We need engineers and technologists to advance the country forward, including in the government. It’s a great tragedy that when we gave a technologist, Elon Musk, great governmental power, he used it not to build, but to destroy. Rather than using his business and technical expertise to make government better, he used his biased ideology and political incompetence to destroy things that were providing good to Americans and the world.
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.
US bases in Iraq are getting hit by FPV drones. At least a radar and helicopter have been destroyed. The US does not seem prepared for this advancement in warfare. If the US sends ground troops to Iran, a lot of them will be killed by FPV drones. These are short range, cheap drones, that can be used as suicide drones or to drop explosives.
The Ukraine-Russia war has shown that this is a new factor in warfare, and the US doesn’t seem to have adapted fast enough.
America’s rolling thunder of destroying things from the air is not convincing the Iranian regime to budge or the Iranian people to rise up.
Ukraine’s drone killers are much cheaper than many US interceptors, and the US and Gulf countries are running out of such interceptors, so want these cheaper Ukranian drone killers to defend against Iranian drones.