From all the combat footage I've seen, A-10s arrive with no warning. Just their rounds delivering fuck upon the enemy and then the trademark grrrrrrrr of their cannons.
Last edited:
What It's Like to Fire the AC-130 Gunship
- Thread starter Habu34
- Start date
Just look at the people making that decision. Low quality personnel.
Their engines have a distinct high pitch whine to them. Nothing else sounds like an A-10.
Those B52s were flying single file… on the same path every night….and we told them we were coming. Complete bullshit, have a good friend (much older than me) who was a crew member on those raids. He said it was suicide.
Pretty sure the 52 crews damn near mutinied on Guam over these piss poor tactics.
Someone with more knowledge can correct me if I’m wrong
RESTON, Va. (March 31, 2025) – Leidos in November successfully completed a guided flight test of their Small Cruise Missile (SCM), known as Black Arrow, from an AC-130J aircraft. The test demonstrated aircraft compatibility, system performance, waypoint uplinks, guidance accuracy as well as integration with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Battle Management System (BMS).
The Black Arrow is a low cost, 200-lb class mission adaptable delivery platform designed to facilitate spiral upgrades for both kinetic and non-kinetic missions. The test was conducted as part of a Collaborative Research and Development (CRADA) agreement between Leidos, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC).
“Performing this test from an AC-130 platform while also integrating with the BMS provided aircrews and operators a chance to see how well our SCM worked,” said Mark Miller, senior vice president for Missile and Aviation Systems at Leidos.
Speaking at the Special Air Warfare Symposium held at Eglin Air Force Base in March, Col. Justin Bronder, USSOCOM PEO-FW, noted that, “SCM is a key capability, rapidly advancing AFSOC’s ability to close long-range kill chains.”
Since the SCM CRADA was initiated in 2022, the concept and benefits of affordable mass have become well recognized within the strike weapons community, and Black Arrow is designed to fulfill this need. Leidos is leveraging model-based system engineering practices to support the timely and cost-effective development. Use of Air Force-advocated architecture standards as well as the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Weapon Open System Architecture are key design elements.
“Aligning to these stringent standards, while successfully demonstrating this capability from an operational aircraft, places us in a strong position to rapidly field Black Arrow if called upon to do so,” Miller said.
The missile is designed to be launched in a variety of methods, including launch ejection from a C-130 (or other cargo utility aircraft) ramp via a custom Ramp Launch Tube (RLT), palletized launch and conventional store release from fixed-wing aircraft.
Leidos is now under contract with USSOCOM to continue test and evaluation activities throughout 2025.
Last edited:
In a modern conflict with peer or near peer adversaries, both the A-10 and AC-130 will have limited use in an environment where IADS are not suppressed to include MANPADS. An SA-16 MANPAD is what shot down Spirit 03 in Desert Storm. At least in initial phases their use is probably very minimal if at all needed due to risk. While these 2 air frames in recent history in the Middle East have been nice, we cannot use those lessons learned to influence how we fight an equal opponent.
Surely nobody ever thought of ways to spoof MANPADS.
Or hide the heat from exhaust emissions.
Or detect when a missile has been fired.
Surely they would have never considered such a thing. It's a good thing there are internet experts to highlight mistakes.
Last edited:
All of that isn’t going to minimize risk to an acceptable level. Nice try internet expert. The smarter counter measures get the smarter the munitions get to counter them. It’s a continuous back and forth. Counter measures can always be tricked or worked around.
Just depends on if you have air superiority or not or how contested the air space is along with an IAD threat. It’s all just mission analysis/threat assessment, risk to force risk to mission and the acceptable level of risk the CC is willing to accept.
During the 2018 battle of Khasham, anyone know the role the C-130 played.
www.aerotime.aero
Wagner recounts US air strikes during Battle of Khasham - AeroTime
The first Wagner account of US airstrikes destroying a large force of Russian mercenaries was published by a Telegram channel associated with the PMC.
www.aerotime.aero
Sadly, none of that worked for for 6567 over Khafji. Been a while, but as I recall the flight recorder picked up the sound of the warhead impacting and the flight engineer said, "Shit! Shit!" The Mayday went out and the only other sounds were grunts and thuds.
While that is a tragic loss, and my respect and condolences to all on board. I have a question which moves towards a point. During the war on terror era, second invasoin of Iraq, Afghan, etc. How much time over target have those platforms spent? If you compiled that into loss vs what they have accomplished, countless men on the ground saved and targets dispached, I think you will see an overwhelming benefit these have provided.
My Neighbor, who I helped build his supercharged 98 Mustang Cobra was gunship aircrew in the early 2000's, he had video on his cpu of what they had done, it was pretty fucking brutal. My sisters baby daddy was around them to over in the stans.
A friend of mine, William Walter is one of the members of Spirit 2 who had to go find the plane the next day and debrief what happened. Long story short Spirit 3 stayed well past their time supporting the ground force and due to that the sun rise allowed the SA-16 to get a lock. He wrote a whole post on it not to long ago in an AC-130 heritage group.
That’s all fine and dandy, I worked directly with both AC-130s and EC-130s in Afghanistan, but that environment wasn’t contested in the air at all; whether from the ground or sky. In a fight with a modern adversary the 130 would have a very difficult time making it to be on station before getting shwacked. It is a completely different fight with different considerations. Going in with a mindset of “this worked well with the fight on terror” is an easy way to lose. Conditions have to be set to have a 130 orbit in a modern fight and the fact is, we are not going to have CAS like we have come accustomed to in fighting in the Middle East.
First met Bill in the mid-80s. On a few of the same deployments. He got me into high power. My only 15 minutes of fame is in his book, History of the Gunship.
I like Bill a lot. Great dude and hilarious!
Attachments
I understand this.
In the future we will run into similar situations and they have a purpose and serve it well.
Similar threads
