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The A-10 Bites Back


Valin

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20150422.aspxStrategy Page:

April 22, 2015:

 

A U.S. Air Force two-star general lost his command for making a speech in which he called air force personnel speaking out publicly about the benefits of the A-10 ground attack aircraft guilty (at least according to many air force generals) of treason. The general was speaking to air force personnel in January about how important it was to support decisions of senior air force leaders and those generals were trying to overcome opposition from the army, congress and many air force personnel to another effort to retire all the A-10s. The general lost his job as commander of ACC (Air Combat Command) for these public remarks. While ACC is in charge of most combat aircraft (fighters, bombers, recon and ground attack) ACC leadership has long believed that the A-10 has outlived its usefulness and that its ground support job could be done just as well by fighters like the F-16 and F-35. Experience in combat has shown that this is not true, but discussing that might be treasonous as well.

 

The air force has been trying to retire its A-10 aircraft since the 1990s and this time (since late 2014) they tried issuing studies and analyses showing that the A-10 was too specialized and too old to justify the cost of keeping it in service. This generated more opposition, and more effective opposition, than the air forces expected. This was helped by the fact that some of the “studies” were more spin and impartial analysis. All this created unwanted publicity to something the air force denies exists but is nevertheless very real; the air force has never really wanted to devote much resources to CAS (Close Air Support) for ground forces. Officially this is not true but in reality it is and the ground forces (army and marines) and historians provided plenty of evidence.

 

The problem is complicated by the fact that the air force does not want to allow the army to handle CAS, as is the case with some countries and the U.S. Marine Corps (which provides CAS for marines and any ground forces the marines are operating with). Soldiers and marines both insist that marine CAS (provided by Harriers and F-18s flown by marines) is superior. The army and marines also have their own helicopter gunships for support, but they lack capabilities only the fixed wing aircraft have. Despite all that the air force wants to eliminate the A-10, which soldiers, marines and many allied troops consider the best CAS aircraft ever, and replace it with less effective (for CAS) fighters adapted for CAS. The ground forces don’t want that mainly because the A-10 pilots specialize in CAS while for fighter pilots must spend a lot of time training for air combat and different types of bombing, The A-10 pilots are CAS specialists and it shows by the amount of praise they get from their “customers” (the ground troops). To the dismay of just about everyone the air force dismisses all this as much less important than the fact that the A-10 cannot not fight other aircraft. That was how the A-10 was designed, on air force orders, but that is somehow irrelevant now.

 

(Snip)


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