Kraut won in the end
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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At least from what I heard from my brother, who was in the Army and got air support from some a few times, he said that: Yes, it is very poor at actually hitting stuff. But it was very good at putting the fear of god into the enemy and making them run for the hills. And even if the gun was mediocre, the bombs and rockets usually did work.
At least for him though, his preferred support was from Apaches. Because they were just as good at the whole "HOLY SHIT RUN!!" factor as the A-10, but could also kill stuff much easier.
COIN is not a legitimate concern for serious military hardware. COIN is shit-tier work that can be done with crop-dusters. You don't build your top-capability airframes to be good at blowing up rice farmers & goat fuckers. You build them to fight China.
Cheap "little bird" helicopters could put just as much fear into Somalis in Mogadishu, except they were far more accurate and had more staying power.
In the late Cold War, the A-10's gun would have been successful at killing lots of Soviet tanks in a Fulda Gap scenario IF - big IF - the rest of the US air force had done an excellent job of SEAD 1st and taken out or suppressed all the Russian SAMs in the area. But hell, even a cheap ZSU-23-4 would likely win a duel against an A-10.
The good thing about Apaches to kill goat fuckers is that they can just sit in a hover out of range & take their time pumping short bursts from their 30mm at dudes all day long. That's a lot more effective against someone who can't shoot back than an A-10, which has to spend the vast majority of its time getting into position just to do a short attack run for a burst of a few seconds.
Well obviously, and I am not saying it should be. And I think one of the smartest things the Air Force has done recently is, like you pointed out, producing the Sky Warden, which is literally just a weaponized crop duster.
I know what the Air Force says would have happened to the A-10 during the war, but the truth is that the Air Force never really liked the plane to begin with (A plane who's only job is the help the Army?! *ew), and so played up how fast it would go down in a major war. Consider that in the Gulf War, the Iraqi's had a denser AA network than anything the Soviet's would have had at Fulda, and yet that is the war that got the "Flying Armored Bathtub with BRRT gun" meme into the normie conversation. Even if the raw numbers show that it did underperform the F-15E and the F-111 on attack missions.
Although I suppose to counter my own point, there had also been an extra decade of improvements to SEAD equipment and doctrine by Gulf War (and recent events show we are still some of the only ones with extensive SEAD doctrine).