![]() ![]() And in the F-117’s greatest performance on January 17, 1991, the stealth fighter brought “shock and awe” to downtown Baghdad, Iraq in the opening hours of Operation Desert Storm.īut even this temporary immunity to Soviet-designed air defense systems was fleeting. F-117s dropped laser-guided bombs next to a Panamanian barracks as a diversionary strike. In December, 1989, during Operation Just Cause in Panama, U.S. For a decade, the F-117 “stealth fighter” operated with near-impunity against sophisticated Soviet-bloc air defenses during precision, low observable strikes. strike doctrine improved exponentially with the introduction of “stealth” or low radar observability when the F-117 Night Hawk, the “stealth fighter”, was introduced. Grant writes, “Approximately one out of every eight F-4s ever built by McDonnell Douglas-for all services-was destroyed in Vietnam”.Īnd remember, these losses were to early Soviet Bloc air defense systems supplied to the North Vietnamese and almost always crewed by North Vietnamese, although intelligence suggested Soviet “advisors” also played an active role in the air defense of North Vietnam. According to researcher Rebecca Grant of, “The cumulative totals were shocking: The Air Force lost 40 percent of its total production of F-105s to combat in Vietnam.” And it was nearly as bad for the iconic F-4 Phantom II. Going back as far as the Vietnam conflict, the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, a supersonic aircraft designed for high-speed medium and low level nuclear strike missions, suffered withering losses over North Vietnam, a country protected by a Soviet designed air defense network. It was either heavy AAA going by or a missile…” An A-10 Thunderbolt II of the Michigan Air National Guard. I saw what appeared to me to be a fireball come by my canopy. I was diving at about a 60-degree dive angle – and this was my near-death experience. “I rolled in and as I was strafing the target I started taking AAA - heavy AAA. Dean related one of his missions in Iraq to Smallwood: “I myself figured that, knowing the number and kind of SAMs the Iraqis had, that if we ever went to war, 20 to 25 percent of us were not coming back.”Ĭapt. Smallwood wrote about the dangers A-10 Thunderbolt II pilots faced when performing close air support missions over Iraq. In his 1993 book, “Warthog: Flying the A-10 in the Gulf War”, author William H. But although the A-10 was heavily armored with a titanium tub surrounding its cockpit, its prospects for survival even in the Soviet air defense era were poor due to a concentration of effective, highly mobile anti-aircraft weapons systems perfected by Russian suppliers in the real-world testing grounds of the Vietnam War and the many Arab-Israeli wars. At the height of the Cold War, the A-10 was intended to moderate that imbalance by providing a dedicated tactical anti-armor asset that could kill Soviet tanks. Strategists anticipated a huge flood of Russian tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany. The A-10 was originally conceived to offset a massive imbalance in the number of tanks between the Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance. (All images: TheAviationist/Tom Demerly unless otherwise stated) An A-10 Thunderbolt II Davis-Monthan AFB training at low level in the western U.S. 25, 2022.Īnd even though recent upgrades to A-10C Thunderbolt II have improved its targeting and communications capabilities, the A-10 was built to fight a very different war than the one we are seeing now in Ukraine. Oleksandr Oksanchenko, who was shot down in his Sukhoi by a Russian S-400 Triumph surface-to-air missile (SAM) near Kyiv on Friday, Feb. While some of Axe’s analysis hasn’t been entirely accurate – the Ukrainians have gotten some combat aircraft in the air- they have already suffered the loss of one of their most celebrated combat pilots, Col. They, combined with longer-range SAMs on the Russian side of the border, could force the Ukrainian army in Donbas to fight without the benefit of any aerial support”. Axe went on to say in his Januarticle, “If that Russian army rolls in, a whole lot of additional MANPADS and SAM vehicles will come with it. That doesn’t happen much anymore.” Another popular meme that you can see online these days.Įven before the Russians crossed the border into Ukraine, defense and aerospace analyst David Axe wrote in Forbes magazine that, “If Russia invades Ukraine, its front-line air-defenses will be the most dangerous in the world”. “It has to be a pretty permissive environment for us to just roll in and do a gun run. ![]() An Air National Guard A-10C Thunderbolt II pilot told. ![]() But according to current A-10 pilots, there’s only one problem, “It’s not that easy”. ![]()
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