USAF Sees Writing on the Wall

The US Air Force Chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz, is now saying that maybe, just maybe, the service should look at procuring a "light strike" capability.

The current aircraft operate too far from the front, and do not have the endurance to stay on station a meaningful length of time.

He was talking about something like the an armed turboprop trainer, though the basic needs are very similar to the A-10, and there are a lot of those in the boneyard.

I would also argue that a turbofan based new airframe, designed to roughly the same specs as the A-10 would be superior, because you could incorporate narrow band stealth to address the issue of the radar guided AAA.

My guess is that a replacement for the A-10 would be, considering advances in armor, propulsion, and cannon, would be at less than ¾ of the weight.

The problem would be how to deal with mission/feature creep.


Video courtesy of the DEW Line.