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Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents


One of the most effective combat aircraft gets pushed aside for one yet to serve.

US Air Force


Known for its survivability, the A-10 is capable of flying with half a wing, one tail fin, one elevator, and one engine torn off. It’s also cheaper to fly and can fly more frequent missions than the aircraft that the Air Force proposes to replace it with: the F-35. But because of its low glamor and low-tech nature, the A-10 is assigned largely to Air National Guard squadrons these days. So with the Department of Defense now planning to re-shuffle the roles of reserve and Guard units in a shrinking fighting force, the A-10s are an easy target for the budget knife. The Air Force announced in January that it would eliminate a third of the existing A-10s in its inventory—102 aircraft—with the remainder to go when the F-35 finally arrives for service. The new plan will retire the entire A-10 fleet.

The A-10 was originally built in the early 1970s, and it was designed to combat Soviet tank columns with its enormous seven-barrel 30-millimeter Gatling-gun cannon. Known for its pugnacious looks as the “Warthog,” the A-10 could also carry a variety of guided and unguided weapons, and it proved its usefulness against a wide range of enemies while flying close air support for troops in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force reported that the 60 A-10s that flew in Iraq had an 86 percent mission success rate.

Today, there are two arguments for cutting the A-10. The first argument from the Air Force is that in an era of shrinking budgets and pared-down ambitions, the military needs a more flexible, multi-role aircraft to do more jobs—not an airplane that's perfect for a smaller number of them. But considering the troubles that the F-35 has faced and the fact that not a single squadron of any of the variants of the F-35 has yet to be fielded, the wisdom of the Pentagon’s aircraft calculus is open to debate.

The F-35 is being built in three variants—one for the Air Force, one for the Navy, and a "jump jet" version for the Marine Corps. It has had a litany of woes in testing. A high-tech helmet that replaces nearly all the aircraft's instrumentation had problems with "jitter" on its display, which forced an investment in a backup plan that was eventually discarded. More recently, discoveries of cracks in a significant number of parts in the F-35s currently being tested led to the grounding of all the aircraft. A report by J. Michael Gilmore, the DOD's director of Operational Test and Evaluation, stated that the F-35 is not ready for combat. The aircraft's “overall suitability performance continues to be immature and relies heavily on contractor support and workarounds unacceptable for combat operations,” Gilmore wrote.

The second argument against the A-10 is that the close air support mission, once provided almost exclusively by manned aircraft like the Warthog, can now be served more effectively by drones like the MQ-9 Reaper and the Army’s MQ-1C Grey Eagle. Drones can stay on station for 14 hours or more with a full load of weapons—the Reaper can carry up to 3,000 pounds of missiles and laser-guided bombs. While the A-10 can carry more than four times that payload in addition to over a thousand rounds of 30-millimeter ammunition, it can only loiter overhead for about two hours before it needs to refuel.

Drones fill in some of the gaps left by the F-35 in terms of capabilities, but they don’t begin to match what the Air Force currently gets from the A-10. That appears to be a shortfall that the military leadership is willing to live with in order to keep the F-35 program alive. The Army is being cut back in size to numbers not seen since before the US entered World War II, according to the Times, and the Pentagon is betting against having to fight another land war on the scale of the Gulf War and the war in Iraq. If the Pentagon doesn’t expect to mount another invasion against a heavily armed and entrenched adversary, having the kind of firepower the A-10 provides on hand to support major ground operations might seem excessive.

That decision may be driven more by budget than by geopolitical strategy. But it’s sure to be one that runs into resistance from many quarters—including reality. The last time the US tried to cash in on a “peace dividend”—at the end of the Cold War—the military almost instantly faced a major conflict in Iraq. The rest is history—a nearly constant demand for military air operations all the way up to the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Update: Secretary Hagel outlined the plans for the A-10 in his remarks yesterday as follows:

Moreover, the A-10’s age is also making it much more difficult and costly to maintain. Significant savings are only possible through eliminating the entire fleet, because of the fixed cost of maintaining the support apparatus associated with the aircraft. Keeping a smaller number of A-10s would only delay the inevitable while forcing worse trade-offs elsewhere.

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