Once they use those F-16s to establish air dominance someone needs to give them a few A-10s to help them speed up retaking their territory.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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If the USAF doesn't want to deal with the A-10s supply chain, there's a good chance Ukraine doesn't either.
The only thing that keeps the A-10 flying is Congressional mandates from a few jobs-oriented congressmen.
It's a morale booster. Marines want a battleship to roll-up and lob explosive vws at the enemy and the army wants to keep it's brrt buddy. With more modern electronics and better drone link they'd still be very capable at the job they are built to do.
You don't spend excessive logistics on a "morale booster". Then, those morale boosters would get shot down in no time and it would have both the strain on the logistics, and the opposite effect for morale. It's an old plane that's not useful on modern battlefields. Get Ukraine what they need - long range rockets and permission to use them how they want. Get them more fighter jets. Get them more artillery. Don't send trash.
To your point, Ukraine lacks resources for both Ice cream and bbbrrrrrtttt.
They are fighting for their freedom.
Point to where exactly it says now, it doesn't right?
So your point is any planning is futile, you must be a proper strategic genius.
Dude you bring up a curiosity in a different situation, time and war, economy and scale. Ukraine doesn't have countless factories pumping out fighter jets to be able to dedicate those to making spare parts for an obsolete airframe. No amount of morale is worth it when you cannot supply the soldiers with what they need. Imagine ice cream barges going through the pacific when most of the US carriers would be on the bottom of the ocean with no more comming. It would be a laughable waste of resources.
You said we don't waste logistics on militarily useless morale boosters. Clearly the us does as do most militaries, good cas is well worth every penny. CAS that scares the shit out of your enemy and raises your troops spirits is even better.
It's never been a forward weapon, it was never meant to be. No one is suggesting to send it now they're saying it may be useful to ship pilots and get them started training and as far as I'm aware that's wrapped into funding.
A10's aren't "good CAS". They are a hog on logistics, expensive, the gun isn't worth it anymore and the job can be done in 300 other, more efficient ways. It's a white elephant and nothing more, there is a reason they are getting retired.
There's more reason they've been trying to retire then since before many people here were born and yet haven't been. Troops love them, armchair strategists that have been saying they aren't worth the money don't. Who should I care about more I wonder.
Ideally, people should try to get them Jas-39 Gripen with MBDA Meteor missiles to back up the F-16 fleet.
Currently, the situation seems to be: F-16 pilots are still inexperienced and their missiles are outranged by some missiles that a Su-35 could be carrying (e.g. R-77M with 190 km range). When a Su-34 (fighter-bomber) conducts glide bombing runs from a distance of 40 km, a Su-35 (air superiority fighter) typically provides it air cover. Under such conditions, it's a difficult task for an F-16 pilot to fire an AMRAAM at the bomber (at best 180 km range) and evade counter-fire from the fighter. Fortunately they've got shiny new ECM pods and hopefully Russian planes haven't got decent radars.
However, a plane with longer range weapons (Meteor can fly for 200 km) would deter even a fighter escort of the Su-34, and likely end glide bombing as a tactic.
Alternatively, one can hope that the actual range of AMRAAM exceeds the advertised range or the actual range of R-77M falls short of advertised range - or that they have better radars, or can somehow backport Meteor to F-16, or that their ECM can beat the electronics of R-77. However, as far as I'm aware, firing an AMRAAM from maximum range needs a really big target (actual bomber, not a fighter-bomber).
Either way, good to hear it happened. :) If it happens more, it might finally deter glide bombing. So far, air defense ambushes have also temporarily deterred it and drones have struck airfields where the Su-34 planes get equipped, but nothing has stopped it for long.
I mean, they made to strafe tanks. Pretty sure they were actually terrible at that when first introduced.
They did fine, budget dweebs just never thought they were enough of an advantage to offset the cost. They stay in service because people in the actual field want them around, it's the same reason a lot of obsolete "useless" weapons stay in service.
That would be super helpful. Everyone always says that the A10s would be too vulnerable to AA but I’m guessing it’s survivability in the skies of Ukraine will probably be higher than helicopters and they are still flying those. A10s will absolutely decimate Russian lines if they can get close.
Helicopters can loiter better, fly closer to the ground, and resupply close to the front.
Even so, attack helicopters are not really used in anything other than ATGM sneak attacks from terrain cover (which the A10 can't do, being a plane), or UGM "artillery" strikes. Most helicopter usage is about utility transport or troop transport in Ukraine. The primary CAS platform in Ukraine is drones. For tactical strikes, it's glide bombs and cruise missiles, but that's in short supply, no point in having a bunch of platforms if they have nothing to shoot.
The A10 is not really useful in near-peer engagements. At least not as useful as an equivalent value amount of SAMs or drones. And aid is passed by congress by value, so it absolutely matters how much something costs, they have to package the best stuff they can in the dollar limits.
The A-10 is vulnerable to AA and to fighters, that's why establishing F-16 patrols first is important. I'd also prefer that the A-10s either be escorted by or fly in mixed formations with Ukraine's Soviet era fighters.
Yea the a-10 is on the us chopping block. Could be their next step.
My vote is for a dozen AC-130J Ghostrider gunships
Those planes are workhorses, they would hardly need a dozen. We could probably put two of them on loan for a weekend and the Ukrainians would have the majority of the trenches converted into graves.
Also a fun indy game on steam "project gunship"
Big asterisk* it's a fun but very dead partially developed game that hasn't been updated in 10months despite its popularity.
Dam your right! Such a shame. As it is atm its still fun, could do woth more scenarios/maps.
Such a shame, any news on what happened to the dev?
No idea just sorta stopped I guess.
Damn... that blows. Had it on my wishlist for a while waiting for it to hit 1.0
BBBRRRRRRRRRRTTTTT
I predict upcoming NonCredibleDefense mecha musume memes.
EDIT: Apparently they're way ahead of me. This is 12 hours old as of this writing. Just hasn't made it to Threadiverse [email protected] yet.
Years it's been and i still have no idea what that place is about
NonCredibleDefense is a recreation of a reddit community.
The following is an oversimplification but its all so ridiculous it is still going to be long:
This probably won't make any sense, internet community drama history is ridiculous
Basically, after years of debates on reddit (and really just the internet in general) revolving around military history and precise technical and operational capabilities and effectiveness of various weapons and vehicles (think the kind of discussions that lead people to leak classified documents on warthunder forums), a number of 'camps' basically formed.
You had 'wehraboos', a modification of weeaboo, but absolutely fanatical about the superiority of the German Wehrmact, 'conmieboos', same thing but for the Soviets, and on and on.
Combined with that, you had a whole lot of people criticizing modern US equipment and its cost, a lot of them looking up to a group of people sometimes referred to as 'the reformers' and also sometimes referred to as 'the fighter plane mafia'.
These people basically claimed to be ex US military or designers of older US weapons/vehicles, who claimed their notions of how to do military stuff more along the lines of 'cheap enough to get the job done, producible in large numbers' as opposed to 'immensely expensive, technologically dependent and technologically superior, but fewer in number'... that these notions made them the sort of dark horse, cool kids version of the correct way the US military should have proceeded, that they'd been ignored and blackballed by corrupt and ignorant US Military and Political higher ups.
These people often went on RT and other foreign media platforms, and podcasts, to basically play up every technological problem and budget overrun or project delay in US military equipment.
At this same time, both the wehraboos and commieboos were basically radicalizing politically, and becoming more ingrained with any talking points from 'the fighter plane mafia' types badmouthing the US.
NonCredibleDefense originally formed as a response to the insanity of all of this, making fun of a whole bunch of people who were making absolutely ludicrous claims which could often be fairly easily proven to be nonsense.
... Then Russia invaded Ukraine and everything went completely nuts.
The wehraboos had basically become Nazis, the commieboos had basically become either Tankies or hated NATO so much that they sided with Putin.
You ended up with ... basically NonCredibleDefense aligning themselves with Ukraine, but also still being very critical of modern Western domestic and foreign policy in general... and getting into tons of spats with any military enthusiast that supported Putin... or hated LGBTQ people.
So... what NonCredibleDefense is, is a mixture of military enthusiasts who are pro Ukraine, pro modern western / NATO involvement in its defense, but also politically left of center, and also very often gay or trans.
And also very into anime, and esoteric internet memes, and video games. Because of course.
The lemmy community is an offshoot of this.
EDIT: Maybe a better way to explain this would be to present the example of the youtuber LazerPig, as basically my best approximation of condensing all of NonCredibleDefense into one person.
Wow, I can see why i was a bit lost there...
Thank you for the excellent summary.
To add to that, on Reddit, there was originally /r/CredibleDefense. This was intended to be serious discussion about military topics from people who knew what they were talking about making supportable statements. Like, people cited sources and such. It didn't always actually meet that bar, but the idea was to keep the level of nonsense low.
That's kind of a high bar, and sometimes people don't want to rigorously examine everything and have more-casual discussion, so then /r/LessCredibleDefence showed up.
/r/NonCredibleDefense was developed as the logical extension of this, becoming less...serious...and consisted of people posting memes and often making completely-inaccurate statements for humorous effect.
NCD was more-approachable than the others, and so a lot of people wound up showing up there.
I was not around when they formed, but did show up later, and enjoyed content on all of them.
There is no CredibleDefense or LessCredibleDefense on the Threadiverse, currently. [email protected] is the sole representative (well, maybe [email protected] will be something like that, but it doesn't quite deal with the same stuff). I tend to vigorously disregard the rule about not posting serious material on NCD, as a result, but it's got plenty of memes and people making jokes.
Same. I find it extremely confusing.
NCD these days is a mixed hodgepodge of NATO propaganda, US defense industry propaganda, laughing at wacky military shenanigans around the world, and pornographic degeneracy involving military aircraft and other vehicles.
NCD started as a spin off from Credible Defense, which is a community where all articles have to be well sourced, arguments well reasoned, and citations are required. NCD has exactly none of those things.
It's the mix that confuses me. And the esoteric military knowledge. Half the time I can't tell what they're making fun of.
Also, they somehow manage to create memes that have real world significance.
"Cope cages" started on NCD, and made it into official NATO military jargon, to the point it's unironically used by senior NATO generals in public interviews as the proper name for ineffective Russian anti-anti-tank measures made with nothing but a welding torch and creativity.
Yeah, I really wish that people would post context there when they post something. Some of the problem is that people see news, then promptly go to create and post memes joking about a current news item. But if you haven't seen the news item and don't know some of the jargon or military history or other context, it can be difficult to understand what's going on.
I've commented a bunch of times with a "context comment" on posts linking to source material.
Worked in the field once, it's no different than other Fandom, except much less extreme than wh40k of course.
Watch some Perun, it might help, or maybe not.
It started out as good, clean, only partially genocidal fun.
Then the war started, and it just became fun.
Imagine a bunch of Tennessee rednecks cheering their kids at a variety football game.
Now imagine the game ended, they're very drunk, and their bitter rivals are trying to get to their cars...
Pakistan proved AIM-120s are still king in the air for MRAAMs back in 2019 against India's Su-30s.
Obviously there's a lot of skill and technique involved, but you get a pretty nice edge with the range. Apparently the IAF said that the pilots couldn't get a shot off without first entering the no escape zone, or at the very least felt uncomfortable getting locked up before they could lock the F-16s.
Although now that China has brought back LRAAMs, it'll be cool to see what the USA makes as the successor to the AIM-54.
The aim260 is in opeval, it's basically a smaller Phoenix (except, you know, with a good seeker).
Also they have the aim 174 (I think that's the number), which is an sm6 upper stage strapped to an f18, basically like shooting a telephone pole at someone from 200km+ away.
We were slow getting started, but we're getting there.
I assume the bomber has to slow down to subsonic speeds to drop it's payload. Don't want to think about the forces acting on the payload if it were to drop at supersonic speeds.