When you care enough to send the very best: A-10s. Those 30mm riffs are amazing.
Of course, every symphony needs a rock-solid, driving percussion section, so give me the old-time AC-130s as well for that deep, booming, bass no subwoofer can capture.
You SHALL feel the earth move.
Of course no Really Big Show is complete without world-class pyrotechnics, so bring back Willy Peter and the Napalm, with special guest the Fuel-Air Explosive (FAE) and her dulcet tones.
The opening act Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions banging it out on their M198s, rapidly climbing the charts, is worth a listen as well.
All opening live at that trendy new venue, the Kill Box.
A Forward Air Controller (FAC) can dream, can’t he?
Not to worry.
It’s got an automatic engine restart system because the fumes of its own gun can actually kill its own engines.
April 26, 2026 at 1:46 pm
Oldarmourer
Pretty sure it’s faster than a Skyhawk and it did a lot of low level drops…
Watching napalm drops (we had to call them ‘firebombs’) is fun. Mixing it ? not so much. Funny thing about the old BLU’s, every single time, one of the igniters was ejected unfired..every..single..time..and guess who had to go dispose of them ? Wandering through a still smouldering site looking for an armed WP ‘beehive’ and hoping you didn’t trip over it…there’s nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning.
April 26, 2026 at 1:48 am
Heltau
Since it looks like Mr. Trump will NOT use the nukes, it’s all conventional all the way for the world. This is good for most the the human race, except for the islams which are NOT human in any way.
There is a big wooden sign to that effect over the bar of a German restaurant across from the main gate of our Air Guard base down the road. Stark said length of burst was typically taught by holding trigger down for the time it took to say “Die Commie, Die!”
We must appreciate this God-given airplane for as long as we can bludgeon the AF Pentagon weenies into submission.
The Spad’s four 20mms could handle anything the NVA or NVPAF had.
Spads officially shot down two MiG-17s (USN), but unofficially (Operation Zorro) added three Fagots, two more Frescoes and six Fishbeds to that while losing none of their own.
clear ether
eon
April 26, 2026 at 2:00 pm
Oldarmourer
It would still make a good counter-terrorist platform today, you don’t need all the bells and whistles to target those..not even radar, thermal would be nice though.
A lot of trainers are being used in their armed roles for just such a purpose, and performing quite well. A-A missiles ? not needed. AESE radar ? not needed. Mach 2 perfomance ? not needed. Lots of weapon stations, a targeting pod if it can’t be built in to free up a station, chaff/flare for ManPADs, guns of course, 30mm is nice but the GAU-8 is big and heavy, maybe a couple of chainguns borrowed from the Apache and mounted in wing pods or on the centreline, but multiple single barrel 20mm works too, the noise and light show from an A-10 is great for morale but you can only kill a terrorist so dead and other than trucks they don’t have armour to bother with which is what the 30mm was intended for, 20mm, or even .50cal or a mix of both can carry more rounds and for A-G would work well. The Cessna ‘Super-Tweet’ did a great job in Vietnam until politics interfered as usual and a modern version would unravel turbans at an extreme rate. Transit times faster than a helcopter and a very slow stall speed for precision weapons delivery would work well. The best part is that it SHOULD be a lot cheaper to manufacture and a lot more could be made for the same price as a handful of overengineered wunderjets.
April 26, 2026 at 5:24 pm
James/G
Four 20 mm guns with 400 rounds each, so many hard points that ‘Fully Loaded’ had true meaning. The only thing Sandy needed was to have a redesign to include in-flight refueling. Take off with max weapons load and thirty minutes of fuel, get altitude and fuel up, then kill *EVERYTHING.*
April 26, 2026 at 9:13 pm
Heltau
My CO of VA-25 (back in 1971) was Commander Greathouse. He was one of the few people that shot down a MIG with a Spad.
April 26, 2026 at 7:34 am
John
I now have to wonder if the Taiwanese are making provisions for receiving the A-10s in the event of Red China’s invasion.
I can think of few things more effective against small invasion craft than a GAU-8.
Rocket pods with laser guided 2.75″ or bigger rockets would do a pretty nasty number on a small boat of any type. Bring back the old 5″ or the WW2 ones with 60lb warheads and anything less than a full warship is in for a bad day. The best part is you can fire those from further away than a strafing run and multiple targets can be designated for the same run in.
Between Chinese air cover, ship borne air defenses, and MANPADS, an A-10 would never get NEAR a Chinese landing craft. They’re great against an enemy with no major air defense system, but against an integrated force with integrated air defense, they’d barely get past the coast.
The A10 Warthog.
Every military ground pounders’ favorite guardian angel.
Long may she fly. And irritate the Perfumed Princes of the Five Sided Puzzle Palace.
I suspect that there is a classified drone that will replace the A-10 somewhere on the drawing boards (or in a CAD software system, to update the phrase), but that the Army and Air Force are squabbling over who will pay for it and “pilot” it remotely.
If you want the thing to sink ships, then you better not tell the Navy until after you’ve built it or else they’ll run interference on it.
I have no insider knowledge of this, I simply have observed how things actually function, or fail to function, in US military procurement.
Probably because Instead of making a ground support aircraft, they’re trying to cram every system imaginable, that are completely unnecessary for and even detrimental to the role intended, in order to dazzle the politicians holding the purse strings that know absolutely nothing about the job needing done but want to see ‘AI’ in everything.
I vividly remember the sound of a Douglas
A-1 Skyraider as it was idling down the PSP
at Tan-son-Nhut airbase; it sounded like a
blown nitro burning Dragster at Lions
Drag strip back in the 60`s….It might have
been Pomona.
Doing a start on an Argus with 4 of them was fun too 🙂
A ‘wet power’ flypast was something to behold too…except at 3AM when you had to be at work for 0530. 72 cylinders beats any alarm clock ever made.
April 26, 2026 at 1:08 pm
Brodder
A-10s? Well today’s my brrrrrrrt-day.
(Counts tree rings) well… crap! I think I just hit venerable stage 1. 60 years.
Defrosting 3 lb T-Bone
Made garlic onion tortillas yesterday (just flour/white corn massa with chopped garlic, dried onion bits, and fine ground Parmesan cheese heels. )
Prob press out 4 or 5 to fry up in steak drippings and butter. Then bake low while steak rests.
Ate asparagus earlier than intended. Had a urinalysis earlier this week. Figured it’d be funny.
Mushrooms went the way of mush really fast this week. One bad shroom and the rest follow.
2 nitro milk stouts for bev.
Red marinade for steak. Red wine, paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, red n black pepper, chopped onion to finish.
It’s a bit feisty. But seared hard and high oven finish does the job.
So the guy that tried to take a shot at Trump was taken alive …that should be making a lot of dems and media heads very, very nervous if he talks…any bets on a ‘Jack Ruby’ moment ?
Trump and the rest of the party need to push the ‘influenced by the fabrications and hype being pushed by the msm’ to the hilt.
Start threatening to pull broadcast licences for anyone found to be holding up the utter bullshit they do now as ‘news’, as well as ‘yuge’ lawsuits. if they want to run fiction, then make them work under ‘entertainment’ licences, not ‘news’.
Leftards have already tried to set the narrative by claiming this guy’s real target was the journalists there, because Trump calls them the enemy of the people.
Never mind that he was rage-tweeting about how much he hated Trump and everyone on his side from inside the venue a few minutes before he went Juramentado.
With progressives, nothing they do is ever their fault. Somebody else is always the villain.
clear ether
eon
April 26, 2026 at 7:26 pm
Oldarmourer
Guess that’s why he only donated to the dems…
I wouldn’t waste ammunition on journalists, they’ll be jumping out of windows soon enough, once some high placed dems start singing to save their own skins…
April 26, 2026 at 7:15 pm
DKNolte
Unfortunately, the kid who tried to take Trump is alive, so watch what follows. In a year or so when he finally goes to trial, it will be a shit show circus of Democrats trying to prove he is innocent because of Republican rhetoric.
I will bet the lawyers drooling and already colluding with George Soros.
The saddest part of this thread, which is indeed awesome, inspiring, nostalgic and huaaaah, is that small drones can take out foot soldiers or single politicians, agriculture spray drones entire installations (or stadiums if you are thinking Springsteen concerts) and a series of IED laden autonomous big rigs synchronized to take out our interstate system are what we are or will be dealing with in the current war.
For a time, until the defenses catch up.
It always works like that.
Build a tank with armor.
OPFOR builds a gun to shoot through that armor.
Add more armor…they build a bigger/better gun.
Until you can’t maneuver over terrain with the weight of anymore armor, or metallurgy won’t let you handle higher chamber pressures in the gun.
The best (or sadest) part is that you wouldn’t have to spray anything other than scented water, the media will handle the rest by inciting blind panic over some ‘anonymous leak’ saying it was plutonium/covid/lsd/liquid cooties/etc. and the gov’t is refusing to tell anyone.
The A-10 has a unique distinction. Of all aircraft made for our military, it is the only one in which the initial order was fulfilled, and that was it. Every other aircraft either got cancelled before the initial order was fulfilled, or additional orders were made. The reason? The Air Force higher-ups don’t like air-to-mud (their disparaging term for the CAS mission). Yes, it needs help keeping enemy fast-movers off its back, but that’s not that unusual. In WW2, for the first few days of each invasion performed by Germany, their army got limited support because the Luftwaffe was busy establishing air dominance. Once they had that, the Ju-87s were pretty free to perform the CAS mission. But if you’re doing CAS, you have to be tough, because you are going to take ground fire, and fast movers are just too fragile for that. Making a fast mover tough as an A-10 would make it not fast.
As someone above said, they should modernize beyond what they did with the A-10C (which was an electronics update). Also, the plane would be trivial to adapt to carrier use. Fold the wings just outboard of the main gear pods (there’s no fuel out there already), and do it like they do it for the E2 Hawkeye – you’d have a nice package for storage on board. The airframe might already be tough enough for catapults and arresting gear, but a tougher landing gear would be needed. That would add about 2,000 pounds. But, newer jets might have enough extra thrust in the same package size to minimize the impact. Something I hope someone is thinking of.
41 Comments
When you care enough to send the very best: A-10s. Those 30mm riffs are amazing.
Of course, every symphony needs a rock-solid, driving percussion section, so give me the old-time AC-130s as well for that deep, booming, bass no subwoofer can capture.
You SHALL feel the earth move.
Of course no Really Big Show is complete without world-class pyrotechnics, so bring back Willy Peter and the Napalm, with special guest the Fuel-Air Explosive (FAE) and her dulcet tones.
The opening act Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions banging it out on their M198s, rapidly climbing the charts, is worth a listen as well.
All opening live at that trendy new venue, the Kill Box.
A Forward Air Controller (FAC) can dream, can’t he?
I don’t know if an A-10 can outrun the fireball if it’s dropping napalm.
Not to worry.
It’s got an automatic engine restart system because the fumes of its own gun can actually kill its own engines.
Pretty sure it’s faster than a Skyhawk and it did a lot of low level drops…
Watching napalm drops (we had to call them ‘firebombs’) is fun. Mixing it ? not so much. Funny thing about the old BLU’s, every single time, one of the igniters was ejected unfired..every..single..time..and guess who had to go dispose of them ? Wandering through a still smouldering site looking for an armed WP ‘beehive’ and hoping you didn’t trip over it…there’s nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning.
Since it looks like Mr. Trump will NOT use the nukes, it’s all conventional all the way for the world. This is good for most the the human race, except for the islams which are NOT human in any way.
Don’t forget about the AC 130’s Daddy, the AC 47 Spooky AKA “Puff the Magic Dragon”
My old Tactical Control Wing (507 TAIRCW) worked with both platforms. Like being a conductor for the loudest symphony orchestra you ever heard!
Zar Belk!
A-10 guys would say “go ugly early.”
We said they had bird strikes from the rear.
There is a big wooden sign to that effect over the bar of a German restaurant across from the main gate of our Air Guard base down the road. Stark said length of burst was typically taught by holding trigger down for the time it took to say “Die Commie, Die!”
We must appreciate this God-given airplane for as long as we can bludgeon the AF Pentagon weenies into submission.
The only thing I didn’t like about the A-10 is that it came online too late for Vietnam.
Yeah, but you had the Spad (Skyraider), and it could carry nearly as much.
Missing the gun though.
The Spad’s four 20mms could handle anything the NVA or NVPAF had.
Spads officially shot down two MiG-17s (USN), but unofficially (Operation Zorro) added three Fagots, two more Frescoes and six Fishbeds to that while losing none of their own.
clear ether
eon
It would still make a good counter-terrorist platform today, you don’t need all the bells and whistles to target those..not even radar, thermal would be nice though.
A lot of trainers are being used in their armed roles for just such a purpose, and performing quite well. A-A missiles ? not needed. AESE radar ? not needed. Mach 2 perfomance ? not needed. Lots of weapon stations, a targeting pod if it can’t be built in to free up a station, chaff/flare for ManPADs, guns of course, 30mm is nice but the GAU-8 is big and heavy, maybe a couple of chainguns borrowed from the Apache and mounted in wing pods or on the centreline, but multiple single barrel 20mm works too, the noise and light show from an A-10 is great for morale but you can only kill a terrorist so dead and other than trucks they don’t have armour to bother with which is what the 30mm was intended for, 20mm, or even .50cal or a mix of both can carry more rounds and for A-G would work well. The Cessna ‘Super-Tweet’ did a great job in Vietnam until politics interfered as usual and a modern version would unravel turbans at an extreme rate. Transit times faster than a helcopter and a very slow stall speed for precision weapons delivery would work well. The best part is that it SHOULD be a lot cheaper to manufacture and a lot more could be made for the same price as a handful of overengineered wunderjets.
Four 20 mm guns with 400 rounds each, so many hard points that ‘Fully Loaded’ had true meaning. The only thing Sandy needed was to have a redesign to include in-flight refueling. Take off with max weapons load and thirty minutes of fuel, get altitude and fuel up, then kill *EVERYTHING.*
My CO of VA-25 (back in 1971) was Commander Greathouse. He was one of the few people that shot down a MIG with a Spad.
I now have to wonder if the Taiwanese are making provisions for receiving the A-10s in the event of Red China’s invasion.
I can think of few things more effective against small invasion craft than a GAU-8.
Rocket pods with laser guided 2.75″ or bigger rockets would do a pretty nasty number on a small boat of any type. Bring back the old 5″ or the WW2 ones with 60lb warheads and anything less than a full warship is in for a bad day. The best part is you can fire those from further away than a strafing run and multiple targets can be designated for the same run in.
Between Chinese air cover, ship borne air defenses, and MANPADS, an A-10 would never get NEAR a Chinese landing craft. They’re great against an enemy with no major air defense system, but against an integrated force with integrated air defense, they’d barely get past the coast.
Which is why we have SSNs with VLS for Tomahawk and Harpoon.
U.S. Navy Submarines; Ruling The Seven Seas Without Being Seen Since 1942.
clear ether
eon
The A10 Warthog.
Every military ground pounders’ favorite guardian angel.
Long may she fly. And irritate the Perfumed Princes of the Five Sided Puzzle Palace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II
Why in the hell are aren’t we building a modern replacement taking advantage of improvements in engines armor, weapons, avionics, etc.?
Answers to questions like that usually boil down to money, politics, or both.
I suspect that there is a classified drone that will replace the A-10 somewhere on the drawing boards (or in a CAD software system, to update the phrase), but that the Army and Air Force are squabbling over who will pay for it and “pilot” it remotely.
If you want the thing to sink ships, then you better not tell the Navy until after you’ve built it or else they’ll run interference on it.
I have no insider knowledge of this, I simply have observed how things actually function, or fail to function, in US military procurement.
Probably because Instead of making a ground support aircraft, they’re trying to cram every system imaginable, that are completely unnecessary for and even detrimental to the role intended, in order to dazzle the politicians holding the purse strings that know absolutely nothing about the job needing done but want to see ‘AI’ in everything.
Generals like fast, pointy jets that cost lots of money.
I vividly remember the sound of a Douglas
A-1 Skyraider as it was idling down the PSP
at Tan-son-Nhut airbase; it sounded like a
blown nitro burning Dragster at Lions
Drag strip back in the 60`s….It might have
been Pomona.
Vietnamese Pilot.
The sound of an 18 cylinder R-3350.
Doing a start on an Argus with 4 of them was fun too 🙂
A ‘wet power’ flypast was something to behold too…except at 3AM when you had to be at work for 0530. 72 cylinders beats any alarm clock ever made.
A-10s? Well today’s my brrrrrrrt-day.
(Counts tree rings) well… crap! I think I just hit venerable stage 1. 60 years.
Defrosting 3 lb T-Bone
Made garlic onion tortillas yesterday (just flour/white corn massa with chopped garlic, dried onion bits, and fine ground Parmesan cheese heels. )
Prob press out 4 or 5 to fry up in steak drippings and butter. Then bake low while steak rests.
Ate asparagus earlier than intended. Had a urinalysis earlier this week. Figured it’d be funny.
Mushrooms went the way of mush really fast this week. One bad shroom and the rest follow.
2 nitro milk stouts for bev.
Red marinade for steak. Red wine, paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, red n black pepper, chopped onion to finish.
It’s a bit feisty. But seared hard and high oven finish does the job.
So the guy that tried to take a shot at Trump was taken alive …that should be making a lot of dems and media heads very, very nervous if he talks…any bets on a ‘Jack Ruby’ moment ?
Trump and the rest of the party need to push the ‘influenced by the fabrications and hype being pushed by the msm’ to the hilt.
Start threatening to pull broadcast licences for anyone found to be holding up the utter bullshit they do now as ‘news’, as well as ‘yuge’ lawsuits. if they want to run fiction, then make them work under ‘entertainment’ licences, not ‘news’.
Leftards have already tried to set the narrative by claiming this guy’s real target was the journalists there, because Trump calls them the enemy of the people.
Yes. Yes, they are this stupid.
Never mind that he was rage-tweeting about how much he hated Trump and everyone on his side from inside the venue a few minutes before he went Juramentado.
With progressives, nothing they do is ever their fault. Somebody else is always the villain.
clear ether
eon
Guess that’s why he only donated to the dems…
I wouldn’t waste ammunition on journalists, they’ll be jumping out of windows soon enough, once some high placed dems start singing to save their own skins…
Unfortunately, the kid who tried to take Trump is alive, so watch what follows. In a year or so when he finally goes to trial, it will be a shit show circus of Democrats trying to prove he is innocent because of Republican rhetoric.
I will bet the lawyers drooling and already colluding with George Soros.
The shooter was taken alive but I’ve got a feeling he’s going to get Epstein’d before anything truly interesting comes out of his mouth.
The saddest part of this thread, which is indeed awesome, inspiring, nostalgic and huaaaah, is that small drones can take out foot soldiers or single politicians, agriculture spray drones entire installations (or stadiums if you are thinking Springsteen concerts) and a series of IED laden autonomous big rigs synchronized to take out our interstate system are what we are or will be dealing with in the current war.
Yes. In the future our most dangerous Threat will likely be some snot-nosed A-hole with a laptop in an internet cafe’ in Sofia, Bulgaria.
clear ether
eon
For a time, until the defenses catch up.
It always works like that.
Build a tank with armor.
OPFOR builds a gun to shoot through that armor.
Add more armor…they build a bigger/better gun.
Until you can’t maneuver over terrain with the weight of anymore armor, or metallurgy won’t let you handle higher chamber pressures in the gun.
An equivalent will happen with drone warfare.
The best (or sadest) part is that you wouldn’t have to spray anything other than scented water, the media will handle the rest by inciting blind panic over some ‘anonymous leak’ saying it was plutonium/covid/lsd/liquid cooties/etc. and the gov’t is refusing to tell anyone.
The A-10 has a unique distinction. Of all aircraft made for our military, it is the only one in which the initial order was fulfilled, and that was it. Every other aircraft either got cancelled before the initial order was fulfilled, or additional orders were made. The reason? The Air Force higher-ups don’t like air-to-mud (their disparaging term for the CAS mission). Yes, it needs help keeping enemy fast-movers off its back, but that’s not that unusual. In WW2, for the first few days of each invasion performed by Germany, their army got limited support because the Luftwaffe was busy establishing air dominance. Once they had that, the Ju-87s were pretty free to perform the CAS mission. But if you’re doing CAS, you have to be tough, because you are going to take ground fire, and fast movers are just too fragile for that. Making a fast mover tough as an A-10 would make it not fast.
As someone above said, they should modernize beyond what they did with the A-10C (which was an electronics update). Also, the plane would be trivial to adapt to carrier use. Fold the wings just outboard of the main gear pods (there’s no fuel out there already), and do it like they do it for the E2 Hawkeye – you’d have a nice package for storage on board. The airframe might already be tough enough for catapults and arresting gear, but a tougher landing gear would be needed. That would add about 2,000 pounds. But, newer jets might have enough extra thrust in the same package size to minimize the impact. Something I hope someone is thinking of.