Cold War-Era 'Warthog' Plane Targeted For Retirement Amid Budget Cuts
November 20, 2013
The A-10 Thunderbolt II, a snub-nosed ground-attack plane nicknamed the "Warthog," is the latest aircraft to find its way onto the Pentagon's endangered weapons list.
Outfitted with a seven-barrel Gatling gun the size of a Volkswagen Beetle in its nose, the Cold War-era plane has a reputation for tearing apart armored tanks and clearing the way for troops on the ground with its massive 30-millimeter rounds of ammunition.
But the unsightly plane has been in the cross hairs of Pentagon officials in recent years. The Air Force — better known for aerial dogfights and dropping GPS-guided bombs — would rather invest its diminishing funds elsewhere. With billions of dollars in budget cuts and a possible second round of sequestration looming, the military faces tough decisions: keep funding proven planes of the past or invest in high-tech 21st-century weapons.
The Pentagon has yet to release its latest budget or officially signal that the Warthogs are on a kill list. But last month, the Air Force disclosed that eliminating the fleet of 326 aircraft would save it about $3.5 billion over five years.
But taking no chances, A-10 supporters in Congress rushed to offer an amendment this week to the National Defense Authorization Act that would effectively prohibit any additional A-10 retirements until 2021 or later.
Last week, 33 lawmakers wrote a letter to the U.S. secretary of Defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to express "deep concern" about retiring the A-10.
Last month, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, blocked the confirmation of the White House nominee for Air Force secretary until she received answers about the plane's fate.
There's even a Facebook group called Save the A-10 that was created in August and has garnered more than 4,000 supporters.
The situation serves as a harbinger of the battles to come in an age of budget austerity. The military says it must slash, or "divest," its older arsenal to save money. But because these entrenched programs support troops and provide thousands of jobs across many states, Congress has continually come to their rescue.
The Pentagon already faces budget cuts of $487 billion over 10 years, and now it must cope with the threat of an additional $500 billion in cuts because of sequestration. The military services are going through an unprecedented process of developing two budgets for 2015 — one with sequestration and one without.
Sequestration cuts would reduce Pentagon spending $52 billion next year. When it comes to programs such as the A-10, some in Congress feel there are better places to cut.
"It would be unconscionable to further cut an asset like the A-10 for budget reasons — increasing the risks our service members confront in ground combat — when equivalent savings could be achieved elsewhere in the Air Force budget without reducing operational capabilities," said the bipartisan letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.
The Air Force spends millions of dollars on "conferences, air shows and bloated headquarters staffs," the letter said.
But major savings — measured in billions rather than millions of dollars — can be made only by cutting an entire fleet, the Air Force has said. That way, the infrastructure that supports the fleet can also be cut, which encompasses thousands of jobs.
The A-10 program also supports 6,000 jobs in the Air National Guard, which flies 90 A-10s in five states. Guard officials have expressed dismay at the prospect of killing the plane.
No one calls into question the A-10's success at close-air support. The plane is considered one of the best at directly protecting troops on the ground. Pilots do that by laying down fire on enemy tanks, vehicles and strongholds with its high-powered Gatling gun.
The A-10 was designed by Fairchild-Republic in the 1970s around the gun — the heaviest rotary cannon ever mounted on an aircraft. Pilots can shoot short bursts that unleash 140 rounds of ammunition in two seconds. To do so, it must fly low and slow over the battlefield, making it susceptible to ground fire.
But the plane is designed to keep flying even if parts of the wing or one of its engines has been blown to shreds. And the cockpit is surrounded by a bullet-resistant titanium tub. The aircraft has been routinely upgraded over the years.
"The idea is the pilot in the cockpit faces the same threats as the guy in the foxhole," said Pierre Sprey, an aeronautical engineer who helped design the F-16 and A-10. "They're in the same fight, and direct contact with one another the whole way through."
That could be seen in July when two A-10s flying out of Afghanistan's Bagram air base protected 60 soldiers who were ambushed after their lead vehicle turned over during a patrol in Afghanistan. As the soldiers lay pinned behind their vehicles, taking fire, the A-10s rained down bullets and bombs until the combatants gave up.
This month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the "A-10 is the best close-air support platform we have today."
As good as the A-10 is in close-air support, the military classifies it as a single-role aircraft. That's the problem. Going forward, the Air Force has said it wants to rid itself of one-mission planes in favor of a fleet of multi-role aircraft. These jack-of-all-trades aircraft can blast apart enemies on the ground and in the sky.
The A-10 can't dogfight. It's not stealthy. It's not supersonic.
"The Air Force never wanted the A-10, and they've been trying to get rid of it for years," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a website for military policy research. "They are manly men and they want jets that shoot down other jets — even though the last time they had an ace was Vietnam."
The A-10 replacement is the upcoming F-35 fighter jet. Known as the Joint Strike Fighter, the nearly $400-billion program for more than 2,400 jets is centered around a plan to develop a fighter plane that could — with a few tweaks — be used by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
The idea is that it can take off and land on runways and aircraft carriers, as well as hover like a helicopter. No single fighter aircraft has had all those capabilities. And it is expensive. At $35,200, the F-35's cost per flying hour is twice as much as the A-10's, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Though few believe the F-35 will ultimately be able to provide close-air support as well as the A-10, the F-35 certainly falls under the Air Force's definition of "multi-role."
Therein lies the dilemma, said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C. If budgets are going to be cut severely, where are the cuts going to come from: expensive new weapons that can carry out more missions, or aging, less-complex weapons?
The F-35 provides 127,000 direct and indirect jobs in 47 states and Puerto Rico. Someone is sure to be upset if there's a proposal to buy fewer of the planes, Harrison said.
"Everyone knows there needs to be cuts, but few people in Congress are brave enough to actually make them," he said. "Bottom line is there are going to be a lot of angry people in Congress — no matter what."
War Over the Warthogs
November 20, 2013
It’s old, it’s slow, it’s ugly, and—unlike a Swiss army knife—the Air’s Force’s A-10 Thunderbolt II can only do one thing: help grunts on the ground. So think of it as the military equivalent of Grandma’s tarnished turkey-carving knife that only comes out at Thanksgiving. It does a fine job on the old bird, but can a cash-strapped Air Force afford to keep the A-10 flying when its sole mission is to save the lives of U.S. troops in trouble?
As the Pentagon’s budget vise squeezes the Air Force, it is considering a decision to ground its 326 A-10s forever to save money, including $3.5 billion between 2015 and 2019. The idea has triggered a dogfight between the Air Force and A-10 backers on Capitol Hill.
Ground-pounders are caught in the crosshairs. “As an Army guy, I will tell you, the A-10s are very close to the Army, and we’re wondering what will do that mission,” General Frank Grass, the National Guard chief, said Tuesday. “But when the nation cannot afford the force it has today, something has to go.”
The notion is painful to the Air Force’s top officer who spent 1,000 of his early flight hours piloting A-10s. “If we have platforms that can do multiple missions well, and maybe not do one as well as another airplane…the airplane that is limited to a specific type of mission area becomes the one most at risk,” General Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee in September. “I think there’s some logic to this that’s hard for us to avoid, no matter how much I happen to love the airplane.”
While soldiers love the airplane they call the Warthog, they’ll get over it, the Air Force’s top warfighter believes. “If a bad guy goes away,” said General Mike Hostage, chief of Air Combat Command, “the Army’s not going to argue about how it went away.”
The Air Force would eventually fill much of the A-10’s troop-support mission with its new F-35 fighter, which has been plagued by problems and cost overruns. “The Air Force is growing increasingly desperate to eliminate competition in its force structure to the F-35,” says weapons-watcher Winslow Wheeler, who spent 30 years monitoring Pentagon procurement on Capitol Hill and at the Government Accountability Office, and now runs the nonprofit Straus Military Reform Project. If the Air Force prevails, “the biggest cost will be in the Defense Department’s ability to support soldiers and Marines engaged in close combat on the ground—a mission no aircraft can perform as well as the A-10.” Other Air Force planes that the service says could be tapped to help ground troops include the AC-130, F-15E, F-16, B-1 and B-52.
In contrast to the F-35’s woes, the A-10 stands as a poster child on how the nation should buy its weapons.
“Close attention to key mission characteristics (lethality, survivability, responsiveness, and simplicity) allowed the concept formulation and subsequent system design to result in an effective close-air support aircraft, and design-to-cost goals kept the government and contractor [Fairchild Republic] focused on meeting the critical requirements at an affordable cost,” a candid 2010 Air Force report said. “The A-10 did not meet all its cost goals, but it came much closer to them than most major defense development programs did in that time frame or since then.”
The A-10’s titanium-clad cockpit and self-sealing fuel cells protects its lone pilot. Manual flight controls back up its hydraulic system. These give the A-10 pilot the confidence to fly low and slow to take out enemy armor or troops with the eye-watering seven-barrel GAU-8 Gatling gun protruding from under its nose.
It made its combat debut in the 1991 Gulf War, where it flew more than 8,000 sorties while destroying a big chunk of the Iraqi military: 987 tanks, 926 artillery pieces, 501 armored personnel carriers, and 1,106 trucks. Only six A-10s were lost. It has since flown in action over Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, again. Tales like this have made it the grunts’ best friend.
“The A-10 was somewhat forced on a reluctant Air Force by the needs of the Army,” that 2010 Air Force report said. “The Air Force believed that fighters that were not otherwise engaged could take on close-air support when needed.” The Army disagreed: it “needed an aircraft that could carry a great amount of ordnance, loiter in the area for some time with excellent maneuverability, and had the ability to take hits from enemy ground fire.” Ultimately, the Air Force agreed to field the A-10, many experts believe, “to keep the Army from taking over the close-air support mission.”
Last week, 35 lawmakers told Pentagon leaders they would “oppose any effort” by the Air Force to ground its A-10s beginning next fall because it would “unnecessarily endanger our service members in future conflicts.”
One of the leaders of the effort is Senator Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., a member of the armed services committee. “Many soldiers and Marines are alive today because of the unique capabilities of the A-10, as well as the focused close-air support training and dedicated close-air support culture of A-10 pilots,” the lawmakers’ Nov. 13 letter said. Ayotte should know: her husband, Joe Daley, flew A-10s in the first Gulf War.
In some ways, the F-35’s woes could be the A-10’s salvation. Ayotte is readying an amendment that would order the Air Force to keep its A-10s flying until its F-35s are fully operational. That’s currently slated to happen in 2021.
The Air Force, apparently, isn’t taking any chances. On Tuesday, the Northrop Grumman Corp. announced it had landed Air Force contracts totaling $24 million “required to keep the A-10 weapon system viable through 2028 and beyond.”
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