Possible reason the A-10 is being dropped

We might become involved in a war with their neighbors or a proxy war elsewhere but neither of them has the ability to conquer defended territory beyond driving distance. No one else has a fraction of our power to engage a powerful army like Iraq's half way around the world on short notice. In the Falklands war Britain was barely more than a match for Argentina, and only because they had nuclear submarines.

The tragicomical misadventures of the Russian aircraft carrier "Admiral Kuznetsov" show how far they are from acquiring that power.

-jsw

I would think that lasers should be good for killing drones, or blinding tanks. Even so, for tank cameras, simple LCD covers like in welding helmets, should probably be good protection against lasers at reasonable distances.

Killing drones is one of the major objectives of deploying the 30 kW models, which both the Navy and the Army have. I don't know about blinding tanks. Maybe.

The way they work depends on an extremely good tracking system. The beam spot has to remain on its target for a couple of seconds to do any serious melting or cooking, and that's with very thin rocket and aircraft shells.

They have some practical uses right now, but they aren't the game-changing weapons that will be coming down the road pretty soon.

Why should China want to embark on a war with the U.S. ? Like the Japanese, they seem to have realized that economic power is cheaper than military power.

They seem far more intent on creating the "Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)" than going to war.

I saw many dozens of skeet go off but only one explosion on a ground vehicle in any of those shots. Doesn't look very effective, but it sure looks and sounds impressive while it's being ineffective, wot?

I was thinking, about those smart fuzed bombs and such.

Are they actually effective against a smart opponent?

Could they be rendered useless by some simple tricks, like inflatable tanks, spray painted tank outlines on the ground, or something else that is cheap but can confuse those weapons?

I saw that too, but the picture resolution was not sufficient to see what they were hitting.

This weapon is intended to devastate a mass of tanks attacking, so think of it as a hi-tech kind of grapeshot, one that works on targets well beyond line of sight. They probably don't care that not all the grapeshot hits something, so long as the attack is broken, or the staging area well behind the front is devastated.

Joe Gwinn

Although not mentioned in the video, these can hit moving targets.

For stationary targets, I'm sure that self-heated decoys could work.

Basically, the original rationale was to break a mass of tanks flowing through the Fulda Gap in Germany, from afar.

The Warsaw Pact had something like three or four times as many tanks as Nato, so there was lots of attention spent on ways to even the balance. Actually, The A-10 was one of these ways.

Joe Gwinn

To have been impressed by that video, I would have needed to see about

The armchair generals (and other politicians) probably loved the sound and fury of it all. ;)

I don't see why they want to replace the lovely and SUPER-EFFECTIVE Warthogs. What's a little DU among friends?

You are missing something critical, the explosively-formed penetrators. They are solid metal projectiles formed by specially-designed shaped charges. The projectile will be going about 2 kilometers a second, and is quite capable of devastating a tank. But it doesn't make that big a blast.

The most effective IEDs are EFPs from Iran.

It makes little difference that those tanks look OK from the outside. The heavier the armor, the stronger the effect. The inside of a tank hit by such a penetrator is dust and red mush.

Joe Gwinn

You can shoot the moon and get the reflection. It is all in the quality of signal beam. It is parallel light.

They were developed for subs to shoot out an optic and cut the waterline or hit the magazine. All sorts of tricky stuff.

These are not the simple ones you hold. These are large units.

I knew a guy working on them in a puff plane. That type. They used a 707 since they were cheap and could use newer engines for more power.

The coolant tank was baffled to prevent waves while flying. The baffles broke down and the plane was having problems with shifting center of gravity. Kinda dangerous.

Battle ships were fitted as well.

Mart> >> ICBM's are rather fragile things and I think a laser could do some

Well you are looking at baby lasers.

In the 70's - late - I saw a 8 'barrel' cut 1/2" steel plate like butter.

Lasers are for Engineering and Research are different than the table top lasers used to study lenses.

All it has to do on an ICBM or MIRV is to create a bump or snag. A high energy pulsed machine gun type would cause massive friction burns that melt down by friction any ICBM or MRV.

This isn't new technology. The magic in this stuff is shoot an ICBM with a shotgun and it kills itself.

Mart> >

Cool new toys. R&D figured out some more stuff. Some of this design concepts were released as a deterrent force. And why not.

Mart> >

It is new technology. None of the other high-powered lasers worked out for a weapon. Diode-bade fiber lasers have.

Well, you can sure see the damage from those clusters. It's raining pieces for minutes afterward.

Unless one is well-placed over enemy territory, the launch rocket is out of reach. At the target end, it's raining reentry vehicles, each of which is equipped with a very good ablation shield to survive reentry. It takes a very large laser to drill that shield.

Joe Gwinn

OK, perhaps I am expecting too many explosions when a tank is taken out. I thought that most anything which penetrated a tank would also hit the stray munitions inside, causing a large explosion. Too many movies?

What I've had trouble wrapping my mind around is how a wad of nearly molten copper, which is much softer than armor plate, can penetrate the hardened steel. Is sheer velocity/mass the reason? Or do they melt their way through? I can see how the super tough, pointed tungsten rods in many KE tank-busting rounds can do it, but how about the rounded EF copper glob?

Ah, OK. I know that penetrators do a frenetic dance inside the cavity they penetrate, bouncing around for quite awhile, destroying anything they touch.

More like a Cuisinart juicer!