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A-10 effectiveness during Desert Storm


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The A-10 is an awesome airplane! I watched them work over old tanks on the range at Ft. Hood before the "slick"

C-130's came across the drop zone...yes it was a exercise but still pretty impressive. Later when I was a MC-130

loadmaster the A-10 guys would fly with us for protection and it was cool to watch them scissoring across the top

of us going to the drop zone. They were with us to suppress threats ahead of and around us. 

During Desert Storm Gen Horner's son was an A-10 pilot (a captain at the time) out of Woodbridge, England so I bet 

he was just a bit concerned about his boy being in the war. After the war and everybody redeployed back I carried 

the general and his wife to Mildenhall. They were going over to see his son. He signed my flight orders for me and 

was a great guy to talk to having just redeployed back a few months before myself.

 

Cheers...Ron

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  • 7 months later...

late to the conversation ..

 

Though I am a Warthog fan (have 3 models built and would do more),an interesting point about it's DS use,  The loss / damage rate was too high that they eventually imposed altitude restrictions and disallowed gun use until the ground war.

 

There were 11 F-16 squadrons deployed compared to 6 a-10 squadrons, yet A-10 loss / damage were proportionally higher.  Imagine if the F-16s predominately carried the Maverick on each sortie like the A-10 did; how many tanks / vehicles would they have destroyed?

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  • 3 weeks later...

When the A-10 was designed the designers knew it would likely suffer higher attrition rates, which it why the heavy armor in the cockpit, the redundant systems etc.  Remember the war in Vietnam was still raging and a potential war with Russia in Europe was at the top of every planners thinking.  It was designed to go in slug it out and get the pilot home.  It was designed with a European battlefield in mind not an open desert without trees to impede ground based line of sight.  The gun was the best at the time, but 50 years of technology have made better gun designs possible.  The AF today argues that the F-35 can replace the A-10.  The mind set today is very different than when the A-10 was designed.   The A-10 was never popular with the AF fighter types who wanted to go in fast, drop bombs and leave fast.  Also, recall that the A-10 when designed was part of a layered attack with the Apache helicopters.  It was assumed that the Apache would also suffer high attrition rates in the close in battlefields of Europe.  Warsaw pack armor troops were very afraid of the A-10, they called it the devils cross, and which is why the emphasis of close in anti-air defenses in Soviet battle planning.  It is very easy to sit back 30-50 years later, and pick apart a design, tactics, weapons.  But in its heyday the fear factor amongst Warsaw pack troops was very high.  The F-4, F-105, F-18 etc all have significant shortcomings, but they all get the job done too.  Thirty years form now what will be be saying about the F-35 jack of all trades?    

 

Edited by aircal62
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I don’t know what to make of the argument that the a-10 is over rated.  As a modeler I love the A-10, however, If you listen to airplane enthusiasts and modelers they never seem to find a bad airplane.  Find the worst airplane ever made that was basically suicidal to get in and fly and there is some enthusiast out there that thinks the thing was the greatest thing ever.  No matter how insignificant or badly made, airplane enthusiasts seem to love them all so I think we need to accept some bias may exist, especially on a modeling forum called aircraft resource center.  As it sits now the A-10 is a 50 year old design that may not be objectively well matched to all use cases.  I don:t consider myself well positioned to evaluate this, and I don’t accept that enthusiasts on this board are inherently a better judge of the A-10s effectiveness than the guy on youtube.  I do think that a ground attack plane that can stick around for a long time and carry a lot of stuff to drop might be a good idea, but maybe a new version is needed designed for the reality we are in now..  

 

Maybe though the future of this role is going to be lots of drones, again I do not know, however eventually I want to build an A-10 I know that for sure.

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On 10/9/2022 at 6:59 AM, Benner said:

There were 11 F-16 squadrons deployed compared to 6 a-10 squadrons, yet A-10 loss / damage were proportionally higher.  Imagine if the F-16s predominately carried the Maverick on each sortie like the A-10 did; how many tanks / vehicles would they have destroyed?

IIRC the F-111F was the #1 tank plinker of the 1st gulf war.  4 lgb and 4 dead tanks

 

Geoff M

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In the Gulf War the Warthog primarily worked with Apaches and Cobras to deal with Iraqi ground forces.  Tank plinking was their specialty, utilizing both the 30mm gun and AGM-65 Maverick A-G missiles. On the second day of the ground war, two A-10s took out 23 Iraqi tanks. A-10s also scored two A-A victories, gun kills against Iraqi helicopters.

 

Rough numbers: Warthogs flew more than 8500 sorties, dropped ~24,000 bombs, destroying 1,000 tanks, 1,200 artillery pieces, 2,000 other military vehicles.  Five A-10s were lost in combat.

 

The F-111F flew ~2500 sorties, dropped ~5,000 bombs - almost all of them (4,660) were PGMs, destroyed ~1,500 tanks, ~300 artillery pieces, 245 Hardened Aircraft Shelters, 13 runways and 12 bridges.  Note the F-111E was not as effective in theater as it had no PGM capability.  I believe the only Aardvark combat loss was an EF-111A. 

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  • 2 months later...
On 11/5/2022 at 6:05 PM, habu2 said:

In the Gulf War the Warthog primarily worked with Apaches and Cobras to deal with Iraqi ground forces.  Tank plinking was their specialty, utilizing both the 30mm gun and AGM-65 Maverick A-G missiles. On the second day of the ground war, two A-10s took out 23 Iraqi tanks. A-10s also scored two A-A victories, gun kills against Iraqi helicopters.

 

Rough numbers: Warthogs flew more than 8500 sorties, dropped ~24,000 bombs, destroying 1,000 tanks, 1,200 artillery pieces, 2,000 other military vehicles.  Five A-10s were lost in combat.

 

The F-111F flew ~2500 sorties, dropped ~5,000 bombs - almost all of them (4,660) were PGMs, destroyed ~1,500 tanks, ~300 artillery pieces, 245 Hardened Aircraft Shelters, 13 runways and 12 bridges.  Note the F-111E was not as effective in theater as it had no PGM capability.  I believe the only Aardvark combat loss was an EF-111A. 

 

The A-10 averaged 10 bombs per target killed? 24,000 to kill 2,400 targets...

 

The F-111E  couldnt designate its own targets like the F-111F could but it did have a delivery profile for them and did use PGMs.

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  • 1 month later...

As a modeling subject, I can’t find much info on the OA-10A in Desert Storm.  Plenty of pictures of the A-10 with the other five squadrons, but no decent pictures of the 23rd TASS while deployed.

 

Haven’t see much written either other than the two times the squadron lost a plane.

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The longevity of the aircraft itself speaks volumes about its battlefield usefulness, just like its kindred ancestor - the A-1 Skyraider.  Most modern military aircraft are multi-purpose machines, but sometimes to get the job done right, you need a single purpose specialty tool.

On a side note, back in the mid 90s, I was stationed in Germany with MAJ "PJ" Johnson and got to hear firsthand how he survived a SAM hit during Desert Storm in his A-10. He was featured on an episode of "Wings" back in the mid-90s talking about that flight and how he helped to rescue a downed Tomcat pilot during the war. The Hog is a tough bird indeed.

Cheers,

John 

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