By Mike Fredenburg
Monday, March 2, 2015
While in Iraq the U.S. Air Force is sending A-10 Warthogs
on successful sortie after successful sortie against the Islamic State, back
here at home, Air Force brass are renewing their efforts to scrap the legendary
plane.
In fact, the Air Force, thwarted in last year’s efforts
to scrap the A-10, is deliberately underutilizing it in the campaign against
the Islamic State. The military waited until three months into the bombing
campaign in Iraq and Syria to deploy the A-10 and has deployed only a small
percentage of the available planes.
Showing the growing frustration over the failed efforts
to scrap the A-10, Air Force Major General James Post, in a recent
closed-session address to Air Force officers, stated that “anyone who is
passing information to Congress about A-10 capabilities is committing treason.”
Never mind supporting and defending the Constitution or having the best tools
for the job — active-duty personnel apparently have a duty not to release
information on the A-10’s effectiveness or its purposeful underutilization by
the Air Force. The A-10 has also been smeared by the Air Force as being the
most dangerous to friendly troops, when in fact it has the lowest rate of
friendly-fire incidents of any combat fighter or bomber.
The Air Force is eager to replace the A-10 with the F-35,
yet the latter is vastly inferior at providing supporting firepower for troops
who are closely engaged with enemy forces. This close air support (CAS) as
provided by the A-10 has proven invaluable on the battlefield. Retired Air
Force chief master sergeant Russell B. Carpenter, who has been involved with or
the lead controller on over 900 close-air-support sorties in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Kosovo, put it this way: “I have worked with F-16s, B-1B bombers, F-15s,
F-111s, F/A-18s, etc., and no other [close-air-support] plane comes even close
to the A-10.” In other words, substituting F-16s and F-15s for the A-10 in Iraq
is putting questionable procurement priorities above the importance of our
present mission.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, the A-10,
affectionately known as the “Warthog” or just plain old “Hog,” has handily
bested all other U.S. aircraft in destroying artillery, tanks, and other
vehicles while supporting infantry engaged in combat-at “danger close” ranges.
At the same time, it’s also the least expensive combat plane in the U.S.
arsenal to operate and buy. With $2.85 billion in recent upgrades, including
better wings and a complete upgrade of avionics, sensors, targeting systems,
and communications, the A-10C is no longer an “aging platform.” In fact, the
A-10C is the most technologically sophisticated close-air-support plane on the
battlefield and will be so for decades to come.
A-10 pilots believe the Air Force’s enmity toward the
A-10 exists because senior Air Force leader for the most part undervalue the
CAS mission. “Unless you have lived and breathed CAS 24/7, you don’t know CAS
and are likely to underestimate how hard it is and how important it is,” says
retired lieutenant colonel Thomas Norris, who has over 3,000 hours of A-10
cockpit time gained during Operations Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm, and Southern
Watch.
Pierre Sprey, one of the designers of the A-10 and the
F-16, is also critical of Air Force leadership and has stated, “The Warthog is
the only plane in the U.S. inventory designed from the ground up to provide
true combat-effective CAS. The Air Force’s brass is busy claiming that new
high-tech missiles and electronics allow clumsy bombers and fast thin-skinned fighters
to support the troops just as well. Recent combat proves that’s just PR spin to
defend their pet megabuck procurements.”
Fortunately for our troops, the push to scrap the A-10
has been temporarily stymied this year by language included in the National
Defense Authorization Act of 2015. Getting the language included was no mean
feat, and the hard work of Senators Kelly Ayotte, John McCain, and Saxby
Chambliss should be applauded. Unfortunately, in spite of these senators’ best
efforts, F-35 supporters sneakily inserted last-minute language into the
agreement that could open the door for the Air Force to place 36 A-10s on
backup status and transfer their support personnel to the F-35. Claims by the
Air Force that A-10 maintenance personnel are needed to meet the huge
maintenance demands of F-35 are false: Senator Ayotte’s office has shown that
all pre-initial operating capability maintenance requirements for the F-35 can
be satisfied using contractors and the reserve component.
Even if the F-35 meets current projections, its limited
close-air-support capability will not come online until at least 2021, and its
CAS will largely be limited to “firing and fleeing.” While lobbing in expensive
precision-guided munitions from great distances can be useful in many
scenarios, it is a far cry from the kind of CAS of which the A-10 is capable.
Unlike air-interdiction missions, which can be conducted by relatively clumsy
B-1B’s and B-52’s, CAS missions require operating in close coordination with
and proximity to our troops. Operating close to the action requires a tough
plane, and the A-10 excels in this regard. Twelve hundred pounds of titanium
armor protecting the cockpit, redundancy of all major systems, and a plethora
of other features make the A-10 the toughest fighter ever built. Warthogs
regularly make it home after taking damage that would knock other fighters out
of the sky — there are even documented cases of A-10s surviving missile hits.
But the A-10 is more than about survivability. Along with
the ability to land and take off from short, primitive air fields, the A-10’s
combat range and endurance — time spent over or near the battlefield — is far
superior to that of the F-35 and other fighters. A-10’s carry powerful
anti-tank missiles and can carry a full complement of bombs. But no description
of the A-10 would be complete without mentioning the GAU-8 Avenger, a 2.5-ton
nightmare of a gun that fires up to 4,200 rounds per minute and is capable of
easily slicing through most armor.
The A-10s carry 1,150 rounds of 30mm ammunition, while
the F-35A carries 180 rounds of far less powerful 25mm ammunition. Amazingly,
the total kinetic muzzle energy of a 2.4-second burst from the powerful GAU-8
is equal to that of a round from the Navy’s experimental railgun.
Like other modern fighters, the thoroughly modernized and
upgraded A-10Cs can use costly precision-guided munitions, but because of their
toughness and low-level flight performance, they can also often safely place
inexpensive unguided munitions onto enemy targets near friendly troops. It’s
the near-perfect merging of modern technology with battle-tested toughness and
reliability.
The A-10’s capabilities are only part of the story of its
success. The other critical part of the story is that the plane’s CAS-centric
capabilities enable Air Force air crews, including support personnel, to work
remarkably closely with ground forces. By continuously training with ground
troops, A-10 pilots develop face-to-face working relationships that cannot be
replicated by fast high fliers, who operate out of bases well to the rear.
Intimate familiarity with ground operations gives A-10 pilots the ability to
distinguish friend from foe using their own two eyes when intense electronic
warfare might render other aircraft useless or even dangerous to our troops.
“We are regularly able to use something that other planes often cannot, the
Mark I Human Eyeball, and sometimes there is no substitute for that,” says
Colonel William Smith, a retired pilot with over 3,000 hours of A-10 flight
time and 128 combat sorties. “We live in the armpit of the guy on the ground,”
he says.
This close working relationship often puts A-10 pilots in
the position of being the last line of defense in preventing friendly-fire
incidents. Ground forces in the heat of battle may provide incorrect or
incomplete targeting information, but because of the A-10 pilot’s superior
understanding of ground tactics and their close proximity to the action, they
can correct for these potentially lethal mistakes on the fly. It’s different
for high fliers. A tragic example of this: In 2014, a B-1B strategic bomber
providing CAS in Afghanistan dropped two 500-pound bombs on U.S. Special Forces
soldiers, killing five of them. Ground-support personnel made mistakes, but the
B-1B crew’s lack of CAS expertise, its relatively poor agility, the opacity of
its cockpit glass, its speed, and its altitude meant that the crew did not
catch those mistakes. “If an A-10 had been tasked to execute the same CAS
mission, I believe in my heart those soldiers would be alive today,” says Chief
Master Sergeant Carpenter, a veteran joint terminal air controller (JTAC).
The ability to base the A-10 on primitive airfields
closer to the battlefield means it can do more sorties per day, while regularly
attacking multiple targets per sortie. Less rugged aircraft operate from bases
well to the rear of the actual battlefield and consequently will take longer to
engage targets. “If you’ve got a faster aircraft that takes longer to reengage
or longer to engage” a ground target, “sometimes it’s over by the time they are
able to come in for you,” retired Air Force master sergeant Eric Brandenburg
says. “The A-10’s having that ability to fly low and slow and engage in real
time is really a game changer. No other aircraft we have can do that,” says
Brandenburg, a veteran JTAC.
Army officials are open about how much they love the A-10
— Army Chief of Staff Raymond T. Odierno has called it “the best
close-air-support platform that we have today.” During Desert Storm, over the
course of a few hours, two A-10s operating out of forward operating locations
destroyed 23 Iraqi tanks and provided the cover that allowed a Harrier pilot to
be recovered after being shot down. No other combat plane could have done that.
The A-10’s capabilities go well beyond combat. Its
unmatched communications suites, endurance, and survivability make it an
excellent forward air controller, guiding strike aircraft to their targets.
A-10 pilots are also the best trained and equipped to execute highly risky
combat search-and-rescue operations and to work closely with Special Forces.
Warthogs are capable of operating in weather and altitude environments that
helicopters and other jets simply can’t.
By using tactics and planning that leverage the extensive
experience of the CAS community, the A-10 has proven it can survive in
environments full of anti-aircraft guns and one-man portable missile systems.
On the other hand, the F-35 is facing a future in which rapid advances in
counter-stealth technology will mean increased vulnerability to integrated air
defenses. F-35s carrying external weapons payloads comparable to that of the
Warthog are not stealthy. Genuine CAS can often require taking your plane
within visual distance of the enemy, which eliminates most of the advantages of
having a stealthy plane. Does anyone really believe that senior military
leaders will be sending fragile $200 million F-35s on the same kind of strafing
runs and other low-flying air-support missions A-10s regularly execute?
For now, the Air Force’s efforts to scrap the A-10 have
been blocked, but the battle is far from over. Charlie Keebaugh, president of
the largest group of tactical-air-control party airmen, says the Air Force’s
zeal to kill the A-10 “causes the [close-air-support] community to question if
the folks in D.C. truly understand the challenges of the modern battlefield.”
The stakes are incredibly high, Keebaugh says: “By
scrapping the A-10, the Air Force is guaranteeing more Gold Star families will
be created.”
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