Look at this plane.
No, look at it.
No I mean look at it mutherfucker.
This is the Fairchild-Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, an adolescent male fantasy of an aircraft. I’d link to a video but everything on Youtube either has marshal music or Slipknot behind it. Wanna see a picture of the holocaust cannon parked next to a Volkswagen Beetle? Hell yes you do!
That is a GAU-8A 30mm “vulcan” cannon. Every male over 20 is nodding appreciatively because ladies? While you were off in 5th grade learning about maxi pads we were discussing the finer points of blowing up tanks.
Gotta love the shit-eating grin. On the right, the over-large bullet used the world over to chew up fighter aircraft. On the left, the over-over-large bullet used exclusively by the A-10 to chew up tanks. They’re $60 each in 1992 dollars. I know this because I was once an adolescent male. I also know that at 6,000 rounds per minute, $60/shot in non-adjusted dollars comes in hella cheaper than the AGM-65 missile we mostly use for chewing up tanks because launching a Maverick at the ground is the economic equivalent of dropping an Audi R8 from altitude. Ahhh, boy knowledge.
The A-10 “Warthog” is the apex of Cold War battlefield thinking. The pilot sits in a 1200 lb titanium bathtub so that he thinks nothing about playing chicken with one of these:
(“Say it with me now, boys: ZSU 23-4 ‘Shilka!’ That’s right!”)
…and those of you who have had the opportunity to pick up raw chunks of titanium can attest to the fact that 1200 lbs is a lot of titanium.
The A-10 is designed to make it home with one wingtop blown off, one engine blown off, or half the tail blown off. If you were tasked with the job of annihilating a Soviet tank column on the opposite side of the Rhine, the A-10 would be your vehicle of choice. It’s slow, loud and survivable. It is probably the most capable Close Air Support (CAS) aircraft ever flown.
And they’re killing it.
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Hard to say which has generated more righteous nerd rage: the death of the A-10 or the presence of a black stormtrooper in the Star Wars teasers. The A-10, after all, is a monstertruck-machinegun-jet, that thing your dad said didn’t exist, your mommy said you shouldn’t want and your friends drew in their Trapper Keepers. It is a flying cock and balls of righteous destruction and it’s kind of amazing that it isn’t a sigil on the Alabama state flag or something. The amount of manlove expressed towards the formidable “Creature from the Id” that is the A-10 Warthog is roughly equivalent to Toby Keith drinking Budweiser and throwing an ice bucket at Jessica Simpson wearing a white T-shirt while sitting on the bumper of a lifted Chevy stepside. Especially when you consider that we’re replacing it with this:
The butt-hurt leveled against the F-35 took on a new dimension as the general peace-loving, Democratic-voting, Amnesty International-supporting but still-A-10-loving public realized that their childhood buddy Spuds McKenzie would get euthanized in favor of it. For one thing, the F-35 looks lame. For another thing, there are no death protruberances on it.
Finally, there’s the question as to whether or not the F-35 will actually be any goddamn good at close air support. But don’t take my word for it:
“The Air Force’s Rationale for Retiring the A-10 Warthog is Bullshit” - Foxtrot Alpha
“A-10 vs. F-35: The Air Force’s Latest Budget Bungle”- Mother Jones
It’s gotten beyond stupid - to the point where the JSF program had to point out that the F-35 isn’t only an A-10 replacement. It’s even gotten to the point where, to satisfy the nay-sayers, they’re going to do an F-35 vs. A-10 flyoff.
Interesting, no? It’s almost as if the Air Force wishes to demonstrate the need for… something else to replace the A-10.
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Ever seen an A-10 in the flesh? They’re loud. You can hear them coming from miles and miles away. They have the RCS a monster truck (shocker!). And they’re most effective against a heavily-armed, heavily-armored, slow-moving enemy force whose individual combat weights are measured in metric tons. That’s the whole point of the StupidGun - tanks have less armor on the roof.
Honestly speaking now - it’s 2015. What are the odds of the United States going up against tanks ever again? Yeah, ISIS has tanks but they’ve discovered that “tank” on the modern battlefield is “slow-moving, high-value target” from a tactical standpoint. This, by the way, was the general assessment of the armed forces in the late ‘70s. But hey, General Dynamics doesn’t make planes much anymore and they’ve got mouths to feed.
If you’ve been paying attention to the typical air-ground engagement profile of the United States Armed Forces for the past 30 years, you’ve noticed they fall into two categories:
1) “never saw it coming” - a Hellfire or Maverick missile streams in from off-screen and blows shit up in grainy FLIR
2) “loitering death” - An AH-1S or AH-64 flutters over Falludjah looking for something to kill, and then lazily annihilates the sniper that (kind-of, sort-of) has Our Boys pinned down through a stunning display of asymmetrical force.
“Never saw it coming” is never going to apply to an A-10. Never ever ever. One thing no one has ever called an A-10 is “surprising.” Engagement range for a Maverick missile is a couple miles; you can pick out an A-10 a couple miles away with a high-powered flashlight. The StupidGun? 4,000 feet on the outside. You’ve actually got better range accuracy with one of these:
Which is more effective against a tank? The StupidGun, no question. But as mentioned before, “tanks” are no longer the problem.
“Loitering death” isn’t the A-10’s wheelhouse, either. It stalls at 140 MPH, meaning that if it’s circling around to blow the shit out of something, it’s circling fast. It can’t hover like a helicopter, either.. it wasn’t supposed to. It was supposed to cruise over contested East German battlefields to annihilate T-82s, not float above Damascus hoping to pop off a kid with an RPG. “nuke the shit out of insurgents?” Yeah, we developed that thing in Vietnam and it’s been through three variants since.
The A-10 has one advantage over the AC-130 and any attack helicopter: it’s mucho bueno survivable. Which matters a lot when you’ve got a large force chockablock with anti-aircraft munitions and spotty intelligence on the war ahead. That scenario has been old-hat for decades, too. the first thing we did when we bombed the shit out of Iraq the first time was overfly it for weeks and weeks because we weren’t satisfied with the quality of our topo maps. “Contested airspace” simply hasn’t existed for the United States since the Vietnam War.
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To be fair, the F-35 is gonna suck at these tasks, too. Sure, it’ll drop bombs and such, same as an F-16, an F/A-18, an F-15E. “I have air superiority and you don’t. Neener neener.” But nobody is calling for eliminating the CAS role, they’re arguing (unconvincingly, half-heartedly) that the F-35 will do the A-10’s job. So what is that “job?”
Most every future CAS role the USAF will face involves killing people who don’t know they’re dead yet. It’s been this way for decades; it’s been argued that we should have used F-117As to bomb Libya in 1986 because then we wouldn’t have had an F-111 shot down. We did use F-117As when we came into Panama; the first shots of the invasion were smart bombs out of stealth fighter bomb bays. Every battle since then has been stealth aircraft in, then everybody else.
“Drones”, you say. And boy howdy, there are a lot of them. Here’s the thing, though. “Remotely piloted vehicles” are “flown” the way the Mars Opportunity Rover is “driven.” The local guys have line-of-sight and radio control for take-offs and landings, but everything after that is done through satellite uplink. That imposes a delay of about seven seconds between the “pilot” telling the UAV to do something and the UAV doing it. Not a problem when you’re cruising through the sky unapposed; big problem if you need to exercise some initiative in response to unforeseen complications.
Which means either you need to give kill authority to the gadget, or you need a dude riding in it. Kill authority is absolutely possible; has been for decades. It’s treaty poison, though. if you want to legally kill someone in warfare, you need a chain of responsibility. At least, that’s the thinking right now - the first international conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems happened less than a year ago. Six months after these pictures were taken.
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If the job is “bomb the shit out of a high-value target unseen” the United States has exactly one vehicle on the line that can do it:
This is a sticky issue for a couple reasons, the first of which is there’s only 20 of them, they’re a billion dollars a piece, and people follow their movements like they were a pod of Orcas. The second of which is that there’s never been anything “stealthy” about the stealth bomber, considering the gala it was introduced at was front page news around the world and every time we put bombs in one it makes the papers. We tend to use the B-2 for saber-rattling; we bombed Kosovo with it, we bombed Afghanistan with it, we bombed Libya with it. In other words, by the time you have a B-2 overhead, your despot has been on the cover of the New York Times for weeks. Compare and contrast: the F-117 carried 30% of the ordnance dropped during Desert Storm.
It did kind of a bad job, though. The USAF attempted to trumpet the F-117’s use during the invasion of Panama until it came out that F-117s had dropped four bombs, all of which had missed. About 50% of the ordnance dropped during Desert Storm missed, too. And then the Serbs managed to shoot one down with hot-rodded 30-year-old Soviet radar and bone stock 30-year-old Soviet surface to air missiles.
That’s okay. We aren’t officially flying F-117As anymore. Officially. More on that next time.
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So here’s the hole:
The USAF is retiring its beloved A-10 Warthog and replacing it with the Pontiac Aztek. Neither aircraft really fits our current SOCOM-driven operational profile, namely “shoot them in the dark.” The A-12? Yeah, supposed to replace the A-6 Intruder.
Pretty much the Navy A-10, circa 1963.
