Defense News reports
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC), for the second consecutive year, is proposing blocking the retirement of A-10 attack planes.
[...]The long-expected move was revealed Monday afternoon with the release of Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry's version of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which the full panel will mark up on [April 29].
The Air Force argues the decades-old A-10s are too expensive to keep flying. Lawmakers reject those arguments, saying the A-10s--which bring jobs to their states and districts--save US lives on the battlefield and must be kept operational.
"Rigorous oversight, endorsements from soldiers and Marines about the protection only the A-10 can provide, and repeated deployments in support of [Operation Inherent Resolve] have persuaded Chairman Thornberry and many members from both parties that the budget-driven decision to retire the A-10 is misguided," according to a HASC fact sheet accompanying the legislation.
On the downside IMO:
Responding to the Navy's and Marine Corps' shared list of "unfunded priorities" submitted this year to lawmakers, the House committee is proposing language that would clear the services to purchase more fighter aircraft than requested.
The Arizona Daily Star notes
Arizona [Congresswoman] Martha McSally [a former A-10 pilot and squadron commander] said she plans to offer amendments prohibiting both the A-10's retirement and the EC-130H [the Compass Call electronic jamming and surveillance plane] cuts.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday April 30 2015, @01:06PM
Stealth is a float, not a boolean. You don't have to be completely invisible, you just need to be hard enough to see that you take far fewer losses. We lost only a single F-117, in how many missions?
The main use case for STOVL is small aircraft carriers with no launch cat or wires. Stuff like the America-class carriers or the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers. Both of which have their own share of problems, proving that at least we aren't the only ones with bad procurement procedures.
Thrust vectoring seems like something that will never matter in combat. Sure, it lets you do some crazy aerobatics - but that hasn't mattered in air combat for quite some time. It's a necessary part of the STOVL feature, at least in the F-35, so at least there's no real harm in having it.
Supercruise is unarguably good though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @08:24PM
I have this article bookmarked as
Conventional Wisdom vs The Actual Record On The Effectiveness & Costs Of The A-10 Warthog - Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey[1] [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [arizonadailyindependent.com]
[1] Sprey, a top-tier aircraft designer, was the interviewee who was central to the previous page here re: the F-35.
To repeat: Stealth aircraft are hangar queens--no advantage and extremely low availability; detectable with very old, cheap, longer-wavelength radar technology.
-- gewg_