@TCUTiger needs to jump in here. The A-10 is just a flat out bad ass. Remember all this pictures of that long line of blower up shit from desert storm? Yep, the hogs got em. And yes, those things can be beat to hell, shot up, shit missing, broke, leaking and still make it home.
Look here sugar bean. I already said the A10 was badass. From a pilot's perspective though, this is hard to beat....
A-10 great, A-4 Great, but the F-4...beyond great. You could see that black exhaust for miles...the sight of freedom. Heavy duty bad ass. Those guys used to come over, and I mean right over my head standing on the bridge wing, when we were in plane guard, 1000 yards behind CV. Never saw the A-4 in the pattern, they were gone by then, but they were cool, small, and agile. Oh, sorry the article insulted cockroaches. The AF pukes want fighters, fighters, and more fighters, how the AF works.
Love the F4 One of my favorite cadences F4 phantom flying low and mean drop that napalm listen to em scream
My first deployment in the USAF was to Guam. B52H's sat "alert" the entire time the hostages were in Iran. I was "lucky" to be in the Persian Gulf the day Ronald Reagan took over for the "marsh mellow" known as Jimmy Carter. We flew 37 hours, escorted by 4 F14's (Jolly Rogers), 4 A-6's, and an E-2. Iranians thinking we had no escort (Tomcats under our inboard engines), launched 4 Phantoms that turned and ran at about 35 miles. We dropped into an orbit about 100 miles off the coast until we heard they had been freed. The two carriers supporting us were the Ranger and Independence.
That "squadron", The Cajuns were the other half of the 917th Fighter Wing at Barksdale. In Desert Storm they were led by future BG Bobby Efferson also an LSU graduate and very distinguished USAF/USAFR career.
I grew up next to a Air Force base and went to about two airshows a year. I was all over that base for one reason or another as a youth. One day around 1965, the F-100 wing shipped out to Vietnam and was replaced with an F-4 wing training up in a hot, humid environment to eventually deploy themselves. I had been used to these elegant, shiny polished aluminum F-100s and suddenly they had these huge, noisy, ugly-ass jets out there with dark drab camouflage looking really sinister just sitting out there on the ramp. It didn't look like it could fly and it damn sure couldn't maneuver like the F-100's. But they hauled a ridiculously huge load of iron bombs and when they were clean, they could haul ass like nothing I'd ever seen. It didn't take long to become a fan.