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From: scott@graft.Berkeley.EDU (Scott Silvey)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Naval use of A-10's
Message-ID: <1991Mar22.042213.20430@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 22 Mar 91 04:22:13 GMT
References: <1991Mar20.034011.1839@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (william.b.thacker)
Organization: UC Berkeley Experimental Computing Facility
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From: scott@graft.Berkeley.EDU (Scott Silvey)
jimcat@rpi.edu (Jim Kasprzak) writes:
|> The A-10's nap-of-the-earth flying ability would be ideal
|> for skimming the seas undetected by radar,

Not any better than that of a Harpoon or Tomahawk.  Supposedly these
  missiles could get shot down rather routinely in a war (that's why
  you have to fire a lot of them at a target to overload it's defenses).
  Also the A-10 has a MUCH bigger radar cross-section than an anti-ship 
  missile.  There aren't too many trees or hills to hide behind out there
  over the water.  Moreover, the A-10 would not be much faster than the
  ship it was attempting to attack ;^)  That would give the target vessel 
  much more time to react to a "sneak" attack.  In fact, the crew would
  probably get bored waiting for the Warthogs to get from max detection
  range to maximum SAM range.

Now, if you were realistic, you would load up the A-10 with Harpoons to 
  give them some standoff range.  But why?  Why not just use the A-6's
  and FA-18's which are already made to handle this?


|> and I'd imagine that 
|> its tank-killing cannon could play havoc with the lightly armored
|> destroyers and frigates of today.

There are only 4 modern naval ships I would think the A-10's cannon
  would have trouble slicing up ... the Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, and
  New Jersey.  That's assuming the battle-wagons didn't bother shooting
  down the poor lumbering Warthogs when they were about 100nm's away.
  And THAT's assuming the carrier in the group didn't launch interceptors
  to shoot them down when they were about 200nm's away (Soviets are 
  building "super"carriers similar to ours now-a-days).  In order for the
  A-10 to hit something with that 30mm, it has to be about 1nm from the
  target.  At that point, the A-10 would also be in range of a lot of
  other guns (big ones and little ones) pointing in the other direction.
  Too dangerous.


|>  So would this actually be a feasible concept?

What, for naval target practice?  Sure it's feasible.


/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Scott Silvey           | Ronald Reagan to surgeons in emergency ward after  |
| scott@xcf.berkeley.edu | being shot:                                        |
|                        |                                                    |
| Flames to /dev/null    |        "Please tell me you're Republicans."        |
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