Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "" video.

@DebatingWombat "stand off weapons in general are not precise enough for CAS" - Absolute bull. The gun is not precise at all, it just has limited danger radius compared to explosives. "a long-standing disgust of USAAF with the A-10 and its CAS role in general" - This is an absolute lie made up by reformists and other crackpots in the "alternative" news crowd. "The USAAF brass never liked the A-10 concept" - Lie. In fact the GAO criticized the USAF for buying too many A-10s without justifying the need for such a large fleet. "on what we might call “VCAS” (very close air support)" - Doesn't exist. Ordnance is either being dropped close to friendlies or it isn't. There's no such thing as very close without committing fratricide. "and has always preferred a strategy of “as quickly and as far away as possible”" - Another lie made up by the same crackpots I mentioned early. "action that VCAS requires, but not at the moment, and the F-35 certainly can’t" - Stop trying to make VCAS happen, you made that up. Substantiate your claim that the F-35 cannot provide CAS. "it is both debatable whether air superiority will really be that important" - Without air superiority you're done. "whether fighters are actually the best tool for that job (as opposed to various AA systems)" - Please refer to Desert Storm. Without fighter cover overhead, aircraft absolutely murder air defenses. AA systems without fighters protecting them are fish in a barrel. "Optimising [...] around a platform that is focused on air superiority is a bit silly if most of your missions are actually going to involve “ground pounding”." - The F-16 was optimized for air to air, became an absolute workhorse. History already proved you wrong.
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@DebatingWombat It's not about disagreement. It's about lying for profit and clout. There's a group of people who wrote articles and books full of falsehoods. Here's the true story. USAF starts to do a study on the Army's views on USAF CAS, and they approach the enlisted men. Troops are satisfied with USAF CAS, but they wonder why they're not called more often. USAF investigates. Turns out that the Army has a faction of air mobility supremacists who want to distance themselves from USAF and encourage their own officers to not call in USAF CAS as often because rotary wing will take over. USAF creates A-X program to placate the concerns of air mobility supremacists, which results in the A-10. Air Force buys so many A-10s the government actually gets up in their face about the money they're wasting on A-10s. Additionally, the USAF obviously comes from the USAAF. So their doctrine in the early years was Army doctrine. And doctrine stated that the hardware acquisition should focus on the hardest, most demanding tasks and then use that hardware for less demanding tasks. Which lead to the myth that the Air Force doesn't want to do ground strikes because they purchase supersonic aircraft. This is nonsense. The assumption at the time was that the best aircraft for the job would be able to do well in less demanding tasks, but this was not working well. The whole issue was caused by doctrine that had come from the time the air force was part of the US Army. Now that you know that you've been fooled by crackpots and revisionists, you can move forward. The results are pretty indicative. A larger country with larger defensive network and no allies in Blue side is still going to get wrecked if they have no air power. Defenses NEED air superiority above them to work. Otherwise SEAD simply eliminates layers with impunity. No, it doesn't illustrate your point. It completely proves you wrong. Your point is that the F-16 could never be a good strike aircraft. It's pretty great. History already solved this debate.
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@hg2560 If you actually read the list of "large" upgrades they're a joke. They're simply being re-wired for new weapons and receiving more up to date systems.
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@BeKindToBirds You've switched from precision to accuracy. Precision is the ability to land all shots in the same hole. Accuracy is landing shots where you want them. The gun is as accurate as the pilot - after all, it is aimed by manually flying the aircraft. Precision? The rounds have a lot of dispersion. Precision guided munitions have a circular error probable of 2-1 meters. They usually fall exactly where you're pointing the laser at. That's precision. If you drop multiple munitions while having the laser pointed at the same place, they all fall near the laser one after another. The GAU-8? It has a 12 meter spread from 4k feet away with 80 percent falling in that spread. 20 percent of rounds will actually miss that circle. "it's accuracy is absolutely insane for what it is and what it does" - Yeah, and it's not more precise than PRECISION guided munitions... Which was what you claimed. "You can call the pilot and tell him exactly where to put it and he will be able to do it." - He'll fire 100 rounds, and one or two will hit that spot. That's not precision.
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@BeKindToBirds The contract is from 2018 or 2019. They asked to retire 42 A-10s in 2021. I'm not sure you understand. If the Air Force could legally just not buy wings, they'd have waited until the A-10s were not suitable for flying and tell Congress to approve the retirement. They HAVE to keep them airworthy, otherwise it would be a roundabout way to retire the A-10s without approval. The fact that they got a second wing contract but then STILL REQUESTED for airframes to be retired a couple of years later speaks volumes.
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@BeKindToBirds "for a cannon of its type, is remarkably precise*" - You said it was more precise than precision guided weapons. Not other cannons. "Hitting "that corner of the building" with a 30mm cannon firing HEI." - You'll shower the street, the two intersecting faces of the building, the roof, etc trying to hit the corner of the building. There's literally footage of buildings being hit by cannon fire, the area around the building gets splashed too. "It is absolutely terrifying" - Yes, it's terrifying because of how high the blue on blue rates are. "If you have any example of a 3000+ rounds per minute 300mm cannon" - 300mm isn't a cannon, it's a howitzer. Goddamn.
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@BeKindToBirds You can't argue with good faith. In terms of blue on blue rates, the A-10 shows that it's overhyped as a way to safely perform CAS because it technically is the least safe fixed wing aircraft for the job. You've strawmanned by claiming I said the A-10 isn't trusted. I pointed out that you claimed the GAU-8 is a precision weapon when it has too much dispersion and it is a manually aimed weapon like an unguided rocket, a mistake you've refused to acknowledge. My point about the single barrel cannon was just a comment in passage to your praise of the GAU-8. You've strawmanned by getting hung on that very small detail. The point isn't single or rotary cannons. it's that you called an unguided weapon with dispersion a "precision" weapon when it isn't. You refuse to acknowledge your mistakes, so now you're yapping about the single barrel comment. Which is not important at all. "congress is the one who keeps trying to shut down the program while the military fights to keep it" - False. Congress controls the retirement authorization. It is the USAF that requests the A-10 retirement every time, and Congress saves it. It's amazing how wrong you are. "understand it a lot better" - But you don't. You claim unguided rotary cannons are precision weapons when they aren't. A person who goes through cancer treatment doesn't become a doctor. It's a significant emotional event, but doesn't bring expertise. You're like a cancer patient shouting at people for explaining that there is a difference between a MRI and a CT scan, because he thinks it's all the same. You think Congress is against the A-10 even though there's verifiable evidence that they're the ones rejecting the retirement proposals, even after the Army has given up and decided to trust the USAF on their decision.
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@hg2560 The USAF requested the retirement of 42 airframes for FY2022.
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@BeKindToBirds "You don't care about factual reality, all you care about is moving the goalposts to be correct" - YOU moved the goalposts. "The cannon is incredibly precise" - Rotary cannons are inherently less precise than single barrel. "35 IN TWENTY YEARS because it has been used so incredibly much" - It provided 20% of CAS since 2001, 11% since 2014. "compare it's rate of accuracy and precision to other fire support like artillery and tanks" - How is that relevant? Meanwhile, the A-10 is the biggest fixed wing user or APKWS. A precision guided weapon. Also used by the Apache. Of course that a laser guided APKWS has more precision than the gun, or artillery. "Literally find me any CAS aircraft in the world with a record of 10 friendly fire kills in 140,000+ close air support missions in places like afghanistan and iraq" - Funny. Because CAS would have been much harder to perform in WW2. Afghanistan and Iraq are a walk in the park, they have better technology. "45 mistakes out of 140,000 missions" - That's more mistakes, while other aircraft are doing more missions.
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@BeKindToBirds "while changing your argument to "it's less precise than a single barrel"" - I didn't change the argument. You're sitting here praising the rotary cannon to high heaven. I simply stated that a single fixed barrel cannon is actually more precise. "incredibly accurate" - Again, accuracy alone does not matter for the purpose you're referring to. Accuracy is hitting what you intend to hit. Precision is each hit being group together with previous ones. A highly accurate platform can still be throwing rounds off target. Because accuracy is the group being centered on where you intend to hit. "get in and get dirty" - Which is an outdated form of doing CAS. Every day you people should pray to the Lord above thanking him that the insurgents never figured out that they should have tried to score a massive psychological win over the US by downing A-10s. "Why don't you run for congress" - But Congress is filled with senile, geriatric fools who don't know anything about what they talk about. Which is exactly why they love the A-10.
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@BeKindToBirds Exactly. No argument. Thanks for admitting it.
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@BeKindToBirds And by making your argument you mean getting things blatantly wrong? I bet you didn't look for a single article reporting on how Congress saved theA-10 for the billionth time.
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