And yet the demand for fixed-wing gunships remained high throughout the war and they developed the AC-119 and AC-130 in response to this demand during Vietnam because of their excellent response time, accuracy, stamina, and firepower compared to any other CAS option, and a similar demand remained throughout Desert Storm and other operations.
Because America keeps fighting against people with inferior firepower. While Madman would be led to believe, Vietnamese did not posses huge amounts of SAMs or even active conventional anti-air weaponry where the actual fighting was taking place for the most of the war, keeping it around the Northern Vietnam. The gunships were capable of operating relatively un-bothered until they weren't, and that's when the trouble started.
If we're going to be cherry picking events I could also cite Grim 31, an AC-130 which survived a Shilka in 2002.
I mean, I am sure that more of those gunships have survived near-death incidents, but the problem is that they have to get lucky to do so, while the enemy needs to be really unlucky to not shoot them down. If anything, taking in account Cannalan and Forenian luck, we're the unlucky party.
Also, consider this, there were multiple AC-130s shoot down by 37mm cannons.
37MM CANNONS FROM WORLD FUCKING WAR TWO. If American's newest magical air toy dies to what is essentially a slight upgrade over a squad of dudes with Mosins shooting at the sky, that probably could be bought for ten cows in some back-ass African country nowadays, there is a slight problem of cost effectiveness.
Besides that, anything that threatens a gunship would threaten our other ground attack aircraft almost equally. Is there really a situation where you need a gunship to destroy something, and some other aircraft we had would be any safer doing the job while being just as effective?
Other ground attack doesn't fucking circle somewhat slowly around the enemy position. It's showing giant fucking target, and it's flight path is predictable to extreme. The advantage of a gunship is easy time shooting things due to predictable trajectories, but the same applies in reverse - the enemy anti-aircraft is going to have field-fucking-day.
Right, forgot about that.
Maybe the AAM is the right choice, but I'd worry about friendly-fire incidents. We'd have to get sufficient radar and tracking range on these missiles to fire all the missiles before the enemy reaches the ground-combat lines. Otherwise the missiles become useless as the air battle takes place above them and they can't engage anything for fear of shooting down friendlies.
That's actually somewhat of a real problem, but I think this could be solved somehow. In reality the missiles lock down on a one target, so there would probably be someone aiming the missile at the planes he believes are enemy. There might still be a regular "just hit whatever" option when you're shooting with no friendles in the air, but I think that's roughly how it should be done. I might try to figure out some actual "tech" behind the guidance, even if I am extremly annoyed by it.