Retiring the A-10 controversy

Losing the A-10 isn’t really about the aircraft

Ethan Brown

Losing the iconic A-10 Warthog isn’t about the aircraft itself going away. Rather, it’s about what the loss of a platform dedicated to a core Air Force mission represents, and the myriad communities who are impacted. The Air Force is making good on its plan to divest the vaunted A-10, using the proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget as the mechanism to remove the close air support attack platform from its inventory.

Understandably, many in the veteran and defense communities are incensed at the services push to finally retire an aircraft whose legacy is peerless, even among the icons of American airpower. Countless servicemen and women – this author included – are alive today thanks in no small part to the seven-barrels-of-death the world knows as the GAU-8 Avenger. That’s overtly cannon-centric, of course, it’s not because of the gun itself, but because of the expertise of the pilot wielding that iconic gun and the titanium-tub built around the gun. The point being, countless American, coalition, and partner-force personnel are alive today because those slow, ugly, highly maneuverable and purpose-built aircraft were there to achieve immediate overmatch in a gunfight.

The A-10 represents something unique in American warfighting legacy: a platform built to specifically accomplish a narrow mission set to the near-exclusion of all else. Casual military history enthusiasts will know the story of how the Department of Defense needed a weapon to defeat the reactive armor of Soviet tanks, but no aircraft was built to carry the General Electric-made monstrosity known as the GAU-8. Thus, using the Energy-Maneuverability Principles codified by Major John Boyd and one of his Acolytes, Pierre Sprey, a long-time DoD civilian data analyst and program manager, the A-10 was designed to carry the massive tank-killing cannon into war.

The A-10 was crafted for the sole purpose of the ground force support mission, and by design it performed that role at an exceptionally high level, which is attributable to the characteristics of the aircraft: the wide wingspan, bubble canopy, low speed and ruggedized fuselage; these features also increased loiter time and made it far more effective at staring out the ground over ‘fast movers’ like the F-15 and F-16. Further, the A-10 embodied the traditional “SANDY” mission from its A-1 Skyraider forebearers of the Vietnam era: providing aircraft support for Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR). But in the modern era, the A-10 epitomized air power in the form of close air support.

From 2001-2021, no other mission in the Global War on Terror was more influential, or more important. And it’s a reality that too few people are aware of, that forward air controllers – the Air Force ground personnel who called in airstrikes from the A-10 –  carried this war on their backs. It is not sensational to state that the entire grand operation hung on their prowess. This is because GWOT was the CAS war: both Afghanistan and Iraq were permissive environments, with the need for flexible, precise, and reactive fires. And no community adapted to this environment as quickly as the joint fires community. The A-10 was perfectly designed to be the ultimate tool in this penultimate CAS war, while multiple other air power platforms replicated some of its success (like the vaunted AC-130 gunship), or were designed to operate in the specific climes and demands of these environments (like the proliferation of the MQ-1 and MQ-9 remote-piloted aircraft systems). But none of them truly compared to the A-10

But to the detriment of the close air support (CAS) mission, the greater community of joint fires experts – Air Force TACPs at the fore – are too emotionally committed to the A-10 platform, because the aircraft epitomized the mission of close air support.

The real concern is that the loss of this platform will mean a de-prioritization of the CAS mission by the Air Force... a decades-long precedent which the service falls back on whenever a ground war ends, and American military might retract from its last endeavor. It happened after Vietnam, where the divestment of the A-1 Skyraider would ultimately serve as partial initiative for the A-10’s creation. It happened after Desert Storm, when “effects-based warfare” became the prominent theory of airpower doctrine: precision air attacks at adversary nodes of power would follow established air superiority and enable the objective of strategic paralysis; this was largely dependent on stealth technology and long-range precision bombing, even though close air support featured prominently in 1991. And now, with the end of what history should recall as the CAS war, the A-10 is being sunset for good.

The A-10 itself, though it will forever be emblematic of the first great war of the 21st century, is only an icon for that generation of warfighters. And because that generation – again, many of whom owe their lives to that platform – is among those who argue on policy and strategy today, the emotionality is clouding judgment. The A-10 succeeded because Afghanistan and Iraq were permissive environments. Permissive meaning, minimal threat of enemy Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADS), and even those which belonged to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi military were defeated first through the Air Force’s primary missions: air superiority and suppression of enemy air defenses. Those two missions occur first in the air order of battle, because without their success, no CAS platform of any kind has a realistic chance of survival. That is, unless they are capable of operating in a high-threat environment and achieving some internal method of defeating or disrupting the IADS network.

In the future, in whatever war American airmen and ground forces find themselves fighting in, the environments are all but certain to be against peer adversaries, which means dense IADS and an adversarial Air Force which won’t simply roll over for the American air fleet as Iraq’s Air Force did in 2003. That war will be waged against far more technologically capable adversaries, with modernized capabilities. Asking the A-10 to operate in those environments would be akin to asking the A-1 Skyraider of Vietnam – itself an iconic legacy bird of CAS specialization – to fly into Desert Storm-era Iraq and perform CAS, but without the Air Superiority that comes before it.

Opponents to the A-10 retirement will argue that, of course, the Air Force (and Navy) will conduct the air superiority mission first as doctrine dictates, and the semi-permissive environment will follow suit, setting conditions for the A-10 to once again dominate the low-altitude blocks of that future fight. Those same voices will cite the A-10’s capability for austere, forward-landings and ruggedized survivability against anti-aircraft artillery. After all, one A-10 returned from a mission in Iraq after literal chunks were blown off the wing and tail frame.

But part and parcel to assess the viability of these capabilities comes down to the almighty dollar: what does it cost to maintain a fleet of aging A-10s that have an austere-operating capability which, simply, isn’t nearly as realistic in the wide expanse of the Indo-Pacific theater? According to a Government Accountability Report from 2022, for the peak years of the Global War on Terror (2011-2019), the A-10 failed to meet its Annual Mission Capable Goal every single year, and that’s when the aircraft was the lynchpin of major air operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Air Force and Navy spent approximately $13.6 billion to maintain a fleet of 1,355 aircraft – a significant portion of which went to the A-10 – and struggles to maintain these legacy aircraft.

While it can land and then take off again on austere airfields in limited capacity, it must be remembered that the maintenance and logistics trains must also be able to forward-stage and sustain out of those locations… the future fight will be driven by logistics as much as firepower. Once again, in the post-9/11 wars, logistics were perpetually at or near the front lines and entirely permissive. Such a phenomenon will not be achievable in a future conflict with a peer adversary. Air power platforms will need to be able to operate effectively from an offset – a safe base far from the front with its maintenance in tow – while being able to defeat or avoid moderate- to high-threat denied environments. It is this very reason that the seventy year-old B-52 remains worthy of constant upgrades and revisions where the A-10 does not; the B-52 can circumnavigate the globe with multiple aerial refuels and carries more munitions than a four-ship of A-10s. And it would do so in a future fight from its far-away safe airfields with its full sustainment package on hand to keep it fighting.

The CAS mission itself remains the concern for the joint fires community, and again, the retirement of the A-10 would appear to be another death knell for the mission’s prioritization. In the future, whatever and wherever the next conflict is, CAS will certainly not be the main event as it was during the post-9/11 wars. It will instead be a specific lever used to achieve high payoff benefits, or will apply the principles of mass, maneuver and the offensive at a time and place where it is feasible in the unlikely event that circumstances allow.

In short, the context of a future conflict comes down to the quality-versus-quantity debate, with American military might always choosing the quality option over adversarial quantity. But in the modern era of warfare, adversaries like China are pursuing both paradigms, while Russia has traditionally opted for quantity, but has learned in Ukraine that technology is a critical boon to augment its preferred doctrine of attritional warfare. In essence, that means preserving ones own combat power behind dense defenses in zone, building combat power over an extended length of time.

In a future conflict with either of these adversaries, attrition – loss of combat forces – will hurt the American military far more than our opposition. Thus, achieving greater survivability and precision effects to disrupt the adversaries buildup of forces behind intricate and comprehensive protective systems is critical, and that demands aircraft who are capable of realistically operating in a denied and non-permissive environment. It is for this reason that the A-10 is no longer viable as a CAS-only platform, dependent on permissive environments and forward-staged sustainment.

It must be understood that CAS, as a core Air Force mission, only occurs after air and space superiority and suppression of enemy air defenses have been achieved. But in future conflicts, even CAS will be dramatically different, as we can expect that absolute air superiority is extremely unlike. This means that the application of a ground-support air integration mission will be different from what we became accustomed to in the post-9/11 wars. Such a mission, when it comes, will likely be a decisive point in the conflict and it will demand a highly trained cohort of integration experts to ensure its success.

Therein lies the concern for the fires community: that divesting the main platform for close air support will mean that, when the day comes that CAS reassumes a prominent role, the Air Force will be forced to relearn the painful lessons of air power integration, only in that future instance, it will likely be a no-fail scenario where failure could be catastrophic. Those lessons are often learned through mishap and fratricide, and are the result of the Department of Defense forgetting how complex and difficult the mission is when its flying systems do not maintain a repository of knowledge, training, and commitment to that mission.

There are no silver bullets for SOCOM, DoD

Ethan Brown

The Department of Defense has a tech-obsession problem. It goes as far back as the rise of the American military industrial complex in World War II. Defense spending underwrote the complexity of the Cold War, pushing the Soviet Union towards financial ruin trying to pace a compounding arms race. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq inculcated this mindset of technological supremacy as the end-all of force development, with security architecture wholly dependent on advanced integrated systems requiring dominated battlespace.

The key phrase here: dominated battlespace. Everything which the American war machine needed for battlefield supremacy in counter-terror operations depended on systems that were never seriously challenged by an opponent capable of threatening the networks, infrastructure, and honeycomb installations that enabled our longest war.

And now, as we are looking towards the potential next conflict against a peer, or at least an adversary capable of challenging our basic capacity to operate, the defense enterprise continues to believe in silver bullets. There are no silver bullets, and the defense enterprises belief in singular systems overmatch above coherent strategy and force organization and preparation is the culprit for this mentality.

Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia, with a great deal of Western aid of course, has proven that there are no silver bullets. Winning a war requires volume, willpower, and no simple or easy solutions. Combined arms and adaptive tactics by a determined force are the key variable in this scenario: Ukraine (with Western aid) has adapted, Russia has consistently failed to do so, and failed to challenge the diversity of its opponent.

But as crisis looms in the Indo-Pacific, the American military enterprise remains fixated on the silver bullets of technological supremacy. While the technology gap remains important against an adversary like China, the failure in the Defense Department’s compounding investment in programs and projects—the silver bullets—it its own detriment.

What is the silver bullet(s)?

There are many, and like a Jack-of-all-trades, none of them are the singular solution to contending with a peer adversary. Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is one such tool. Not even the different services can unify effectively on a network of networks which can crosstalk and data-share from Army to Navy, to Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force. Hypersonic glide vehicles, a buzzword-garnering headline and useful information coup for our adversaries, strike fear into Western defense and academia for its impossibility to intercept by air-defense systems. Those same ultra-fast weapons are a fixation in Western weapons development as a result. Other strategic-level silver bullets like maritime vessels, new long-range vertical lift indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity programs like the F-35 round out the bandolier of silver bullets.

Those are strategic-level assets, which have a disjointed impact on the soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians and marines who are going to have to fight the literal war when it comes. Ukraine has taught valuable lessons on a state military’s reliance of strategic assets to resolve tactical problems, as noted by Matthew Arrol in a piece for the Modern War Institute last year:

“First, [Russia’s use of the Kinzhal hypersonic weapon in Delyatin] demonstrated the adversary’s reliance on strategic, expensive, low-density weapons, to achieve tactical effects against an operationally insignificant asset in the face of a difficult targeting environment.”

At the functional level, the endemic of faulty acquisitions, poorly managed requirements generation, and decreased emphasis on warfighter preparation for the next conflict are just as prevalent as those strategic level programs.

Resolving the problem

There are three main components to addressing this issue. First, correcting unclear requirements being generated by developers who are not the end-user device operators. Trust shooters to develop the tools to shoot, especially since the defense enterprise is no longer perpetually cycling units into places like Afghanistan. The systems are built to requirements established by people who don’t understand the needs of the end-user. This shouldn’t exist within an elite organization such as the Special Operations Command, but remains damned by the stove piping of offices, program managers, and information sharing.

Second, focusing on the strategic tools and foregoing management of the human inventory are certain to create a security apparatus that, when the tech-tools fail, will have limited operators capable of holding the line. More money spent on the tech means reduced development of warfighters who are far more likely to innovate solutions and carry out commanders’ intent on the battlefield.

Third, and perhaps most controversial, is the limited playing field of commercial enterprises who provide the ‘silver bullets’ to the defense enterprise. The DoD fails to engage smaller businesses who are more inclined to meet explicit requirements via innovation, because innovative and cost-effective deliveries are the only option for venture capital/small businesses looking to enter the industrial complex. Many of those small defense business enterprises are looking to deliver a singular component or deliverable, sell the proprietary data to DoD, and fade from business forever having made their lone sale. It’s the nature of the business.

Competition drives efficiency, and when the enterprise has but a small number of large tech titans whose anti-trust legal teams can threaten lawsuits when the defense enterprise cries foul over unmet requirements, the DoD has no choice but to funnel more money into indefinite arrangements.

Of course, this entire segment could be summarized by saying “fix the acquisition and requirements process and build a healthy human inventory”, or simply boil the ocean.

The hard right versus the easy wrong

There isn’t an easy road out of this paradigm. But it stems from ineffective oversite by congressional leaders, the stranglehold of the industrial complex on the business and tech development, and the defense enterprises obsessive search for a bandolier of silver bullets over building its warfighters.

For congress, not enough members of the armed services, appropriations, and defense sub-committees understand the requirements generations process or impact of human as buzzword-laden powerpoints that brief well lead to funding poorly managed programs. For the industrial complex, not enough competition exists to force contractors to deliver goods promised. And for the defense enterprise, too little critical assessment, too little accountability of program management, and far too little functional knowledge of the force requirements are to blame.

It's bad enough that the lean towards revolutionary tech has reduced the investment on the human hardware—the DoDs most critical asset—but it’s far worse when the drive for new tech is so poorly and unabashedly mishandled by the personnel entrusted to put the tools in the hands of our service men and women who will have to fight the next war on our behalf.