The Air Force Isn't Ready to Replace the A-10

Would you rather have a Swiss Army knife or a tire iron? Context is, of course, everything, so imagine that your car has been getting flats like crazy, and the Swiss Army knife costs three times as much as the tire iron. Facing a round of deep budget cuts, the Department of Defense is opting for the Swiss Army knife, which is why it's planning to ground the A-10 Thunderbolt II—called the “Air Force’s most effective weapon”—in favor of long-delayed, over budget, under performing F-35, known as “the stealth fighter…designed for no one.”

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel released a budget proposal to shrink the size of the armed forces to their smallest size in decades. Under the budget as proposed, the Air Force’s entire fleet of 350 A-10s would be retired in order to save $3.5 billion over five years, and its former combat roles will be handed over to the newer F-35 joint strike fighter and the growing drone fleet.

“The A-10 is a 40-year-old single-purpose airplane originally designed to kill enemy tanks on a Cold War battlefield,” Hagel said. “It cannot survive or operate effectively where there are more advanced aircraft or air defenses.”

That’s mostly true. The A-10 was designed for a single purpose—close air support for troops on the ground. According to Pierre Sprey, one of the A-10’s designers and one of its most vocal defenders, designing a plane directly for the mission supporting ground troops had never been done before or since.

As profiled by Andrew Cockburn in Harper’s, Sprey was a mathematics prodigy who was admitted to Yale at the age of 14 and believed that close ground support was the most effective way to use the Air Force. This view, Cockburn writes, made him an outlier amongst Air Force leadership that was interested in long-range bombers and air superiority won through dogfighting, but in order keep “close air support” from falling to the Army and its helicopters, the Air Force tapped Sprey to help design a cheaper, Air Force alternative.

Thus the A-10 Thunderbolt II was born. It was designed to fly slow—between 200 and 300 knots—and low, below cloud cover. The cockpit was designed to both protect the pilot and give him maximum visibility for identifying camouflaged threats to friendly infantry on the ground. It's a shit-kicker, capable of taking off from short dirt strips and with redundancy built into the controls so it can be flown even after taking damage from the ground. All advantages that come from designing the right tool for the job.

Although its official nickname is the “Thunderbolt II”—named for the first “Thunderbolt,” a World War II fighter called the P-47 that provided Patton close air support as he marched across France in 1944—the A-10’s looks earned it the affectionate nickname of the Warthog. Its performance on the battlefield made it one of the most beloved airplanes in the military.

Major Daniel O’Hara, a Marine who led a platoon in Afghanistan, told PBS, “I have sort of found a soul mate, so to speak, in the A-10.” He went on to explain how the A-10’s uniquely tailored skill set was a huge asset in Afghanistan, just as it had been in the early 1990s for General Schwarzkopf during Operation Desert Storm. The Air Force announced that the 60 A-10s that had flown in Iraq had an 86 percent mission success rate.

So the A-10, like a tire iron, was designed for one thing, did that one thing really well whenever needed, which, as it turns out, was pretty often. But in the interest of keeping costs low, the Air Force is phasing out the tire iron in favor of using the multipurpose F-35, and providing close air support with airplanes like the B-1, a $300 million supersonic bomber designed for nuking Moscow, and drones.

The F-35’s development has already cost taxpayers $400 billion, but still, to call the fighter underwhelming would be putting it kindly. The F-35 is such a mess that the military keeps lowering its standards, even as the price rises ever higher. It's designed to replace the F/A-18 for the Navy, the F-16 for the Air Force, and the AV-8 Harrier for the Marines.

To meet all of these needs, compromises were made across the board, and the resulting fighter is too heavy to be a fighter, but not tough enough to replace the A-10. According to David Axe at Medium, one Australian military analyst-turned-politician claimed F-35s would be “clubbed like baby seals” in combat.

During the first Gulf War, A-10s decimated Iraqi armor and truck conveys while flying out of “hasty bases,” improvised dirt strips. Don’t expect the F-35 to do the same. "The idea of landing on a beach and supporting your troops close up from some improvised airfield, à la Guadalcanal, is not going to happen." retired Air Force chief of staff Merrill McPeak told Time magazine, in reference to the F-35.

It would seem like the only place the F-35 is adequate replacement for the A-10 would be in the Air Force budget, except that its far more expensive—$131.9 million per plane, versus an inflation-adjusted $20 million per A-10. You might think that a joint-strike aircraft would be cheaper, but according to the Rand Corporation, it’s historically been cheaper to just buy three separate types of planes. The price difference extends throughout the life of the aircraft as well. The Air Force estimates the F-35 will cost $31,900 per flight hour, compared to the A-10's $17,716.

The decision doesn’t make much sense to Sprey. “You are going to buy extremely expensive aircraft that causes you a much worse financial problem,” Sprey told PBS, “and you are canning the cheapest airplane you operate…saving a trivial amount of money.”

The less expensive option is using drones for close air support. The cost per flight hour of a Predator drone is just $3,769. However, as Cockburn’s piece illustrates, drone technology and cameras just aren’t there yet.

“Technology is good, but the problem with using that technology, especially the optical stuff, is that it’s like looking through a soda straw,” retired Lt. Col. Bill Smith told PBS. “So imagine you hold a straw up to your eye, and that’s how you have to view the whole battlefield.”

The "soda straw" thing comes up every where that unmanned aircraft are compared to the A-10. This limited perspective has had consequences. In Afghanistan's Paktia Province near the Pakistan border in May 2012,even as A-10 pilots were telling their Joint Terminal Attack Controller that there were no targets on the ground, Cockburn reports, a B-1 strike was called in to blow up what turned out to be a farm, killing the farmer, his wife, and five of their seven children.

The A-10 was designed to give its pilots visibility, which is why the pilots were able to see a farm with their naked eyes and binoculars, while JTAC saw a target.

The F-35 was designed for flying really high, and really fast, invisible to enemy radar, which are things it does better than the A-10. Even though it was designed as an all-purpose fighter, the other thing it does better than the A-10 is suck down huge amounts of funding.

The F-35 program is estimated to cost $1.5 trillion, but Lockheed Martin claims that the program supports 125,000 jobs in 46 different states, which remains a big selling point for the program in Congress, even as a report from the Center for International Policy estimates that the number of jobs created is, in reality, closer to 50,000-60,000.

The smaller Pentagon budget is about scaling down after two long, costly occupations, and an aircraft designed for close ground support implies that there will be troops on the ground, something the armed forces as a whole is stepping back from. The DoD is betting that it won't need to do so in the near future.

But if you're sacrificing some amount of preparedness to save money, shouldn't you, you know, actually save some money? Likewise, when you go to replace a tool, it's worth making sure you have a worthy replacement, lest you find yourself on a remote road, chipping at a flat with your Swiss Army can opener.