The A10 is an obsolete aircraft. It has found a role against weaker enemies, but in a peer-to-peer conflict, the aircraft is not survivable. At this point, it’s not worth the costs to keep it around. It shouldn’t be replaced with a one-to-one aircraft. It’s role of close-ground support where the craft flies just 200 feet above the ground is not survivable in modern combat against peer-to-peer competitors.
It may be worth keeping around while the US industrial base takes forever to build new aircraft. It can fight drones in the meantime and even launch long-range missiles from the air. In a fight against China, the US will need all the long-range air missile launchers it can get.
The Air Force has a doctrine where it should spread out planes and move which bases they fly from so it’s harder to take them out. The US apparently wasn’t practicing that doctrine, and is paying for it.
It is more expensive to move maintenance teams around or have different teams available at multiple bases.
Regime change wars have never been successful from the air with conventional weapons. Administrations get wooed by the ability to strike targets with precision from afar, and forget that blowing a bunch of stuff up and killing important people doesn’t end a regime’s ability to suppress its people or fight back.
Although stealth delays radar detection, its more important role is making stealth planes hard to target with weapons. The wide bands of radars that can detect the planes are not able to locate them accurately enough to target them with weapons. No stealth is invincible, so mission planning is also key.
The U.S. may not have enough pilots to win a long war against a peer competitor. It takes a long time to train pilots, and they don’t stick around because flying commercially pays more. The pilots we do have don’t get enough flying hours. The U.S. Air Force has similarities to Japan and Germany’s air forces at the beginning in WWII. Germany and Japan did not have enough pilots or a robust enough pilot pipeline to maintain skilled pilots throughout the war.