The US Air Force Chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz, is now saying that maybe, just maybe, the service should look at procuring a "light strike" capability.
The current aircraft operate too far from the front, and do not have the endurance to stay on station a meaningful length of time.
He was talking about something like the an armed turboprop trainer, though the basic needs are very similar to the A-10, and there are a lot of those in the boneyard.
I would also argue that a turbofan based new airframe, designed to roughly the same specs as the A-10 would be superior, because you could incorporate narrow band stealth to address the issue of the radar guided AAA.
My guess is that a replacement for the A-10 would be, considering advances in armor, propulsion, and cannon, would be at less than ¾ of the weight.
The problem would be how to deal with mission/feature creep.
Video courtesy of the DEW Line.
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