A lot (way to much, IMHO), she is amoung the most serious contenders for the presidential race…

Thanks Merlock.

Re: the article Mirage3000 posted……… So, how popular is Royal?

The F-22 and F-35 are riddled with delicate systems that cover the aircraft. A few shots from the enemy, and they probably burst into flames.

And yeah, I’m sure cost is a terrible issue. Compare the 2.8 million A-10s to the nearly 2 billion F-22.

Nope. A-10 isn’t going away.

CAS comes in many forms. After long range SAMs and enemy aircraft are killed off, legacy or stealth aircraft doesn’t matter…. dropping JDAM, Paveways, and CBU-105s from 35-40k ft means AAA, medium SAMs, Small SAMs/MANPADs ( some newer MANPADS have some nice range now )…. anyway… none of these threats can touch an aircraft dropping from that high and out. Dropping sub 4 meter precision guided munitions in near any weather. I can touch you, but you can’t touch me.
A-10. It can take a lot of punishment because it ….. has no choice. Even with the up coming PGM upgrade, it still won’t be able to go high enough with munitions loaded on, to avoid those medium-to-low altitude threats. That is part of the reason we buried some of the airframes that were shot to pieces in the desert post Desert Storm. The fast movers from up high can avoid a Tor 1 with PGMs. The Tor 1 will kill every thing it looks at that fits a helicopter or A-10 like altitude set. Where… even when the JSF goes down for a guns pass on CAS after using up all of it’s PGM’s. ( Quite common today with todays CAS …. after the PGMs are used up and the GFAC still needs support, it’s guns time ). … at least the JSF has a slightly better chance at avoiding a Tor1 ( at distance ) coming down for a guns pass…Because of it’s sensors (if the threat emits )…. and that the Buick of Stealth is a narrow band stealth jet tuned for emitters that direct weapons (AAA, SAM, fighter aircraft) Fast movers expose themselves less ( time) on a guns pass. Swoop down and zoom climb up. An A-10 is slow and orbits around and if it runs into a flak/battlefield SAM/MANPAD threat… like the redcoats in the line, it just has to stand there and take it.
Fast movers have better response time out of the JSTARS stack. A-10 is kinda slow when a GFAC is asking for help. A-10s are better for pre-planned ops with short response areas (time). The most important thing to a GFAC is time when an ambush pops up and the ground troops he is with need fire support. A B-1 or teen fighter or someday JSF arriving in 10 minutes or less, beats an A-10 arriving in 15-20. And a GFAC doesn’t care much what airframe shows up as long as it can help kill what is hurting his troops he is embedded with.
You also may need to consider looking at the full JSF sensor suite. The ESM kit on it, basically makes it, it’s own little local_area Rivet Joint. Where with it’s incredible suite of diverse sensors it is also just a portable sensor node collecting and recording the electronic order of battle and passing that to anyone else on the network that is interested. If something emits, it can geo locate it quickly and accurately, pass that along on the network to other interested platforms/decision-makers, or kill it for itself.
Again, A-10 is very useful… but more for lower ground fire threat ops. A full blown ground war scenario and TOR-1_like threats will have a feast on low flying anything.

Just checked with an ex Loring AFB, Maine crew chief. Back in the day, non alert maintenance guys would show for roll call and it would go something like: “Phantom, ELP, SOC, Biff,…. you are doing Alert area de-icing”… A whole shift you could be doing nothing but going from plane to plane on the alert pad de-icing alert aircraft. After all before we took down the alert area in the good old days, the alert area, in SAC was the mission. Again the non-alert maintainers de-iced in the alert area. De-ice trucks like you see in commercial airline ops. They had a bit of a longer wait time between de-icing… than lets say an airline that is worried about law suits. So 2 or 3 de-icing trucks in the alert area doing deicing every 2-3-4 hours. Just depended on the conditions.
The alert area maintainers were more focused on their alert plane. Example A model tankers had hot water cycled into the water tanks all the time in extreme cold so the water wouldn’t freeze. ( water injection for extra power on take off )….
There were a bunch of other nasty things for cold ops too. The REAL cold war 😀 There were certain extreme cold conditions where when it was decided it was too unsafe to operate, that base’s alert area went offline from the SIOP plan until conditions improved. ( There is plenty of nuke overlap in the SIOP plan )

The one off of Savannah Georgia didn’t have the fuse component in it at the time of the mid air.

When were you at Barksdale? I was there (just as a dependant, but still there and on the flightline every chance I could get) from ’87 through ’94. Dad was a crew chief woth 2nd OMS and later 96th BS.

86-92-Photolab near the hospital. Same building as the then 49 test squadron.

I was at Carswell ( B-52Ds-KC-135As ) and Barksdale B-52Gs etc…. didn’t see a lot of snow. I’ll ask a guy I work with who is an ex B-52G crewchief that was in Maine.

Just look at how Meteor and Brimstone have slid further and further down (and off) the UK weapons list for JSF.

Really can’t use the MOD as a standard of performance for putting weapons into the field. The hacks in MOD and politicians are more concerned with saving a few bucks here and there instead of getting weapons into the field. What “says it all” to me …..only one of many examples… is the the gun debacle in the RAF version of Typhoon or any number of other things. Australia is actually spending money on defense so I doubt they will have any problem if they really want it.