The real issues are:

1) The A-10 fleet is being maintained mostly through cannibalization of existing aircraft. There’s no further supply of spares.

2) For the particular role it’s good at, CAS in a permissive air environment, drones cost 2/3 less than the A-10 per flying hour and replicate most of the functionality.

3) The monetary, personnel, and time expense of maintaining the A-10 fleet as a whole very disproportionate to the unique capabilities it brings to the table.

There are some other important CAS scenarios, but none of them can justify a 70-rps, 30-mm shell, anti-tank Gatling gun.

It’s already much better with regular rotary-wing aviation support, but that can be slow to get on station, and has a worse MANPAD risk.

I’d rather have an AC-130 gunship circling overhead, keeping the enemy port-side and landing area-clearing artillery on their position, to help me with that mission anyday.

It can be so hard to explain to people that the gun has effectively been dead weight for more than 20 years, and that modern CAS consists primarily of dropping a smart-bomb or launching an AGM from 20,000 ft. up. Indeed, that’s the vast majority of what the A-10′s have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is so much completely irrational F-35 hate and A-10 love out there, especially online. That’s worth reflecting upon. It’s fascinating as a social phenomena, but, again, goes to show the absurdity of anything that relies on the assumption of the accuracy and reasonableness of public opinion.

As you say, we’ll just have to wait and see.

If it is going to attack a target that is heavily defended with modern radars and missiles, it will have to go in clean, which means it will be carrying much less ordnance internally. The number of aircraft required would be substantially larger.

It will be stealthy on the way out when its wings are clean. The missions will be successful if the F-35 can get away before the bad guys show up.

As to using long range AA missiles, the USAF ,abbr title=”Rules Of Engagement”>ROE almost always forbid that and require visual identification. The Army did shoot down at least one British aircraft in the second Gulf war using BVR Patriot missiles, and the Vincennes did shoot done a civilian air liner in the first Gulf war. Who knows what happened in Ukraine? So unless the USAF is absolutely certain no innocent aircraft are in range and all radar targets are bad guys, you won’t see any over the horizon shots.

The USAF usually emphasizes the F-35′s other attributes, like networking, which allows it to swap off targets to other members of the strike force and to share targeting information. Then there is an enhanced sensor suite and improved cockpit displays.

We will have to wait and if the designers have made the right tradeoffs.

On a related note, did you know that the last battleships (USS Iowa and USS Wisconsin) were stricken from the Naval Registry back in 2006?