A-10 vs. Su-25/39, page 4

A-10 was scramble designed with “off the shelf” components as a stop gap measure to fill a giant gap on the Western European front.

Its main design parameter was cost. It had to be as cheap as possible to design, manufacture, operate and service.

Engines are General Electric TF34s, and were made for the commercial market.

For example they are used in passenger jets such as Canadair CRJ Regional Jet
Bombardier CRJ.

One only needs to really look beneath the A-10s skin to see that it’s put together with commercial parts, and was not designed grown up as a war machine. I do have to say that given the low budget, A-10s engineers did an excellent job working with what they had.

A-10 was literally built around the giant GAU-8 cannon, specifically to bust Soviet armored vehicles which were expected to cross East Germanys borders into the West. NATO forces were absolutely outgunned so a cheap armor buster was thrown together. That’s all there’s to it.

There are reasons why A-10 had such a difficult time surviving the bureaucracy and why it literally spends its entire service life on the budgetary cutting g block. If has too many problems to speak of, but the main one, get ready: survivability.

Why? It’s simply to SLOW and just doesn’t have the climb rate needed. A-10 needs over 4 minutes to escape the kill zone of AAA and manpads.

When clean it climbs at 6K fpm, when loaded, forget about it.

A-10 is a pure CAS platform, which can operate only against undefended targets, and that’s why A-10 has the highest loss rate in USAF.

Frogfoot on the other hand was specifically designed as a rugged war machine, from ground up. It’s fast and incredibly agile even when loaded. It is MUCH smaller then A-10, while delivering similar payload.

A-10 loiters above its targets and strikes from low altitude (NAP), while SU-25 makes quick diving attacks and quickly escapes the kill zone.

SU-25 is a basic CAS platform with limited sensors, it’s not a tank killer. SU-25T is a dedicated armor buster with advances sensors/FCS, and fundamentally differs from the vanilla SU-25.

SU-25 is also operated by the navy because it can attack shipping with dedicated ASCMs, and has the range to do it.

All in all, SU-25 simply outclasses A-10 in every respect because it was designed to do so from ground up, while A-10 was thrown together with parts that were available from the commercial market.

Considering the origins of A-10, it does its job well and certainly at a good price.