Air Force Finally Makes Progress In Its Long Standing Effort To Retire The A-10

The A-10 Warthog

The A-10 Warthog is a U.S. Air Force fixed wing ground attack fighter optimized for close air support of ground troops which entered service in 1977. The Air Force has been trying to rid itself of this model of fighter aircraft which is more than 45 years old, although key components have been upgraded over the years, for a long time. 

But Congress has until very recently strong resisted this effort, even though the A-10 is admittedly an old design, and even though fighter aircraft admittedly age much more quickly than bomber aircraft. 

Congress has resisted this effort because the Air Force has largely neglected its obligation to its sister service, the U.S. Army, to come up with a successor aircraft to provide the close air support for ground troops that the A-10 has provided.

For example, "Shortly after the [1991] Gulf War, the Air Force abandoned the idea of replacing the A-10 with a close air support version of the F-16."

The Air Force has responded to this criticism with the claim that the F-35A has filled the close air support mission requirements that the A-10 filled, but this claim is dubious at best. 

Dropping guided bombs from very high altitudes is not really "close air support" even though it may suffice to destroy enemy tanks, fixed bases, and other heavy military systems. The F-35A dropping guided bombs from high altitude isn't a very workable tool against dismounted infantry, for example. Ground troops in battles where friendly and enemy forces are close to each other want the assurance that close air support firepower is utilized by someone who can visually confirm their targets. An F-35A has too high a stall speed and burns through its fuel too quickly to operate on a sustained basis above a small battlefield where slow moving ground troops are engaged. The F-35A, because its stealth, its supersonic speeds, and its multiple functions make it so expensive (more than $110 million per plane to buy and $7.1 million per year per plane to operate), is ill suited to efficiently fighting wars of attrition. And, the F-35A, because its stealth feature makes it fragile and requires special maintenance equipment at its air fields, isn't very well suited to working out of rugged field airstrips on a sustained basis. Also, a fighter operating at altitudes so high that it is invulnerable to surface to air missiles also can't serve the A-10's role of deterring enemy ground troops from engaging at all by providing a visible "show the flag" type imminent threat to enemy ground troops who choose to engage despite the availability of highly lethal close air support. 

The AT-802U Sky Warden

The Air Force also touts the small fleet of AT-802U Sky Warden (a.k.a. the OA-1K) propeller-driven armed reconnaissance planes (which are a modification of a crop dusting aircraft design that debuted in 1990) in the hand of Special Forces operators that ordered up to 75 of them 2022 at a price of $40 million per plane, although the initial buy is of just six of them to replace an existing light spy plane.

The planes are intended to perform armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions at low cost in permissive environments from austere locations, and will allow SOCOM to remove the aging U-28A Draco from combat service. The Sky Warden can deploy guided weapons including the APKWS rocket, GBU-12 laser-guided bomb, and Hellfire and Griffin missiles; it has a six-hour loiter time at a 200 nmi (230 mi; 370 km) radius.

But these light attack aircraft, while better than nothing and suitable for counterinsurgency missions in which the insurgents are particularly ill armed, are far less capable than the A-10. They are not genuine close air support aircraft.

The A-29B Super Tucano

The Air Force ordered the Sky Wardens after having done its best to squelch, reducing funding for, and divest itself of the Brazilian A-29B Super Tucano attack aircraft equipped to drop smart bombs that it launched a competition to procure. Originally, the U.S. Air Force had planned to buy of 100 light attack aircraft for U.S. military after a fly off between competing designs in 2012. The U.S. military never end up buying any of its own, and instead ultimately, the Air Froce it bought 20 of them for a light attack mission for the Air Force of Afghanistan in 2013 for $21 million per plane Some of these planes were used by their pilots to flee the country in the fall of Kabul in August of 2021, at least one crashed, and some them were seized by the new Taliban regime in 2021. Operationally, in this and other conflicts with other operators, it has been used mostly in an anti-personnel strike role.

The AH-64 Apache

In response to the Air Force's neglect of the close air support mission, the Army has developed organic helicopter gunships like the AH-64 Apache, which entered service in 1986, to carry out the role that the fixed wing A-10 filled, even though helicopters have a shorter operational range than fixed wing aircraft (476 km for the Apache v. 1287 km for for the Warthog v. 1850 km for a Reaper drone), have a lower cruising speed (265 km/hr for the Apache v. 560 km/hr for the Warthog v. 280-310 km/hr for a Reaper drone), are less fuel efficient, require more maintenance which is particular pressing for military systems that operate on the front lines of ground warfare battles, and are less robust in the face of enemy fire. 

For example, during the 1991 Gulf War:

[A] total of 277 AH-64s took part, destroying 278 tanks, numerous armored personnel carriers and other Iraqi vehicles, for a total of over 500 kills. One AH-64 was lost in the war, crashing after a close range rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit, the crew survived While effective in combat, the AH-64 presented serious logistical difficulties. Findings reported in 1990 stated "maintenance units could not keep up with the Apache's unexpectedly high work load."

The AH-64 played roles in the Balkans during separate conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. 

During Task Force Hawk, 24 Apaches were deployed to a land base in Albania in 1999 for combat in Kosovo. These required 26,000 tons of equipment to be transported over 550 C-17 flights, at a cost of US$480 million. During these deployments, the AH-64 encountered problems, such as deficiencies in training, night vision equipment, fuel tanks, and survivability.

According to a Boeing official quoted in an October 10, 2022 news report about a proposed final upgraded version of the AH-64 to an AH-64F version:

The Apache is going to be the US Army’s principal attack helicopter for the next 25 to 30 years. There’s nothing right now that is on the books that’s going to replace the Apache[.]

The U.S. Army, however, "is still fielding the most recent AH-64E Apache Version 6, which it said in a Jan. 2022 news release is “the final planned modernization of the aircraft, replacing the AH-64D Apache attack helicopters.”" 

In December of 2022, "After years of testing and deliberation, the US Army has made the US$1.3-billion decision to select the Bell V-280 Valor tilt-rotor craft to replace the Army's 2,000 UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters and 1,200 AH-64 Apache assault helicopters. The new development contract for the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program is part of the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR TD) program that was initiated in 2013 to design, build, and flight test prototype candidates to replace the Army's current inventory of utility and long-range assault rotorcraft." The Army plans to have the V-280 enter service in the year 2030.

The MQ-9 Reaper

The Air Force has also suggested using unmanned armed drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper which entered service in 2007 to take up some of the A-10's close air support role. Despite having armaments powerful enough to destroy tanks, this armed drone has been used predominantly in an anti-personnel and assassination mode over the course of its operational history.

The Air Force's claim that it doesn't want to have new fixed wing close air support aircraft because it is vulnerable to surface to air missiles falls flat, despite the fact that it has suffered some losses to anti-aircraft fire. 

Even more vulnerable Army helicopter gunships are now routinely used in the same role. And conflicts in which there is uncontested airspace, have been the norm rather than the exception for most of the global conflicts since World War II. It served in the 1991 Gulf War, in Bosnia in 1994-1995, in Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan starting in 2002 after the initial invasion, in Iraq starting in 2003, and in Libya in 2011, and in northern Iraq and in Syria against ISIS in 2014-2015.

The A-10s track record has also shown that it has consistently outperformed rivals for the same mission, like helicopter gunships and main battle tanks in its original mission of destroying enemy armored forces, well into very recent military conflicts, although it did suffer significant losses from anti-aircraft fire in the 1991 Gulf War.  For example, A-10s destroyed 987 tanks and thousands of other military vehicles in the Gulf War.

The Air Force leadership's conclusion that ground warfare in which the U.S. and its allies have air superiority are irrelevant relative to need to defend Taiwan from a PRC invasion flies in the face of several decades of recent military history and is short sighted. 

Whether the kind of wars where a fixed wing close air support aircraft would be useful are the kinds of wars that the Air Force would like to fight or not, U.S. political leaders have repeatedly chosen to engage in these kinds of conflicts and there is no good reason to believe that they will stop doing so in the foreseeable future. The A-10 itself is a product of the Air Force learning that lesson once during the Vietnam War. But, the Air Force is now intent on forgetting those lessons once again in favor of the whims of the "fighter mafia" that drives its procurement decisions.

Also, the U.S. military has a bigger budget and more modern fixed wing aircraft than any other country on Earth. No country in the world has less of a need to have one size fits all multi-purpose warplanes. It has a fleet large enough to allow it to benefit from manufacturing economies of scale even if it is making multiple kinds of warplanes.

It is cheaper to build a warplane that does not have to serve multiple disparate missions, and instead is optimized for just one or two missions, without sacrificing competence in those missions. 

The U.S. military can afford to have separate aircraft for air superiority missions, long and short range bombing in wars with near peers, close air support, counterinsurgency bombing, ship based fighter aircraft, and homeland security missions. Some of those missions call for aircraft close in cost to the F-22 and F-35, but many of those missions could be performed as well or better at a fraction of the aircraft procurement and operational costs with more specialized aircraft that lack expensive capabilities that aren't needed for their specialized missions. 

Aircraft with fewer missions that are less demanding can also be designed and fielded more quickly, with less risk of technological glitches along the way, allowing a greater percentage of U.S. aircraft to be more modern than they are when they are bottlenecked around a technologically ambitious ultimate weapon that requires defense contracts to achieve capabilities never before achieved in multiple domains before the new aircraft can be fielded.

In short, while the A-10 is almost half a century old and due to be replaced, the Air Force continues to shirk its duty to the Army to develop a modern successor to the A-10 in the specialized close air support role, but has declined to do so for reasons that don't hold water upon close inspection.

The Air Force wants to speed up the retirement of its remaining A-10 Warthogs to fund new weapons it says are better suited to counter China.

Service leaders have long sought to eliminate the almost half-century old plane, which has been repeatedly saved by lawmakers who argue that no other aircraft can protect ground troops so well. But after two decades of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. no longer has a large number of ground forces deployed. The Air Force expects the battles of the future to be won by newer technology — including hypersonic missiles and stealth warplanes.

“I would say over the next five, six years we will actually probably be out of our A-10 inventory,” Gen. CQ Brown, the Air Force chief of staff, said Tuesday at an Air Force Association conference in Aurora, Colorado. The Biden administration is poised to send its 2024 budget proposal to Congress in the coming days. Earlier in the day, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the service wants to speed up new aircraft buys in 2024 and continue to retire older aircraft as it aims to “increase midterm capability and capacity.” After years of rejections, Congress approved the Air Force’s request to retire 21 A-10s this year. “We're gonna continue down that path,” Brown said, until the remaining 250 or so A-10s are gone.

He said combatant commanders—the generals and admirals who oversee U.S. military operations in different regions of the world—are not asking for A-10s. He noted that the A-10 is a single-mission aircraft and because fighters and bombers, equipped with satellite-and-laser-guided bombs, have been proven in close air support. While Brown said the A-10 is a “great airplane in an uncontested environment,” Air Force leaders say the twin-jet is too vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles.

“We cannot predict the future of what kind of environment we're gonna fight in, but [we] fully expect to be much more contested. The amount of close air support we will do will probably be less than what we've done in the past, particularly in the Middle East because [in] that environment, we didn’t have an air threat, or a surface to air threat,” Brown said. “From that perspective, we’ve got to lean towards where the threat is.”

The A-10 was originally designed to destroy Soviet tank columns with its signature nose-mounted 30-millimeter cannon. Over the past year, Ukraine has reportedly asked U.S. leaders for 100 A-10s to help in its fight against Russia.

U.S. Special Operations Command is buying a fleet of propeller-driven attack planes to support troops on the ground.

From here.