Why replace it with a multi-role aircraft? Because that is a genuine cost savings, and is more effective too. If you buy, say, 100 CAS planes, 500 fighters, and 500 strike bombers, you wind up with 100 CAS planes, 500 fighters, and 500 strike bombers. On day 1, you have 500 fighters clearing the air so that the lesser planes can go in. Assuming (as would be the case today) that the strike bombers are stealth, you also have 500 strike bombers taking out SAM sites and command centers. Meanwhile on day 1 you’re risking heavy casualties or having a very slow ground advance, because your low/slow gun CAS planes can’t go in until the enemy fighters and SAMs are neutralized. Or you need to send the CAS planes in with escorts, taking fighters and strike bombers out of their roles clearing the area, delaying the time when the CAS planes can operate unmolested. Let’s say you hold them back and leave your fighters and strike bombers to their role. Maybe for particular missions you send a strike bomber as emergency CAS; it’s not as good, but it’s there. Day 2 you can send in the CAS planes over limited areas, while the fighters mop up enemy air, and the strike bombers expand the area that’s free of SAMs. Land forces won’t move as far, so you’re probably okay with the coverage. That expands. Day x, the enemy airforce is effectively out of planes. SAMs hide better so they still have AA threats, which means your strike bombers are busy hitting them, and your CAS doesn’t have free access all over yet. It also means your strike bombers can’t yet concentrate on taking out strategic assets, because that will get your CAS pilots killed, and that will get your ground troops killed. It also means you now have 500 fighters sitting around mostly useless, and your effective air force is only 600 planes. But you can’t really send them home because that would leave your slower planes vulnerable to counter-attack by one of your enemy’s allies, or even a small force of fighters they managed to hide from you. Day y and up, there are few enough SAMs for the CAS planes to fly just about anywhere with only limited strike bomber coverage to deter what remains. Most of the strike bombers are now able to hit more valuable targets, and your ground troops can advance faster under excellent air cover. Throughout this you’ve supported 1100 planes, their pilots, their maintainers, and support staff to protect, house, feed, etc. them.
 
Contrast that with 900 multi-role aircraft. (They are more expensive, so you have less of them. Not a problem, as we’ll see.) On day 1 you have 400 planes armed as fighters and 500 armed as strike bombers (or whatever mix is most appropriate to the specific threat). The strike bombers may not be ideally configured for it that day, but they’re also able to go against fighters if they have to; they are the same airframe as the fighters, and “fighter” is also within their normal mission scope. And the enemy fighters know it; they’re not as quick to attack as they would be against slow bombers. Without as much need for dedicated fighter escort it’s not a problem to have fewer fighters, and enemy air is neutralized even faster. And at least the 500 armed for air-to-ground are probably able to do emergency CAS too since it’s a normal part of their mission profile. Your ground forces move under available air cover the whole time and your advance is much faster. They’re able to take out some SAM sites from the ground, freeing your strike bombers to take them out deeper into the country and balancing the emergency use of some of them for CAS. Day 2 you swap 200 planes from the fighter role to dedicated CAS; they may not be quite as good as a purpose-built CAS plane would be individually, but once the need for fighters is reduced you have up to 400 of them, whereas with purpose-built you’re limited to the 100 you have. Moreover, your CAS are indistinguishable from your stealth strike bombers, so the remaining SAMs are afraid to / unable to target them until they’ve proven they’re CAS by destroying some of their ground forces in close battles, at which point it’s too late to save their ground troops with a SAM. And they are the same airframes that have been attacking the SAMs so they’re not exactly helpless against them either, something purpose-built CAS can’t say for themselves. Day x the enemy is out of opposing planes, about the same as the other scenario, so you split most of the remaining fighters between CAS and strike bombers, maybe keeping a handful ready as fighters just in case. Strategic targets fall even faster, and the ground advance is unimpeded. Day y (which is sooner than day y in the other scenario) the conflict intensity has gone down significantly. You send a lot of the strike bombers to the CAS role. Enemy ground forces take a vicious pounding and your ground forces advance across the country. Very quickly thereafter, you retire most of the planes from the theater; since any of them can be configured as fighters, you don’t need to leave 500 dedicated fighters there to deter counter-attack or in case of hidden air assets being brought to bear. Also, being supersonic fighters at heart, each CAS plane can respond to emergencies much faster than purpose-built CAS could, so each one can cover a much larger patrol area than a purpose-built slow CAS plane. So once the ground front isn’t active all over all the time, you can retire most of the CAS and have a smaller number of total planes respond over the same area. For the entire rest of the war you have a force of 300 planes in leisurely rotation, all able to provide CAS, deter your enemy’s allies, and bomb pop-up SAMs or strategic targets of opportunity. You can send home the logistics needed to support the other 600 too. The war has ended faster, with fewer friendly casualties since you had CAS from day 1, and hundreds more planes to do CAS once the air war was won. And it was all much cheaper too since you can maintain a ready-if-needed force of 300 fighters, 300 strike bombers, and 300 CAS after the intensity dies down, with only 300 planes. And not only lose the logistics of supporting 600 more, but since you had 200 fewer airframes to start with, you were already saving the costs of 200 pilots, 200 ground crews, and all the logistics personnel and supply line to support them.

@Free Current  
As much as I love the A-10, it’s not particularly good at its current job. It seems good only because there’s nothing genuinely good to compare it to. For example, why are we firing a 30mm anti-tank gun that costs $27 per round at pickup trucks and camels? Because we don’t have a similar plane with a bank of .50BMGs or 7.62mms. Why are we burning large amounts of fuel using jet engines at low altitude? Because we don’t have a similar plane driven by a prop. Why do we need to have a lot of them, patrolling small areas and burning that fuel for long periods? Because they’re too slow to provide cover to larger areas. Why aren’t they forward-deployed all over the world? Because they can’t survive modern SAMs, they can only go into relatively uncontested areas, or areas that have been cleaned of anti-aircraft threats.
 
For cutting down columns of Soviet tanks in the 1970s and 80s, it was truly unrivaled. But there’s no more USSR, and for all the bluster the Russian Federation is (except for the fact that they inherited the USSR’s leftover nuclear weapons) a secondary regional power with a third world economy. There are no more columns of Soviet tanks that may come rolling through the Fulda Gap. So since we have the A-10s, and we just don’t have anything better at CAS yet, we use them for CAS. While they burn too much fuel for the role, they burn less fuel at the task than the four enormous engines of the B-1B, the eight engines of the B-52, or even the one larger/lower bypass engine of the F-16 (or the two of those engines in the F-15). While its 30mm rounds aren’t appropriate to any target they’ve engaged since we took out Saddam Hussein 14 years ago, its rivals all mount 20mm anti-aircraft canons that aren’t really that much better. While the B-1, F-15, F-16, and F-18 (and even the B-52 though to a lesser extent) can respond over much larger patrol areas, they burn so much more fuel doing it that it’s not a clear cost savings to have them do so. And while a genuine purpose-built CAS plane would do the job much better and cheaper, the A-10 presents a clear cost savings in that: it’s already designed, already tested, and we’ve already developed advanced methods for its use and maintenance; and we already have them in inventory so we don’t need to buy them (though we do need to buy new wings for them all due to metal fatigue).

@Blissey1  
Sadly it will get replaced eventually, with something that’s not as good at the job. DOD is too focused these days on multirole planes.

J model… Pfff.

@bronytanker  
realistically, even the most loved planes eventually get replaced. That said, the C-130 won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

Oh it’s cute.

@bronytanker  
do you tnink they’ll ever replace the A-10?

@Background Pony #91C2  
do you think the military will ever replace the Hercules?

@bronytanker  
Yeah, Coast Guard too. The Gremlins version is in development at darpa to be used as an airborne aircraft carrier for drone swarms.

@Not-Immortal  
The C-130, the true all purpose workhorse of the Air Force.

@bronytanker  
If you can think of a role, the C-130 has filled it, dude.

@Background Pony #91C2  
never heard of the gremlin model tbh, wasn’t there also a search and rescue model as well?

@bronytanker  
Don’t forget the soon to be “gremlin” version.

@Blissey1  
if I remember right there is the cargo version; a tanker version, a weather version, and of course the “Spooky” gunship; to name a few.

man jsut how many planes has the c-130 chasis been used for?

HOLY SHIT WHAT A QT EEEEE

I like her.