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...Which is why the A-10 is a thing? The AAA guns the thing is built to face-tank also utterly screw over helicopters. The point is that the military still finds a much worse CAS option to be worth dumping far more money into, so the professional military with vast reams of data wildly outside...

Then why is the Army dumping truckloads into modernizing helicopters? Barely off the ground and hovering. And it doesn't need to be the exact same layout but upgraded, it can do literally anything that's technically possible; we're talking a hypothetical from-scratch successor. Also, with...

I did point out that it was primarily an issue with naval cruise missiles, but the supply bottleneck remains a serious problem. Because missiles are expensive. Anything that'd call for a "tactical bomber" is a degree of ordnance usage rate that is not sustainable. You're talking a successor to...

The US military already struggles to afford having a single load on a lot of missile systems (mostly naval cruise missiles, admittedly), and you want to have CAS replaced with something lugging around hundreds of the things? You want to replace CAS with a heavy bomber? Again, the A-10 is...

Per-sortie price tag, in other words because it is efficient, even if it's slightly more risky. A gattling strafe is going to be a couple hundred rounds at most. Each of those two missiles costs a sizable fraction of the platform firing them. Hell, a fighter-bomber is quite able to carry...

My main thought is going for sort of a jet-based tiltrotor-like system in a heavily stealth-formed airframe capable of transsonic or low-mach speeds for getting in and out of the engagement zone as the situation demands, basically try to form it around being quite usable in the role of an attack...