car and your mobile phone. A kit that turns a Mk-82 into a JDAM is not all that expensive in relation to what it costs to expend dozens of unguided aircraft and munitions to achieve less effect than one weapon that shacks its target. CAS is already primarily provided by guided weapons, even in permissive environments, because it is more efficient with less danger of collateral damage. In the non-permissive environment of a high intensity conflict, strafing or releasing near the target at low altitude will not be survivable.
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@mikenodine6713 Thank you. The official position the U.S. Army communicated to the Pentagon earlier this year is that they don't care what platform USAF employs to deliver CAS. All they care about is that it gets delivered effectively when needed. The Army is not wedded to the A-10 any more than the Air Force is, they just want warheads on foreheads.
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Attack helicopter do not operate like fixed wing aircraft, and Army doctrine has historically used more like rapidly repositionable direct fire support assets than like traditional aircraft. On occasion the Army has tried using them like tactical aircraft and suffered for it. Attack helicopter approach while masked behind cover and only unmask when necessary to acquire and designate a target. They can even fire from cover if the target is already designated. A-10 are exposed well above the tree line, and even higher if the pilot is visually searching for targets.
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@atillanagy-balo6493 I commend you for stating these compelling facts, but I expect they will not make it past the locked door of the A-10 fanboy mind. They can't let go of a past where low and slow was both necessary and survivable. Low and slow is now neither of those things. There is no need to replace the A-10 because it brings nothing necessary to the battlefield.
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