The A-10 goes to Turkey
Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh A. Welsh III visited Hill Air Force Base in Utah last week to visit that white elephant the F35. While he was there he said this according to the Standard Examiner;
According to a report from the base’s 75th Air Base Wing, Welsh told the Hill group the A-10, while long-beloved, needs to be retired.
“The A-10 will not be used in a high threat environment,” Welsh said. “Seventy percent of the A-10s we used during the first Gulf War suffered battle damage. It’s a rugged airplane, but it’s not hard to hit.”
So, we fast forward to this week where AFP reports that 12 A-10 Thunderbolts (Warthogs) have deployed to Incirlik, Turkey to take part in the war against ISIS;
The 12 planes, famed for their tank-destroying capabilities, arrived over the weekend and have already been scheduled to fly missions in support of the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State jihadists in Iraq and Syria, the official told AFP.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said the move had “added capability” to the coalition’s efforts against IS.
If the Air Force had their way, the A-10 would have disappeared before Desert Storm even started, but here it is, 24 years later, a week after the Chief of Staff said they were useless on the modern battlefield going back into battle. Reality always bites the Pentagon-types right in their collective ass.
Category: Air Force, Terror War
The Warthog may not, as Welsh said, be hard to hit but, the thing is, when it’s hit it keeps on truckin.
Who is he really trying to fool at this point? Between the A-10/F-35 and MollyGate, my beloved AF is doubling down on some really stupid shit and Capitol Hill is starting to zero in on them for it.
Good. Maybe it’s time for Congress to crack down on stupid sh!t coming out of the 5-sided asylum.
And the USAF is hardly the only service that’s guilty.
Hmm, let’s see if we can come up with some other weapon systems that were “rugged, but easy to hit,” shall we? B-17 Flying Fortress Big, slow, easy to hit, flew in daylight. Armed to the teeth, tough as nails, made the krauts and japs pay for every shot they took, frequently came back from high-risk missions shot full of holes, but CAME BACK with the crew alive. F4F Wildcat Heavy, not sexy-looking at all, couldn’t turn with a Zero. Packed four .50cals and gave its factory the nickname “Grumman Iron Works.” P-47 Thunderbolt Single-seat fighter so big it was hard to miss with a thrown rock. Had EIGHT .50s that tore the dogshit out of anything in front of them and a ginormous engine that allowed it to climb like a homesick angel, plus it was tough enough to be called a flying tank. Battleships in general All but two of the battlewagons at Pearl Harbor returned to the fight. It took the entire British Home Fleet at visual range to put the Bismarck down. The USS South Dakota lost power to her main guns at Guadalcanal, closed to engage her opponent (the HIMS Hiei, IIRC) at spitting distance with her 5-inch secondaries while still taking major hits, and WON. The whole reason the Iowa-class was reactivated in the 80s was because we and the Russians both knew that it didn’t matter what you hit them with, up to and including a tactical nuke, they’d still close to gun range and kick ass. The M26 Pershing when it was fielded in Germany in 1945. Couldn’t get out of its own way, but high-velocity 88s that could rape every other tank known to man wouldn’t make a dent. Pershings engaged Tigers 1 on 1 and came out on top. The Germans just couldn’t kill them, even if they moved as rapidly as a glacier. And today, I’ll offer the following: AH-1 Cobra and AH-64 Apache They’ve taken tons of hits in multiple wars, even from illiterate hajjis with RPGs. How often do they go down? Decidedly less. And those who… Read more »
Which part of “high threat environment” is hard to understand? The A-10 is highly unlikely to survive against a modern air force. Recall that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan really had an air force. As for some of your examples… The B-17 was Queen of the air, true, but the Germans stopped all bombing of German targets in fall of 1943. Does Schweinfurt ring a bell? We lost 60 bombers shot down & at least 60 more heavily damaged out of 376 attacking on August 17, 1943. Two months later the USAAF tried again, resulting in another 60 bombers shot down with 17 more damaged beyond repair, out of 291 aircraft. The USAAF stopped attacks on Germany until sufficient fighter escorts were available at the turn of the year. The Wildcat was not “easy to hit,” especially when the (expert) Navy aviators employed the Thach Weave. The “ginormous” engine of the Thunderbolt only produced climbs as you described in later models. The earlier D mark gave a quick zoom climb that rapidly petered out, allowing (say) a Spitfire to blow by it in a steep climb. It wasn’t necessarily easy to hit, given the aircraft’s roll rate & diving speed. It took a while for the Krauts to learn you can’t out-dive a Jug.
While you’re bragging on BBs, recall that the IJN wiped out the Pacific Fleet in half an hour, and that the US Navy took out both the Musashi and theYamato, two of the most powerful battleships afloat with with dumb bombs. As for the Bismark, it may have taken a lot of effort, but it did sink. Frankly most of your examples weren’t arguably “easy to hit,” including the M26, the Cobra, and the Apache. Tanks are easy to hit, if you’re dumb enough to deploy them without infantry. Not so much with grunts around. To repeat: the issue with the A-10 is that it has operated for the past 15 years in a very permissive environment. It would not do as well against a modern opponent. So, no, you didn’t tear apart the argument. In… Read more »
Well said, and I agree.
Takes a lickin, and keeps on tickin.
Question, general? How many B-52’s suffered battle damage over Vietnam? And yet that airframe is not only still in service, it’s planned to be around for another 30-40 years.
Sometimes you just don’t go fucking with a good thing.
If it ain’t broke, fix it until it is.
More like “If it ain’t broken, keep fixing it until it’s FUBAR!”
How many B-52’s suffered battle damage over Vietnam?
17 Combat losses, 31 total
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War#USAF_fixed-wing
The B-52? She takes after her Grandmama the B-17!
Fuck. That. Guy.
We love the A-10!!
Army Aviation just needs to acquire these planes so we can stop hearing all of this nonsense from the Air Force
I agree – so long as the budget and manpower “slice” comes with them. But that would break the Key West Agreement (1948, I believe) assigning roles and missions to the services, and the USAF will fight that tooth and nail. Doing that would reduce the size of their “piece of the pie”.
So how about disestablishing the USAF and bringing back the Army Air Corps?
Sad, but it seems like the Air Force today is more interested in its “cool” projects than actually defending the nation.
The Air Force has never been weaker politically
O-4E: Maybe. But IMO also irrelevant.
I’d guess DoN would support the USAF if the issue was changing the Key West Agreements. Each service jealously guards its personnel and budget; DoN is no exception.
One can make a reasonably good case that the USMC more properly belongs in DA – as a combat-arms branch called the Marine Corps, with elements “chopped” to USN OPCON for rotational duty afloat as required – than in DoN. Arguments for: more consistent overall ground combat doctrine/training, unified procurement, ease of integration of follow-on Army forces into amphibious beachhead, better coordination of amphibious operations involving both Marine and Army forces, etc . . . . Arguments against: not necessary, and “we’ve always done it this way”. (There are probably other good arguments against, but I can’t think of any at present.)
Sidebar: I’m not personally sure how well that move would work out; my “gut feel” is about a 50/50 chance of working as well or better than today, and that’s probably not a good enough chance to be worth the short-term disruption of a huge admin realignment and integration effort. I could easily be hugely wrong either way, though.
IMO there’s no way in hell DoN would ever support setting a precedent that might conceivably cause something like that to be considered at some future date. (One can also make a similar argument that all USN aviation should be admin moved to the USAF, with squadrons more-or-less permanently “chopped” to USN OPCON for deployments/related training. I’d guess that as having an even smaller chance of working well long-term.)
Moving the A-10 to the Army would establish exactly such a precedent. Ergo, DoN would IMO not support such a proposal, and joint opposition by DoN and the USAF IMO would in turn kill any proposal to revisit Key West.
Army, Navy and Marines should just grab them all and start using them. Why ditch something that works, just because it’s not sleek and shiny?
No money in the John Mclain/ Martin Riggs of airplanes – teh A-10. General Welsh is retiring in a year & he knows which side his bread is buttered.
John McLain / Martin Riggs… what a great parallel. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPT!
That would make the F-35 the Colin Farrell of airplanes: tries to be a badass on TV, effete pussy in real life.
Given that the F-35 hasn’t even reached IOC, that’s pretty funny.
Is that an IOC with or without effective fire control for the onboard gun? What I’ve read indicates that the on-board gun’s fire control software won’t be ready for 3-4 years – IF everything goes smoothly in software development, software integration and testing, and platform integration and testing (no schedule slips).
If you believe all of the latter three are likely to “go smoothly” and stay on schedule, I have this bridge for sale . . . .
Bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppp!
If I’m calling for CAS, I’ll take “easy to hit but survivable” over “not available due to maintenance or refueling requirements” every time.
Or “out of ammo”. A-10 carries about 5x as many gun rounds as I recall.
https://youtu.be/ySuixFGIfbE
I have the Weirdest Boner.
(This one *always* cracks me up.)
You can’t say boner, dammit!
BONER, BONER, BONER!!! :d
God bless the A-10 and the people that service and fly them… and may they send many, many members of ISIS to a place where every virgin looks like Helen Thomas…
Or the place where the ISIS members are the virgins.
Oh so another pampered perfumed Prince of the Pentagon screeches for the A-10 to be mothballed, I wonder which defense contractor has a six figure job waiting for him for trying to ditch the Warthog in favor of the F-35 – THE FLYING FUBAR!
I sometimes wonder if achieving a certain rank requires a lobotomy, first.
I have begun to wonder if the F-35 will one day go the same way as the SGT York. Remember the money wasted on that as well as the rigged test?
The ADA system SGT York? Oh yeah.
Worked for a guy once who’d been involved in York testing. Based on what he told me, “rigged testing” is exactly the correct term. For the system, so is “expensive fiasco”.
If even half of what he related was accurate, people should have gone to prison for rigging those tests, and a number of others should have been fired for gross incompetence for “developing” that POS.es
Best I can tell, the Comanche was an even bigger failure. But at least that program doesn’t seem to have tried to use blatantly rigged testing. It was just an abomination that sucked up money for decades without producing anything workable.
I say they should redesign the A-10.
1) Upgrade the armor on the underside of the plane to decrease the whining of the Air Force generals.
2) Increase the engines to add some power to offset the weight of the armor and new weapon system.
3) Upgrade the GAU-8 from a 30mm chain-gun to a 40mm chain-gun grenade launcher.
4) Increase the room in the cockpit to account for the raging erection of the pilot firing the new gun.
Keep the GAU-8 in the nose, mount six MK19s in the wings, WWII/Korea style.
Ooooooo … I LIKE that!
the Air Force had a great replacement for the A-10 on a local talk show here in Tucson Az. one of the original designers of the Hog said from the get go the AF has fought, lied, and been as he said acting like a baby as far as the A-10 and the platform that would have replaced back in the late 80s and early 90s and then threw a fit because the marines wanted the aircraft. talk about a bunch of assholes
To be fair, General Welsh referred to a “high threat environment.” And, to be honest, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan can be considered “high threat” in terms of air superiority. The truth is that the USAF has done pretty much whatever they wanted to in both countries, with MANPADs being the greatest threat.
If (God forbid) we got into a shooting war with (say) Russia, I seriously doubt the A-10 would do so well.
Which is why the F-35 should be scrapped ASAP and the F-22 ordered by the thousands ASAP.
Gawd, wouldn’t it be great if the next POTUS re-opened the F-22 line?
So far as the Russians and their current “allies” are concerned, ever hear of the Su-25 “Frogfoot”? And its upgrade? Looks familiar, huh?
Agree manpads are an issue, that’s what SEADS is for. I’m sure Achmed the goat fondler is up to speed on whatever their system is, this week.
Gotta winder, was there ever a time when politics didn’t hamstring the forces that defend us? Thinking only a couple of well placed funerals away, but that’s just me.
Going to Syria, FINALLY?! Now, if only they will be able to actually engage …
… which, according to former SECDEF Gates, seems unlikely.
One can only hope, I suppose.
Okay, AF–we get you. The A-10 works great against the targets we’ve been fighting for the last 25 years, but doesn’t cost enough money, and doesn’t look cool in air shows. Fine, then have somebody design a proper modern one that does the same mission. I don’t exactly know how well a flying gun stealths-up, but I’m pretty sure there are tons of people willing to figure it out.
let me take a poke at this.
This goes to trust. Ground forces are quite willing to trust the A-10 community to provide highly effective ground support. They do it very well. Any perceived vulnerability of the A-10 to air attack is nicely covered by air cover by those wonderful fighters.
Some in the Air Force want to replace a dedicated CAS platform, that cannot be tasked with anything else, with a mostly-fighter multi-role platform that can and will be tasked with non-CAS activities, and that is demonstrably and provably inferior to the CAS role it supposedly will cover.
trust us, says the Fighter community.
If the Air Force was building a 21st century ground attack aircraft, optimized for CAS of ground-gaining forces, the ground-pounders would be cheerleading this thing. But instead, they are asked to trust that a compromise platform, driven by people who will live in a culture that glorifies air-to-air and denigrates air-to-mud, will even come somewhat near to what they can currently expect to get from the “flying fossil” that seems to do the job better than anything else anyone else uses. At least from the point of view of the people who need the close air support.
See how that works? This is not the first go-round where one bunch seemed to think that the air-to ground stuff was second-fiddle to other priorities. Give them a “nothing we can spare for air-to-air” ground-pounding Shturmovik, and trust will be there. Tell them once again that “we need more and better fighters, and we can do that mud-stuff after we win the air war” well, I think they may have heard that before, somewhere.
Start painting aircraft with mile markers for ground gained, and stars for ground battles won, and perhaps ground forces might extend that trust a bit further. Just a thought.
Gosh, replace an aircraft that does one thing well, with one that does many things not as well. I can see the wisdom in that! Remember the TFX/F-111? Hmmm, lot of crickets today…
Given that the F-35 has yet to reach IOC, it is difficult to rationally analyze the capability of the craft as yet.
I do very much agree the “Swiss Army knife” approach to aircraft design is at best non-optimal, and at worst brain dead. Dedicated air superiority and CAS designs are generally superior. On the other hand, we have seen designs which were “accidentally” multi-role, such as the Lightning, Thunderbolt, Mustang, Corsair, Phantom II, Fighting Falcon, and Eagle. The latter has turned out to be especially useful given the Strike Eagle and (now) Golden Eagle marques. But, no, we can’t plan for that to happen.
Upgrade the ones we have. Then build more.
I love the comments. However, I must respectfully disagree with an underclassman from my alma mater, General Mark Welsh since I graduated in 1967 and he didn’t until 1983 when I was doing threat testing on the F-117 and therefore know a little bit about this “Stealth is the universal cure all for all that ails you” nonsense, say it isn’t so Todo. I have done or overseen operational testing for the Air Farce, no, not a misspelling, for over 33 years and I think I have a pretty good idea what all of the fighters, bombers, UAVs, CSAR components and the venerable U-2S can do or not do. To make this short and get to the bottom line, if they would do the two mods that I recommended over 15 years ago to the A-10, it would NOT be susceptible, that is unengageable, by IR manpads and also added another mod which I just remembered it would not have to worry about RF manpads or other mobile SAMs or even static SAMs and if they would put 2 AIM-9X on it with its HMS (helmet mounted sight) it could defend itself against any “modern 4th+ or 5th generation airframe since the AIM-9X is a visually emplyed weapon just like all of the other air-to-air SRMs and OBTW, the two mods I mentioned above will kick the ass out of the bad guys SRMs, so the A-10 will win a visual duel and when F-15s and F-16s would get seen by an A-10 and it would turn nose on to them, none of them wanted to put their puny 20mm gatling gun against the Hog’s 30mm gatling gun even in simulated air-to-air combat. Now, what was General Mark saying about it NOT being survivable in a High Threat environment. Food for thought and like one of you said, the Hog is like a TIMEX, it just simply takes a lickin and keeps on tickin.