The AV-8B isn’t in the US tree so doesn’t exist and so isn’t currently an option, the only Harriers in the US tree are at 9.7 so it would actually be dragging them up.
And anyway the very rare 11.7 downtier to 10.7 can be advantageous since you can only see at most 4x Pantsirs at a time.
No, actually I was talking about getting a functional(access to a Targeting pod / Laser designator) Strike Airframe for the 10.0~11.7(Technically could go as low as 8.7~11.7 with the B-57G Tropic Moon III, or OV-10) gap, in the Tech tree. As currently The US entirely lacks Tech tree options below 12.0 for unknown reasons (its totally not to force sales of an overpriced premium, still waiting on its tech tree counterpart, that was promised) even though there a number of options that would only need to be refit with already implemented stores.
I can’t wait for the eventual F-111D / -E / -F to inexpiably also be 12.0.
Considering they are GPS guided glide bombs (potentially with a SALH terminal seeker, with the -39B/B) that isn’t so much an issue since altitude can be traded for range and their glide ratio is easily ~1:20 or greater and so even a release as low as 1 km of altitude they can reach out to 20km, which outranges all currently implemented SAM systems.
And the fact that the Targeting pod can be used to generate GPS coordinates, and perform terminal guidance as needed means that static positions are going to be very risky, and with up to 16 of them you will have the advantage in terms of magazine depth (up to 16x of them) so can exhaust them all as well, even if they manage to successfully intercept them all.
the A-4E isn’t even that hard to combat… Most nations have something to counter it. Also doesn’t have insanely overpowered AA players on their side to prevent them from being touched… It is very different.
Russia has had 60-80% winrates for years, last time Germany had a winrate higher than 50% was 2020 for about 2-3 months until their new Leopard got nerfed…