Posted on Mar 23, 2015
The fight for the A-10 starts anew. What say you?
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Once again the push for retiring the venerable Warthog is on by SecAF & AF Chief of Staff. It appears that the "ordinary soldier's" voice is starting to be heard in the halls of Congress on this.
What say you?
What say you?
A-10
Air Force
Close Air Support (CAS)
Posted 11 y ago
Responses: 16
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To hell with drones knocking 1 or 2 trucks at a time. Put A-10s in Turkey with fighter cover than when a convoy go out wipe it out, Syria or Iraqi.
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TSgt Tim (lj) Littlejohn
Give these planes the needed up dates so that they can be there, until the F-35 gets it's shit together. In like 2025 or was it 2030, we can't wait that long for close air support for our troops on the ground.
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I just loved seeing the A-10 in action along with hearing that signature sound as it rained hell down on the enemy.
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If you don't mind a word from a Navy guy, the most significant testimony is missing; that of our enemies. Nothing like the sound of an A-10 and its gun breaking the will of the enemy. And the features that protect the pilot in a low and slow environment can't be surpassed within the envelope of other airframes. The bosses forget sometimes that Joint Multi Razzmatazz is a compromise on all fronts. The best you can get is "adequate" vs. "superb". However it's tough having a stable of various single mission assets. A-6 veterans see this as Group Think, Part Deux.
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Keep GrimReaper's transportation. I don't ask for too much but this one I ask for please. That sound of battle is pure motivation and the sound of tomorrow for a lot of us.
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I have had the privilage of hearing General Welsh speak about this topic in person (about 2 1/2 months ago), the way it was explained to me then made me say, "I understand why we are looking into this option and the reasoning seems to be sound."
Here's how it was explained to the Airmen at our base:
The Air Force needs to modernize. Now the original purchase order of the F-22 was cut by Congress and we are not allowed to purchase more Raptors. This means we have been forced to go with the F-35 to do any modernization at all. At the same time we have sequestration slamming us and we've seen a massive reduction in personnel to the point where some fields are at extremely critical manning, particulalry in aircraft maintenance. To effectively field the F-35 with its prohibabtively high cost and the critical manning levels we need to take maintainers and cross train them from existing airframes over to the F-35.
We will also need to retire airframes to deal with the further stretching of personnel and budgets that will be caused by this. So the question becomes, "which airframes?" The answer is obviously to look at an older platform at try to retire it. The Tankers, Bombers, ISR (U2 basically), and Cargo planes are not suitable for retirement because they lack replacement platforms in the immediate future and cannot suffer further reduction in capability right now so they're off the table.
That leaves Fighter aircraft and CAS. The primary job of the Air Force is to dominate the Air, Space, and Cyber Space realms of a battlefield. CAS comes second. With this in mind, we do not currently have a strong enough Fighter fleet to justify retiring an older airframe without significant loss to Air Superiority capability, this is directly because of the reduced purchase of Raptors which put our Fighter modernization behind schedule.
This leaves only one realistic option: We reduce by removing the only CAS primary airframe we have. Yes, it will degrade our ability to do CAS. Yes, its a lousy choice and no one is really happy about it but it's what we're stuck with because of sequestration and the fact that we weren't able to purchase our full order of Raptors.
The laundry list of Raptor issues after it joined the fleet didn't help either since it solidified the realization that we will need a lot of maintainers for the Lightning II and all its inevitable teething issues.
At the end of the day the retiring of the A-10 is the only choice we can make in good conscience. We can deal with a setback in CAS. But if we lose the fight for our Airspace we will truly suffer. And that's something that we cannot allow to happen.
That's roughly the message I got and I'm behind it. Hopefully we can get Congress to find a way to cut us a break.
Here's how it was explained to the Airmen at our base:
The Air Force needs to modernize. Now the original purchase order of the F-22 was cut by Congress and we are not allowed to purchase more Raptors. This means we have been forced to go with the F-35 to do any modernization at all. At the same time we have sequestration slamming us and we've seen a massive reduction in personnel to the point where some fields are at extremely critical manning, particulalry in aircraft maintenance. To effectively field the F-35 with its prohibabtively high cost and the critical manning levels we need to take maintainers and cross train them from existing airframes over to the F-35.
We will also need to retire airframes to deal with the further stretching of personnel and budgets that will be caused by this. So the question becomes, "which airframes?" The answer is obviously to look at an older platform at try to retire it. The Tankers, Bombers, ISR (U2 basically), and Cargo planes are not suitable for retirement because they lack replacement platforms in the immediate future and cannot suffer further reduction in capability right now so they're off the table.
That leaves Fighter aircraft and CAS. The primary job of the Air Force is to dominate the Air, Space, and Cyber Space realms of a battlefield. CAS comes second. With this in mind, we do not currently have a strong enough Fighter fleet to justify retiring an older airframe without significant loss to Air Superiority capability, this is directly because of the reduced purchase of Raptors which put our Fighter modernization behind schedule.
This leaves only one realistic option: We reduce by removing the only CAS primary airframe we have. Yes, it will degrade our ability to do CAS. Yes, its a lousy choice and no one is really happy about it but it's what we're stuck with because of sequestration and the fact that we weren't able to purchase our full order of Raptors.
The laundry list of Raptor issues after it joined the fleet didn't help either since it solidified the realization that we will need a lot of maintainers for the Lightning II and all its inevitable teething issues.
At the end of the day the retiring of the A-10 is the only choice we can make in good conscience. We can deal with a setback in CAS. But if we lose the fight for our Airspace we will truly suffer. And that's something that we cannot allow to happen.
That's roughly the message I got and I'm behind it. Hopefully we can get Congress to find a way to cut us a break.
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Sgt Tom Vaughn
Marine pilots would love to have a-10's. Great idea. I will move that on to another all Marine site.
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SSG Adam Wyatt
On a budget level, it makes sense. Reality, it doesn't. I know CAS is second to the Air Force but in my world it was #1. What happens if your JTAC is out of the fight (God forbid) and you have a fast mover on station? Nothing. What happens when you have an A-10? The pilot gets on the mic with a Private and drops ordinance More accurately than a fast mover. As a comment stated above, maybe the Army and Marine Corp should fund their own CAS programs because to us, CAS comes first. Just my opinion from the ground.
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TSgt (Join to see)
SSG Adam Wyatt Respectfully I must disagree with your statement about it not making sense in reality. In a big picture sense it does make sense because the Air Force must be strategically prepared for the worst case scenario.
We have to be ready to fight against a grade-A air power that can give our AF, Navy, and Marine pilots a run for their money even if its not very likely to happen. Because if we gamble on this and say, "we're not likely to deal with anything outside the Middle East for the next 10 years or so, we can probably get away with laying off modernization for about that long and keep the A-10" we probably win that bet.
But if we don't and it leads to us losing the battle for air superiority . . .
We take our first ground casualty to enemy aircraft since Korea and end up looking at being on the recieving end of a world class asskicking like the ones we've handed out to Iraq's army in our last two matchups. And we have a bodycount on our side that is horrific.
It probably won't happen. But we just cannot make that bet, the cost is too high if we lose.
That said, I would rather keep the A-10. I'd much rather keep the U-2! (That's a sucker punch we're not ready for and no one's even talking about the Dragon Lady getting retired outside that community) But I can also see that we've been dealt a terrible hand and we have to play it out like this even though it's guaranteed to end up costing us more lives because CAS loses capability.
Frankly, I put the blame on those who make the budgets because they do not seem to fully appreciate the gravity of the situation and the risks entailed in defending our national sovereignty. Because if they did we sure wouldn't be forced to pay for continued air supremacy with blood thanks to lost CAS capability.
We have to be ready to fight against a grade-A air power that can give our AF, Navy, and Marine pilots a run for their money even if its not very likely to happen. Because if we gamble on this and say, "we're not likely to deal with anything outside the Middle East for the next 10 years or so, we can probably get away with laying off modernization for about that long and keep the A-10" we probably win that bet.
But if we don't and it leads to us losing the battle for air superiority . . .
We take our first ground casualty to enemy aircraft since Korea and end up looking at being on the recieving end of a world class asskicking like the ones we've handed out to Iraq's army in our last two matchups. And we have a bodycount on our side that is horrific.
It probably won't happen. But we just cannot make that bet, the cost is too high if we lose.
That said, I would rather keep the A-10. I'd much rather keep the U-2! (That's a sucker punch we're not ready for and no one's even talking about the Dragon Lady getting retired outside that community) But I can also see that we've been dealt a terrible hand and we have to play it out like this even though it's guaranteed to end up costing us more lives because CAS loses capability.
Frankly, I put the blame on those who make the budgets because they do not seem to fully appreciate the gravity of the situation and the risks entailed in defending our national sovereignty. Because if they did we sure wouldn't be forced to pay for continued air supremacy with blood thanks to lost CAS capability.
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SSG Adam Wyatt
Reality is where the metal meets the meat. Nothing more, nothing less. This is a generational war and we have spent a lot of time outside of the middle east fighting it.
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Give them to the Ukrainians and the Iraq's they are too good to squandered and turned in razor blades by the USAF!
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