Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "Ed Nash's Military Matters" channel.

  1. The fallacy is that people refuse to accept any alternative that isn't the realistic alternative, and they think the realistic alternative is a modern A-10. No other country is building this type of aircraft. If the fast movers are suppressing SAMs then they can drop the bombs and finish the mission by themselves without having to wait for the A-10 to limp along and come do the job. Yes, that is an unnecessary waste of resources. Having a princess of an aircraft that needs everyone else to make sure there's no war going on around it so it can pickle off ordnance safely. The A-10 has no resistance to ground fire in the age of fast shooting 23/30mm AA and other anti-helicopter SHORAD that can shred slow moving aircraft for sport. They're made to protect troops against squirrely targets that hide behind ridgelines. Slow fixed wing are a piece of cake.
    2
  2. Same thing was said about T-62s. They were later taken out in frontline fighting.
    2
  3. The problem is that after the first turn, the F-22 would just go straight and the cannon rounds would have trouble chasing it. Even in DCS chasing fleeing Su-25s with the Harrier to get gun kills is a chore.
    2
  4. But it's meaningless. Nobody was giving modern tanks apart from Poland giving updated T-72s, so Ukraine took what they could get. Russia is not defending itself. They're attacking. Yet they're desperate. That's humiliating.
    2
  5. Not really. You can have air supremacy but ground defenses are still a nightmare. The US achieved air supremacy in Desert Storm but the ground defenses of the Iraqi Republican Guard still forced USAF Gen. Chuck Horner to stop sending it against them.
    2
  6. Losing a pilot and an A-10 you can't get any more of has absolutely no monetary savings.
    2
  7. The USMC can't take off or land them from amphibious assault ships, the Army isn't going to spend a billion dollars acquiring an aircraft that's going to need retirement anyway due to airframe hours and lack of spare parts.
    2
  8. That's a lie.
    2
  9. To be fair the Afghan government jumped in front of every bus for a decade and a half. The US can't baby a country forever.
    2
  10. What they have been using for two decades. F-15s and F-16s.
    2
  11. Why would they spend billions acquiring an aircraft that is one foot in the grave?
    2
  12. There was a former USAF mechanic who was flying a Mirage F1 in Libya as a mercenary. He had the military experience, at least.
    2
  13.  Meat Salad  They're not getting 800 T-90s lol
    2
  14.  @thethirdman225  "true CAS" is the worst straw to grasp at. Air superiority or not, warheads have to drop on foreheads.
    2
  15. Harriers do not use hovering for combat. At most there's VIFF'ing but that's a high risk maneuver. They hover to land vertically. That's it. In combat they fly like fixed wing. There's no advantage in hovering because helicopter pilots can "dogfight" against other rotary wing craft. There's no point in trying to enter the realm where helicopters fight best.
    2
  16. Helicopters can fight from behind terrain.
    2
  17. Those are decade old arguments proposed by Pierre Sprey and Russia Today.
    2
  18.  @nigelsmith7366  It's not strange at all. Same reason the Army doesn't operate cruisers and aircraft carriers. Combined arms will combine the different branches.
    2
  19.  @bennuredjedi  They can do it now. By ending the Air Force and making it the US Army Air Force. But who'd want that? Maintenance and logistics of the A-10? Brother, that aircraft was meant to be retired in the 90s and spent 30 years on life-support. They're old. AV8B? More of those were lost in Desert Storm than A-10s. It's a Cold War aircraft. Stop. AC-130s? They can't even operate during the day because they're so vulnerable. The crew of the Spirit 03 paid the price for saying on station longer than they should have to protect the guys on the ground. You're not doing the military any favors by making ground support so risky.
    2
  20.  @bennuredjedi  Vietnam was Vietnam. It's not Vietnam anymore. The Air National Guard retained the A-7s and with upgraded pods they could do what Vietnam-era A-7s couldn't. Vietnam was a question of technology not keeping up with jet performance. I think it's funny you mention the A-7 when it was one of the criticized fast jets that got the A-X program rolling. In fact, the proposed YA-7F would have afterburners and the ability to fly supersonic, but the program was killed to finance the A-10.
    2
  21. No, because lack of spare parts will prevent it. The company that made it went out of business two decades ago.
    2
  22. Attack helicopters can scan for targets and fire from behind terrain. Fixed wing like the A-10 needs to pop up, roll in and do a predictable straight line maneuver to get within firing parameters, roll away and then dive back down into terrain.
    2
  23.  @EsotericResearcher777  That's just a fallacy. SEAD cannot whack a mole every threat on the ground. Not only are SAM crews aware that they need to turn their radars off to evade detection, modern SHORAD in the form of laser guideded/electro-optical SAMs are harder to detect due to their ability to shoot down low flying aircraft without the need for radar lock, and there's also the fact that MANPADS are essentially impossible to suppress. Any man with a tube on his back can pop from behind a tree or rock and put a firecracker on your tailpipe. SEAD flights cannot do anything about this.
    2
  24. You can't hit the pilot through the armor and you can't reliably ignite the fuel in the tanks, but you can still hit other components. If you hit flight control surfaces, weapon pylons, an engine, targeting pods, etc the pilot will be likely to have to go back home instead of fighting you. Now if the A-10 hasn't seen you and your position isn't defended, you may not want to alert the pilot to the fact that you're there. But only a limited area is protected against 23mm. It was designed mostly against 14.5mm.
    2
  25.  @LupusAries  "The A-10 can stay on Station for hours, in a war like Afghanistan." - A turboprop has a ton of time on station. "due to the more limited payload of the F-16" - A-10s in Afghanistan were also payload limited by the sheer altitude of some airbases. You can see videos of A-10s taking off/in pre-flight at Bagram. It's almost 5,000 ft above sea level and the A-10 is severely lacking in thrust. They're not carrying everything plus the kitchen sink or else the pucker factor during rotation would be off the charts. "Citation needed" - Oh I got the full interview. Posting the link will probably see my comment filtered for spam so google "airforcemag article 0691horner". Title is "A Conversation With Chuck Horner" and dated June 1, 1991. "The Tornado GR. 1 lost 10 Aircraft, mainly due to it's mission profile" - Exactly. The Tornado had a much harder, near-suicidal mission that forced the West to reconsider low-level attacks as a way to evade defenses as a whole and the Tornado was forced to continue the war doing mid-level attacks. The Tornado suffering those losses doing an extremely difficult job was considered a paradigm shift. The A-10 proved itself incapable against a near-pear adversary and got a hero's welcome. That's propaganda for you. "aircraft with a riskier mission profile do get shot down more" - Okay, which proves that the A-10s mission profile is flawed and only works for COIN, where a turboprop aircraft would be better suited. "Except in Syria" - Exactly. >national interest The National Interest is a terrible outlet.
    2
  26. That's a lie. Everyone in the USAF loves doing ground attack and support. Listen to any interview. You live in the information age, pilot podcasts are dime a dozen. Listen to them saying they love it.
    2
  27. Equal capability inherently requires a Vietnam war mindset in the design. Technology has moved on so you're never going to get the same capabilities. Nobody else is building this type of aircraft. They're a dead end. There's no such thing as a new production run, as the manufacturer went out of business. Starting all over again probably means a higher flyaway cost than a F-35 for an aircraft that has one fifth of the capabilities.
    2
  28. The USAF isn't lacking jets that could be used for training. The A-10 is worn out and lacking spare parts. No point. Removing the gun would cause it to become tail heavy.
    1
  29. The new wings were made by Boeing. They're entirely new production.
    1
  30. At a 220 million per aircraft cost? The F-35 costs 80 million.
    1
  31. lmao
    1
  32. The ground is a greater threat to the A-10 than the air. Forget air superiority. The A-10 can't duke it out with ground targets because they shoot back. In 1991 the A-10 had to be pulled away from Iraqi Republican Guard units due to excessive losses. It's not the fighters that are the problem. It's the targets. The targets the A-10 is meant to kill can easily kill the A-10 first.
    1
  33.  @passantNL  Even into the late 90s there were requirements for visual ID due to rules of engagement. IFF only responds if it's a friendly or unknown, and there's a multitude of reasons why a friendly IFF could be reported as unknown. The MANPADS operators do typically have a IFF antenna, but they typically get to see the aircraft before it's inside MANPADS range.
    1
  34.  @dagger6467  "you dont retire an aircraft line you just upgraded" - The retirement will only begin in 2030 according to their schedule. So basically 2035.
    1
  35. ​ @metricstormtrooper  I say give them to the navy first, push them off the carrier deck to make artificial reefs.
    1
  36. Why would the US Army want an ancient aircraft that doesn't have enough spare parts?
    1
  37. Because the Marines can't reliably take over the role? Not all aircraft are suitable for carriers and carrier operations inherently limit the number of aircraft involved, while the USAF can deploy from land bases.
    1
  38.  @ConstantineJoseph  There's no balance. They're losing the good tanks too, so there's absolutely no conservation going on. It doesn't make sense, unless Russia is desperate. Low cost? All the tanks were paid off decades ago. It shouldn't make a difference if it's a T-55, T-62, T-72 or T-80. The fact that they're bringing the T-55s means they're climbing down the totem pole as the vast majority of the storage tanks are garbage. Expendable? The crews are precious. Treating the tank as expendable will resort to progressively less trained tankers. The Russian military was supposed to be able to put conscripts in a modern tank. The fact that they can't already spells out the reality of the situation - Russia was defeated, they're just insisting on prolonging the suffering.
    1
  39.  @tonywilson4713  The A-10 is vulnerable due to essentially being a 1960s design born into a 1970s-present world. There are other close support aircraft that prioritize keeping the aircraft safe over expecting it to get hit. "check what's happened when its been up against planes like F16s in open air combat trials" - I want to kick people in the nuts over this. You're referring to a 2015 article by David Axe that was picked up and quoted ad nauseam by other outlets without doing the basic legwork. Axe wrote an article based on a leaked report he misunderstood. He didn't read it properly. For six years that I've had to explain to other people that just because they read something on the internet doesn't make it true. If you had read the report, you'd have learned it was a software control laws test, not "open air combat trials". I swear people make up more details on this story every time it's told because this is the first time I see someone refer to the test as a "open air combat trial". The F-35 in question was AF-02 and it was loaded with limited software. If you read the report, the pilot asks for software fixes. Please, for the love of everything, READ the sources instead of relying on glorified bloggers acting as journalists. "look for the Pierre Sprey and Chip Berke discussion" - Watched it the day it came out. "What Pierre Sprey goes into is what happens when an F35 is located and then engaged" - Pierre Sprey had retired from the aviation industry decades prior. I'm sorry, but what he thought he knew was woefully outdated. "that has nothing to do with combat" - But it has everything to do with the performance claims being made.
    1
  40. ​ @LolTollhurst  But Saab said they could upgrade Cs to Es, so Cs will have to be cannibalized to keep their promise. Time and time again Saab's marketing dept. wrote checks their engineering couldn't cash.
    1
  41.  @demos113  The alternative is already deployed. F-16s and F-15Es perform more CAS than the A-10.
    1
  42. Supermaneuverability is meaningless. It's post-stall maneuvering. You never stall an aircraft in combat unless the only other option is dying.
    1
  43.  @eze8970  Seems about right. If anything, the same guidance system could be used and a soft launch + propeller drone could be packaged into a tube to fit the same launcher. A bit like the switchblade.
    1
  44.  @texdawg8980  High in the sky is safe when all the opposition has are AKs and maybe a PK. RPG-7 rockets self-detonate at around 900 yards.
    1
  45. Because Ukraine's cheap anti-IFV weapons now work against tanks. This is going to be hell.
    1
  46. The original A-X program recommended turboprops precisely because jet engines were considered sub-optimal for the speed ranges the aircraft was meant to operate at. However as the program went forward turbofans bridged the gap and instead of higher performance, the twin turbofans were used to carry more payload and armor. But initially the A-X proposals were turboprop.
    1
  47. Russia's artillery/long range strike superiority and better ability to conduct maneuver warfare is the greatest threat. They barely do any CAS as their aircraft are hesitant to go on risky missions over Ukraine. They prefer to strike from long range, hitting arms and fuel depots.
    1
  48. Except that general leading the red team was caught cheating by having the simulation run with small ships fitted with missiles too heavy for them.
    1
  49. Sure, a Marine F/A-18 could be recording it.
    1
  50. It's already filled to the brim with upgrades. Doesn't matter, it's still outdated. The B-52 is a much larger airframe which gives more allowance for changes.
    1