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.
