« on: February 08, 2017, 12:19:33 am »
The Explosive Rise in A-10 Warthog Strikes, VisualizedU.S. troops in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on Hogs
by ROBERT BECKHUSENThe A-10 Warthog, a muscular and armored ground attack plane, is an odd vehicle because it was originally designed to attack Soviet tanks in Europe in the event of a third world war.
Thankfully, that conflict never occurred. Instead, the Warthog flew in the Persian Gulf War, the Balkans and has spent years taking on lightly-armed insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq — where it performs excellently at the job.
Particularly in Afghanistan, given the length of the war and the A-10’s predominant role, it might not be a stretch to say the Warthog is bound to it in the way the Il-2 Sturmovik and Ju-87 Stuka were to World War II.
The RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank closely tied to the U.S. Air Force, recently compiled statistics on A-10s in Afghanistan, with the goal of studying how they performed and how the Air Force could replace them in the future.
It should come as no surprise that as the war continued, the A-10 took on a larger share of missions — comprising “one-half of all the CAS [close air support] missions … despite representing a small fraction of the total aircraft in theater,” according to RAND.
Warthogs also began striking targets across a wider span of the country as the Taliban’s reach expanded.
A-10 air strikes increased sharply as U.S. Marines and soldiers surged into Afghanistan in 2010. But RAND’s data is incomplete, as it doesn’t include statistics on drone strikes and from Army attack helicopters.
The lack of data on Army helicopter strikes — such as from the AH-64 Apache — is central to a Feb. 5, 2017 Military Times report on missing records in America’s overseas wars.
The Air Force continued to rely on A-10s primarily because of the aircraft’s ability to fly low and slow, giving the pilot enough time to line up and strafe with the plane’s 30-millimeter rotary cannon. This weapon is especially useful for hitting moving targets.
RAND noted that regarding other aircraft such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon and B-1 Lancer, a fast-moving jet bomber, “weapon use and enemy killed tended … to be somewhat lower than those for the A-10.”<..snip..>
https://warisboring.com/the-explosive-rise-in-a-10-warthog-strikes-visualized-376ba336b8c#.ke3sqyyv4
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