Having been on the receiving end of of an A-10 fire support mission more than once, I can speak for the effectiveness of the job they do. Their time on on target is the key to their effectiveness. They are flying tanks. I do not really care the politics of the the replacement, just that the replacement is just as effective. Lives depend on this. It should not be a pissing contest between political views but what just works. As a former grunt I just want my ass saved.
Would a plane better at loitering be able to provide more useful fire support? Or is that simply solved by having more A-10s and cycling them more? (Maybe that's the cost economics problem that the department can't justify? So fuck logic let's just shift the cost structure and pour trillions into a new plane that might look better in the accounting tables?)
If the guys on the ground are having a no good very bad day then having fewer aircraft that can loiter longer is likely going to be better because every time an aircraft shows up there's a ramp up period while the pilot figures out WTF is going on down there and that ramp up period comes with reduced effectiveness and increased risk to the guys on the ground.
Also, time to target is very important. An F15 with the wrong munitions that's seconds away at mach 2 is much more helpful than an A10 that can put the hurt on an entire tank company but is minutes away.
So if the A-10 was never going to be around in enough numbers, what could be done? Only one group had enough distance from the Air Force and enough independent money to consider a viable alternative: buying a cheap, lightweight attack plane on their own. That was the Navy SEALs. A group of them met with the Secretary of the Navy in 2006 to tell him about the problems they faced with getting good enough air support.
Like other American combat troops in Afghanistan, the SEALs sometimes found that high-tech gear couldn't reliably get the job done, or that cheaper, lower-tech solutions worked better. This is how the US military almost adopted the A-29 Super Tucano, a $4 million turboprop airplane reminiscent of WWII-era designs that troops wanted, commanders said was "urgently needed," but Congress refused to buy.
