But with the way things are going, the true replacement will likely be larger drones with heavier weapons loads. How soon until we see a drone sporting a 25mm cannon?
Debatable. I'm thinking "about the same time the Army fields the Apache replacement."
My thinking is that if it's a USAF controlled drone, they'll use the GAU-22 25x137mm, but if it's an Army controlled drone they'll use the M230LW 30x113mm.
Guns are no longer serious CAS options unless they're firing guided munitions. Thinking mainly of various attempts to make radar guided aviation guns back in the 50s and 60s as follow on to Vulcan and the computer controlled gunfire systems of the F-15C testbeds in the '80's.
You might be able to get some sort of precision guided, chemical energy round out of a 25-30mm cannon I guess, and the range can be achieved by sabot, but at that point you're better off lobbing rockets with the secret fire mode of AH-64. I don't even know if it's still in the software, but it was probably in the -64A at least, and definitely in the AH-1F and -S. A barrage of Hydra 70s with 40-60mm ICM bomblets guiding themselves into a killbox with a 2D course correcting fuse should be able to compensate for most pilot error during pitch up and give a decent pattern on a distributed target like a platoon DFP or air defense site.
This is beyond the logic of most APKWS users sadly.
The main problem with guns nowadays is mostly that CAS done by an FPV operator in a 4x4, with a battery of suicide assault drones, can perform every functional element of an A-10 gun run but about two orders of magnitude cheaper and for about the same period of time spent waiting.
The other problem is air defenses are sufficiently advanced from their pre-Vietnam counterparts encountered over Serbia, Iraq, and Hanoi that air operations can be shut down over an entire theater of operations besides periodically lobbing glide munitions. Whether that's a function of the VKS and PSZSU being vaguely incompetent, like Saddam's aviators in the Iran-Iraq War, or an actual threat for Western and Chinese air forces remains for the future to reveal.
We're getting to the point where the pinpoint instant death of the AGM-65 and Warthog are well within the hands of criminal gangs though.
Disagree on your first point Kat. There's still a requirement for conducting passes in close proximity of the AO to verify the bearings of the contact and friendlies. Up close, not like literally overhead but close enough that the sensor fidelity approximates the Mk1 eyeball (and the JTAC can acquire you to guide attack paths). At that engagement distance, gun and lasers provide the best cost-per-burst/SSPK ratio.
Agree with the rest. CAS is seeing a revolution with infantry now having access to self-deployed highly elevated sensors and shooters. SHORADs are ultra lethal and proliferating now (Iran has a HTK Crotale lookalike and a pretty novel loitering anti-drone FOG). Small drones are essentially flying minefields. The degree to which the US has historically "cleanse the battlespace" to enable effective class seems ever more distantly possible.
I propose that a future manned CAS dedicated craft would be something like a stealthy AC-130. A flying mothership that flies beyond the effective reach of most VSHORADs and armed with drone wingmen, active self defense system and PGMs. The centerpiece of a FoS. Look at how infantry combat has evolved in Ukraine. I'm seeing small skirmishes and minor breakthroughs very similar to SOF actions. Might be worth looking at unconventional development pathways.
Disagree on your first point Kat. There's still a requirement for conducting passes in close proximity of the AO to verify the bearings of the contact and friendlies.
A drone does this. Then that drone zooms in at 150-200 mph because it's a 5 lbs racing FPV drone with a 3 lbs hand grenade attached and kills you inside your dugout, along with three of your friends, and you get your last moments put up on Twitter.
Aircraft are too expensive to waste on such a trivial task.
They were flying minefields a year or two ago. Now they're more like immediate artillery. Drones move quickly and munitions like ZALA Lancet and Shahed-136 have sort of changed things. Not because they're brand new, they're not, but because they can be produced very quickly using simple electronic motors.
All of this fits inside a Toyota. The laptop is the "control mainframe" and a box in the back on a pallet is the "containerized assault drone carriage". The aux cord plays the hard bass.
Unfortunately nobody in America can manage this. The PRC can, though, because they are the drone market. Everyone else in the world put together is about 40% of DJI or so.
You might be able to get some sort of precision guided, chemical energy round out of a 25-30mm cannon I guess, and the range can be achieved by sabot, but at that point you're better off lobbing rockets with the secret fire mode of AH-64. I don't even know if it's still in the software, but it was probably in the -64A at least, and definitely in the AH-1F and -S. A barrage of Hydra 70s with 40-60mm ICM bomblets guiding themselves into a killbox with a 2D course correcting fuse should be able to compensate for most pilot error during pitch up and give a decent pattern on a distributed target like a platoon DFP or air defense site.
I suspect that fuzing control for flechette and cluster warhead Hydra Rockets is still in the Fire Control systems, so you could use an AH64 as a baby MLRS.
The infantry platoon brings its own FPVs and can do its own CAS in that case. Major frontal assaults against sizeable defensive strongpoints in modern combat rarely number more than half a dozen men on their bellies anyway.
The Cold War idea of a gun run from an A-10, and perhaps perpetuated by GWOT, is now utterly dead. It's literally suicide. You'd use howitzers or GMLRS or something. Or lob Stormbreaker glide bombs into a killbox from 50 kilometers away. Or Brimstones from 30.
We have plenty of footage of Su-25s and Su-34s to show what happens when you get within line of sight of a combat zone: you die.
Much like Su-34s and Su-25s, though, it's not to say it won't happen. It certainly will, at least for a short period, and then it will suddenly stop. In favor of this:
The dreadful future of the A-10 revealed.
Danger close munitions will be a quad or octocopter assault drone with ICM bomblet grenades on a string or something. There's some unique things coming out of Taiwan that have rotary magazines for 60mm mortar shells. Something similar for a 40-60mm ICM grenade made from recycled M26 or M30 rockets might be neat.
CAS is rapidly becoming a mission undertaken at the battalion and below levels with organic airborne combat drones.
If you're talking about organic drone, sure. But we're discussing a CAS craft(s) here. Say, a couples of CCAs scout ahead, gather the 3D coordinates and broadcast it back to the strikers. That kind of drone will need persistence and sensors like what we has on the Hawg. Why don't just use a manned aircraft for both strike and ISR? I'd rather not bet on hand waving super AGIs into existence like it's some trivial matter of RnD. And demographic issues can be averted by just opening the immigration gate through US military service. How many aspiring young men and women want that eagle passport?
Yes, high speed drones are an increasingly prevalent thread. Hence why you need self defense DEW on your CAS crafts. And a heck lot more countermeasures.
I disagree that a gunship can't be it. What we're seeing in Ukraine is air parity between two armies whose air combat doctrines are pretty much "fight under that condition" but the Soviet approach to aerial warfare has always been questionable. How many small quads can an XM30 carry before we look at solutions like unmanned mules and RCVs and bandwidth. Units will always have limited resources. A CAS craft let the colonels plan around limitations by using joint tactics. The A-10 was designed to fight in Vietnam not the German plains. A CAS craft for the high intensity flight would be doable just like how our pilots kamikaze with bombs and 50cal strafe before kamikaze was a thing. If the people don't have the will to fight for their power then they deserve whatever fate the usurper will bring upon them. And I think that the American kid who signed up for that Apache or Hawg contract have that courage.
...no one cared what the "CAS guys" want/wanted. CAS/BAI was a single mission set after 1985.
Had the budget cuts and Desert Storm not happened, YA-7F would have replaced A-10 beginning sometime in 1994, and fully replaced it by 2000 or so. It would in turn have been out of service by 2018 and likely replaced by F-35. Eventually the CAS/BAI job for ANG was handed down with F-16C and -CJ, while the F-35 is now displacing the A-10 almost exactly on schedule, and the A-10 neatly slotted into doing a job in GWOT so it wasn't completely useless either. Just mostly useless.
Warthog pilots love the JSF anyway. Soldiers might not, but if they knew what a good plane was they'd be able to fly them, lol.
Attack helicopters are another thing the 21st century is proving are something of a mistake that is being corrected by nature. They will probably not disappear, but I suspect Mi-24/Mi-28 and AH-64 will be the last of their kind, and they will eventually be replaced by armed utility helicopters with a couple console operators and external wing racks for NLOS weapons.
And which year did the Hawg entered service? A-X predated AirlandBattle by a far margin.
The YA-7F would've competed with both an all weather Hawg and A-16. The only credible threat to the A-10 was A-7DER but what USAF general would buy more Navy plane?
Funny that you mentioned the F-35 since the bloated Amy could've replaced the Hawg but the USAF made no case for that until the F-35 was chewing too much fund and demanded a sacrifice.
Unfortunately until the USAF develop a credible replacement for the Hawg no 35 would perform BOT CAS. AV-280 perhaps.
Again, the GAU-8 teared through the Afghan mud wall like sandpaper and ended many firefights to the warfighters' delight. The F-35 could not unless they adopt APKWS.
War is Darwinian. FPV and the like will have there day. Just as the Maxim gun put paid the Cavalry until the tank. The tank ruled until ATGM. Once economical means to render FPV arrives, and it will out of necessity, people here will be arguing about how useless FPV will have become.
Logistics remains the lynch pin of this arguement. It is still reported that both sides are going through FPV in the tens of thousands a month. If the resupply is eight hours away stuck in a convoy slowed by interdiction, your hand held CAS is not available. Artillery will remain the number one killer, but it to is in limited supply. CAS, attack aviation, manned or unmanned, what ever you want to call it will be a commanders emergency back up.
Attack helicopters are evolving as.well. I will agree that the likelihood of future dedicated attack platforms is improbable.
It was outdated by the mid-80s and the USAF knew this. Investment in A-10C was probably a mistake for any high intensity conventional wars but perfect for low intensity colonial ones and the training dummy/punching bag formerly known as the Iraqi Army.
The YA-7F would've competed with both an all weather Hawg and A-16. The only credible threat to the A-10 was A-7DER but what USAF general would buy more Navy plane?
A-10's biggest threat is actually the DAF and their need to fund new tactical aircraft. Even Congress is admitting this now that the Boomers are retiring and people with relatively less emotional attachment to funny slow airplane with big gun are in the halls of power.
Funny that you mentioned the F-35 since the bloated Amy could've replaced the Hawg but the USAF made no case for that until the F-35 was chewing too much fund and demanded a sacrifice.
DA and DAF are replacing the A-10. Right now it's being replaced by a combination of Phoenix Ghost and Switchblade assault drones, and new forms of the anti-tank missile, such as the Spike-NLOS.
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Journalists are even blaming the failure of suicide drones' export on words, instead of their lack of a Desert Storm or similar high value obvious use case, because Ukraine is rewriting a lot of what we think we know about tactical aviation and close combat in general.
The weaponization of the personal computer industry is insane, because it's giving people in a shed the same amount of potential killing power as a battalion of mechanicals of 1980, provided they play video games and know where to aim. And how to solder.
How many S-300Ps, a combat system now old enough to be my dad, did the Pashtun goat herders possess?
They seem to lock down entire swathes of aviation battlespace in Ukraine and the Slavic air forces are resorting to lobbing glide bombs from medium altitude outside their range, attacking air defense sites with SRBM and IRBMs, and occasionally rolling downtown like it's 1968 with iron bombs in a Fullback or a Fencer.
A-10 had a new lease on life because of its use in a famous international police operations that spawned many films. That's it.
It's not particularly survivable when even JSF is likely going to be lost in tragic numbers.
To be fair, A-10 would be excellent as a jet aviation, heavy load carrying adjunct to Colombian or Mexican Super Tucanos, for intercepting the fentanyl death battalions of Sinaloa or something. We should consider selling them to LatAm air forces. The Mexican Marines in particular would love them.
The tank ruled until ATGM. Once economical means to render FPV arrives, and it will out of necessity, people here will be arguing about how useless FPV will have become.
I don't think it will be as clear as a tank exploding and people saying "tanks are useless", but rather it will be more like "the snake drone murderbot made out of razor blades contributed 67.4778% of close combat casualties in the Giga Kill War of 2029, so why ARE WE STILL USING RIFLES", or something. Drones seem to be an evolution in the sense that multiple arms of combat are merging into a single event, like the tank and the helicopter, but they're going to be somewhat obscure and niche if only because they're closely related to artillerists.
A tank is big, chunky, and loud. A helicopter is fast, sleek, and loud. To some extent their size makes laypeople have absurd expectations.
Sure we haven't had a full accounting of what replaces them? Not 100% sure but whatever is providing the functionality it not widely discussed, anyway.
Sure we haven't had a full accounting of what replaces them? Not 100% sure but whatever is providing the functionality it not widely discussed, anyway.
Sure we haven't had a full accounting of what replaces them? Not 100% sure but whatever is providing the functionality it not widely discussed, anyway.
It has been discussed extensively in public but does not make a sexy, clickbaity story for people's news feeds or whatever, so you're not seeing headlines like
"SHADOWY SPACE FORCE JSTARS REPLACEMENT SHROUDED IN SECRECY"
"AIR FORCE: JSTARS NOT STEALTHY ENOUGH FOR CHINA FIGHT"
"REPORT: SPACE FORCE NEEDS A REASON TO EXIST, KILLS JOINT STARS"
The infantry platoon brings its own FPVs and can do its own CAS in that case. Major frontal assaults against sizeable defensive strongpoints in modern combat rarely number more than half a dozen men on their bellies anyway.
As to the ground Surveillance and Tracking Radar, well, those are small enough now that you can stuff a good one into a drone the size of a cruise missile like JASSM (a little bigger, since you want to recover it). ~600lbs of radar, the limit is really power generation.
Make a nice stealthy drone that can just loiter in the area and you don't care if it gets shot down. And you build hundreds of the stupid things, just like the original plan for TACIT BLUE. Assign each STAR-drone to a CCA-quarterback for getting data.
The FPV drone is the grenade. If you can't use a defensive hand grenade, then they're inside the trench and will soon be dead, or you will be.
Assault troops in Ukraine have 40% survival rates on good days. Bad days it's more like 10%. Which means 1-4 survivors usually because assault teams rarely number more than a dozen men. FPV drones will often zip inside the trench during the assault, after mortars and BMPs have lifted, to hover ominously next to a Pikmin gunner and blow him up with a brick of Semtex or an RGO/RGN grenade, or all the assault troops die after being cut down by rifle fire and PKM and chased by enemy FPVs to be blown up while retreating.
Danger close no longer matters in this case, at least no more than employing normal hand grenades, which is not very much. Usually, no one survives if you fail, but some people typically survive if you succeed. One or two or three, maybe double that if it's a major battalion level attack by a assault detachment with their usual compliment of "a couple dozen" storm troops.
Reagrding the FPV vs A-10 stuff here, I'd just want advocates to explain how those 200 esqe companies fighting on the FLOT would re-arm when, say, the MSR route is overrun or bombarded and they need to pull out before an assault take place. A squad could only carry 2-3 drones, maybe more if they got a stash in the IFV but those drones are single-shot at best. And the trooper who is messing around with the controller won't be killing or holding positions with his rifle. Which, in real warfare, is a pretty crucial task. So small drones could create mortar-like effects at the squad level and perform recon, and that's about it. A drone swarm would be pretty recognizable on the radar ( and so would their staging ground be) and small lone-wolf drones don't bring the firepower and persistence of a dedicated CAS platform. 8 SDB and a half-mag of BRTTTTT is another world of devastating.
Reagrding the FPV vs A-10 stuff here, I'd just want advocates to explain how those 200 esqe companies fighting on the FLOT would re-arm when, say, the MSR route is overrun or bombarded and they need to pull out before an assault take place.
A company can carry dozens. A hundred troops can now, quite literally, slaughter a battalion to every man and machine.
40 years ago we talked about one third of a battalion being destroyed. That's a company, a dozen vehicles, being expended in major combat, and maybe half to a third of the men. Against drones, it's the entire battalion. Literally, in some cases. You send out a thousand men and their 40-odd tanks and IFVs, and dozens of trucks out, and maybe a single jeep with three wounded guys comes back.
The advantage of the drone is that it combines reconnaissance, targeting, and fire correction in a single lethal package. In this sense it's most comparable to fiber-optic guided anti-tank missiles, but cheaper by one or two orders of magnitude, and just as difficult (actually even more) to defeat.
Yes, they can replicate "the most lethal weapon system available to infantrymen" but make it even more lethal. Experienced troops do not fear even 120mm mortar bombs going off within 20-30 meters, because they are not serious threats. Drones, however, are.
You're right. They vastly, vastly outweigh the effects of such a platform. It's why both Russia and Ukraine prefer ZALA Lancets, Phoenix Ghosts, and little FPV racing drones to gun runs and rocket attacks by Su-25s. The latter typically only strike infrastructure now.
In other words: "CAS aviation" is responsible for BAI, while CAS itself is handled organically by platoons, companies, and battalions.
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