Ksimmelink,
"To bring "my comments" back to the A-7 vs. the A-10 and using in CAS role I recently read a report from the first Gulf War where the strikes on the Republican Guard were proving much more difficult than imagined because they were dug in."
An A-10 designed for CAS in SEA does not have an IFFC/PE capability because it doesn't have an autopilot as ARI, let alone an FLCS sufficient to do HUD steering of the death dot in a manner that compensates for CM ballistic variables sufficient to use the full range of the GAU-8 which is around 12-15K feet worth of slant.
Of course, excepting the N/AW, it also doesn't have a HUDWAC so bombing from altitude is a return to the TLAR school. Which is why A-10s would find some Home Depot like target and drop their Mk.82 or Mk.20 _purely_ to 'Agitate the Argies' before descending to LOW to go hunting.
Which is a great way to get dead in any war because the trashfire costs about a quarter of a percent as much to buy, in density as the 'real killers' in the radar and heat S2A categories.
In Europe, this didn't matter too much because the A-10 could not survive in the medium altitude role and there was plenty of rolling hills and treelines to put 'here be dragons' AAH behind as designated Zoos killers and early warning.
Those which had lasers as part of the LAAT and TADS augments as well as some stuff we were putting on the OH-58C could also zot for TISL snap to Maverick which was otherwise worthless.
I mention all this because Ft. Riley in summer is nothing like Germany in Winter and Irwin and Benning were worse.
When the sign at the gate has three modes: "Snow, Sleet, Rain, Ice" and the fog is o thick that you can't taxi to the active without a Follow Me or a chain of airmen waving lights, is NOT the time to go galavanting around with 1:50,000 maps on your kneepad, trying to dodge high tension lines and work radios.
And the Soviets were all about the Winter War.
Finally, if you want to kill the threat where it hits you, that's fine. I myself prefer plenty of rawwwkets and SADARM artillery shells to due the CAS mission because I generally have a really good idea where they are at and even if they break out, I can keep up with a jeep or a scout chopper, shaping them up until an armor team can put paid to them. Germans as famous as Mellenthin and Balck agreed with me: you stretch them out and then you cut them into bits before rolling them up from behind.
Where things get dicey is when the numbers start to add up and the old Saw: "Force them to defend everywhere and they defend nowhere well" comes into it's own. Holding that at X thus lets them run around you at Y and ODS in an unprepared desert with six months prep gives you the notional idea of how long we would have lasted with Hitler's Highway Net and 40+ years of prep all lining up on the Soviets 10:1 overall and 30:1 local supremacy scale.
Which is why you _really_ don't want to fight the good fight. Because the threat knows it's own routes and they will have, _in addition_ to dedicated ADV covering the breakthru point, at least one SA-7/14/16 gunner standing in the roofhatch of each and every BTR or BMP, covering a clock sector. They will have Desantnoye playing helicopter hopscotch from every high and at geographic feature that coud /possibly/ be used as an IP or TACP point (we discovered at Bicycle Lake and again at Irwin during JAWS/JAAT, that if you put the ambush AAA or Shoulderlaunch into the IP lane, your kill rate goes up by 50% just because the pilots are focussed on the target bobup and gun bunt) and if it's important (read successful) enough, they will have battlefield air superiority sweeps going through every 2-5 minutes.
And you _just don't want to be there_.
It is when you consider these facts that the A-7D just smashes the A-10 because where you DO want to be is cross-FLOT 20-50nm, blowing up bridges, laying down cluster mines and generally raising hell with the 2E while they are still clustered around POL/Ammo points or in road march along narrow approaches. NOT WHEN THEY ARE WEDGED OUT IN BATTLEFIELD MODE.
And the A-7D, even before LANA, could do that, because it had an honest 450 knots on the clock and dual pencil beam mapping as genuine TFR with which to fly through the clag.
It also had a genuine digital dive toss and loft mode which meant that you could pull up from 3.5 miles away, sling shot 12 Mk.82 and get back to clutter while your wingman flew a similar profile with PB lofted Shrike and so anything which lit off to shoot back (SA-8 and 13 in particular but also SA-6/6b/11) would catch one right in the teeth for their trouble.
An A-10 could do _none_ of these things and indeed one of the things that wore out half the fleet was flying around at full throttle with the boards partly cracked because they bled E so badly that they couldn't afford to wait for the Hoovers to windup in their breakaway turns.
Later they did do some testing with the AAR-49 and the Atlantique and the Pathfinder pods but in without autopilot to keep them on the straight and narrow, out of the weeds, they couldn't do loft bombing if you put a permanent RATO on the back.
"If I remember right, at that time there was a lot of talk of retiring the A-10 in favor of the F-16 because its mission was not clear any more (read not as pretty and flashy)."
The problem was that the A-10 was never survivable in a high threat environment as long as it stuck with the gun and fixed reticle laydown bomb attack and as soon as you acknowledged that (the A-10 was actually one of the first jets certified with Hellfire in the original four-shot rack) by moving to a useful PGM and targeting pod, you were right back at the "Why not a jet that can survive a sudden shoulderfire launch and has the autopilot to ease workload?"
Then the Russians intro'd true LDSD capable Su-27 and MiG-29s and it was suddenly a matter of looking up, 20 miles beyond the FSCL to see what was wickedly this way comething and the Hawg couldn't do that either (mind you an F-16 with AIM-9M is not a match for an R-27 from 10,000ft higher but at least you can split out go Polish Heart Attack on them).
"But after weeks of pounding the Republican Guard with bombing from F-16s, B-52s and FA-18s, they sent in RF-4Cs and the bomb damage assessment came back as stating that the RG was still at ~90% effective. This was a shock to everyone. (now I know this wasn't the A-7, but the example here is a fast mover vs. a slow mover)."
The B-52 did not belong over Iraq in daylight while there was even the slightest hint of a radar S2A threat. It didn't belong over Iraq at even at night, lolo. It did both and got nailed for it.
The F/A-18 was operating without PGM because the Squids were too cheap to buy AAS-38B with the laser and while the angle:rate capability of the FLIR alone was generally better than radar CDIP, it only provided roughly what a good pilot with poor eyesight could achieve by registering the prior aircrafts miss distance and adjusting his jet's offset accordingly.
We had very few CBU-52/58 with the radar fuze, Mk.20/CBU-49/59 still functioned poorly from height (stubby muniont, long drop = lots of wobble = whacked coverage patterns, even with the later model's spin fins, just like the BL.755) and the new generation of CBU-87 was just coming into production with very few available in theater.
In this, the weapons release computers on period F-16A/C were operating with OFP tapes that were designed around low angle popups to maybe 6-8K feet because you just weren't safe any higher than that in a NATO war. Yet they were dropping from late Vietnam era heights of 15-18K roll-in and 12K threatfloor with no lower than a 10K roundout.
Which meant that bombs were going through at least two-level crosswinds and dirt whose pitch angle would have been relatively easy to judge in Europe from 8,000ft was just a flat plate with minimal reference features in the desert. Which is not to say the hardpack wasn't tilted, because it was (radar CDIP uses the main radar to determine slant range but it is notoriously vulnerable to relative ground slope).
Finally, there was a phenomena by which jets flexed as they dropped ordnance and due to manufacturing variances you could forget block serials, individual tail numbers were their own eccentric 'HUD says here, you point the jet there' world. Something you couldn't be sure of familiarity compensating for, even if you had your name on the rail of a squadron jet because you flew what the chiefs generated.
These vagaries of performance resulted in F-16s flying without wing tanks in wall to wall Mk.84 (with radar fuzing, which was another nightmare of wings blown off jets) mode to hit anything and so of course their radii and time on station was very limited, even though, with 370s, they otherwise actually exceeded what the A-10 could carry all-internally and flew with a more efficient throttle setting in the 20K regime with faster out-and-back trips to the tanker.
It wasn't until the mid 90s that serious evaluations of what went wrong, along with some new OFP tapes tailored to a range of individual airframes, brought the USAF to a roughly 3m bombing capability from 15K (see: 'Air Combat #3' with the F-16 on the cover)
"So even though it was a mission which it seemed that the A-10 wasn't made for (rather long range for the slow flying A-10) they sent them in and surprise, surprise things turned around in a hurry. They discovered several things:
1. The dug-in Iraqi armor required a direct hit from bombs and CBUs which was difficult even from great bombing platforms like the B-52 and newer generation fighters."
The only jets flying the LAU-88 were the Cajun A-10s operating out of the FOLs in support of SOF wombat hunts for SCUDs. Thus, 2X AGM-65B/D (and the TV Maverick worked very well in broad daylight from high altitude, once the rains stopped) off LAU-117 was a nock's neeks, six of one, kind of a deal. The A-10s were restricted from low level gunnery for almost 3 weeks after a couple Lone Ranger Red Baron wannabes mistook themselves for fighter pilots and got whacked in the process of gunning for helos that were doing liason missioning.
"2. The A-10 with its slower speed (even at higher altitudes) had more time on target to make decisions and access the battlefield. It also could deliver its munitions more accurately than the fast movers. Of course the gun was the real asset that made a huge difference against the armor."
Slow speed at altitude buys you an SA-6 up the yang, and being a black-silhouette without MAWS or effective expendables (IIRR, we were still using the MJU-7 which just didn't have enough output to get the later SA-14 mod and SA-16 to bite) meant you were in a bad way if you pressed too hard (low), long (minutes in the target area) or often (back along the same bearing).
NATO would not allow this to happen because the TACP would put you in the stack with helos and other fires and the threat was so high that you generally had a very good idea of the flow needed to route in and out of even a moving target engagement so as not to get fratted or conflicted with/by your own people.
In Iraq, pilots got bad cases of "Well how many kills can I get today? Billy Bob got 25 yesterday in this same area."
And that's just a real good way to get dead.
"3.The A-10 pilots could do their own BDA since they were on the target longer and could access the results quicker."
The Iraqis called the A-10 the Black Death or Vulture because it could be seen, 'hovering' waaaaay up thar for the better part of an hour at a time. I beg to differ that if you have bombs and targeting pods onboard, you don't need to be malingering about for half that long.
As another poster stated, it's not like you're 'pinning them down'. They aren't in active contact. Get in, get it done, get out.
The fact that the A-10 is such a slowmobile with such lousy weapon aiming characteristics that they would literally 'find a likely spot' and dump all six Mk.82 or all four CBUs, just to lighten the jet up for the gun-hunt is highly suggestive that these are not assets being used properly so much as the sole solution available for the job because everything else was worse.
Three years later, F-16C.40 with LANTIRN targeting pods and 2X2 GBU-12 would have gotten four kills per plane, handed off to someone else and come home for more, keeping the Sortie Rates high and the threat...'astonishment' stress levels irregular and wearing.
Hanging over someone's head like the veritable Sword of Damocles just gets them mad when dead is so much better.
"4. The A-10 could see through the countermeasures that the Iraqis were using such as burning oil drums next to undamaged armor to make it look like it was burning, or the use of decoys, or the shell game where the Iraqis would move a damaged tank into a clean dug in position and move the undamaged tank into the bombed out revetment so the fast movers would ignore the one with the scorch marks in the sand and bomb the clean one which had a damaged tank in it already. These guys weren't dumb."
They're called Zeiss. They made X18 binoculars, even in 1991. Anyone can buy them, even a lowly Viper driver. Otherwise, I'll trade you a targeting pod for your persistence, any day. A fact well proven by the few F-16D and F-15E with functional LANTIRN TPs and the F/A-18Ds with the better Nitehawks which were available.
I don't believe they used A-10s as FAC-A, Killer Scouts or SCARs in 1991. They couldn't because the A-10 didn't have the speed or the sensors.
And just a few years later, the Gnat 750 and the MQ-1 were better for loitering pest roles because they were smaller, made less noise and could stay for a day looking at you with both Lynx and MTS.
Again, what you are talking about here is making the best of a bad situation with an absurdly incompatible platform because everything else was /worse/.
This is not a direct endorsement of the A-10 in any way shape or form.
"After a short time, even though they had to come up with new tactics on the fly and perform missions they hadn't trained for, the A-10s quickly turned the battle against the RG around."
There is truth in the fact that the Black Hole in Riyadh, the F-16 desk got awful lonely and the A-10s never stopped picking up roles.
But if you are going to miss with 'both pylons loaded today!' worth of ordnance, missing with nine doesn't make you a hero, it makes you Polish.
And this was a solid fact of ODS. They had swung so far right into fightering for it's own sake territory that they had left the business of winning wars behind them. Had they brought the Guard and Reserve and few PACAF wings that had AAQ-23/26 into the battle, the war would have gone much faster, even given the butchers job they did on the F-4E's radius with the slats and wingfoam.
Smart Weapons Win.
Everything else is a firepower demo with the targets shooting back.
"This information is found in a report titled "Airpower Against an Army, Challenge and Response in CENTAF’s Duel with the Republican Guard."
I recommend Smallwoods book, the WAPJ, the Warbird Tech book, and period AvLeak from about 1975 onwards.
The A-10 is one of the most overrated weapons systems on the planet. It's utility now, is what it should have been from the start in terms of basic GCAS, autopilot, PE/IFFC, _targeting pod_, ROVER/MIDS, sophiticated IRCM, and most importantly standoff replacements (APKWS) for the gun.
But it is the gun and the weak engines which also forever keep the jet from having a volume search or standoff mapping aid as radar, a second seat for a switchology handler and the thrust trust as thinner wings (the A-10 literally rides the Mach compression stall margin above 20K and is thus also a difficult platform to deploy with) to remain functional in a world where UCAVs and micromunitions are the real answer and FAC-A is about handling remote pylon coverage over a wide operational arc.
The Hawg has served well, it's crews oh nobody any explanations for it's shortcomings as it's successes. But nor should we fail to understand what those shortcomings are as we redefine the CAS/OBAS mission set.
On the other hand, few A-10s came over the target at 150 feet carrying six Rockeyes and two AIM-9s doing 520 knots. That may be one of the reasons why that in Desert Storm, although A-7s delieverd 20% of all the Rockeyes used, they did not suffer a single loss in the entire conflict. 
