Republican Representative Martha McSally’s Arizona Senate race loss to Democratic challenger Kyrsten Sinema, together with the death of the state’s beloved Senator John McCain, means the A-10 Warthog has lost its most vocal defenders in Congress this year. This has prompted many to question whether this will prompt the U.S. Air Force to redouble its efforts to retire the venerable ground attack aircraft for good. The impact may actually be less pronounced than the planes defenders might fear, but it also might still not be enough to save the ‘Hogs from going to the Bone Yard. McSally, herself a retired Air Force colonel, former A-10 pilot, and member of the House Armed Services Committee, had been the Warthog’s primary advocate in the halls of Congress after McCain passed away from cancer in August 2018. She had declined to seek re-election as a Representative for Arizona in 2018 in favor of running to take the Senate seat left open by Senator Jeff Flake’s decision to retire from public office. New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, another Republican and supporter of retaining the A-10, had lost her re-election bid in 2016. There is, of course, a distinct possibility that Arizona Governor Doug Ducey will now appoint McSally to take McCain's seat, propelling her into the Senate, anyway.

It’s hard to understate McSally’s impact on the state of the A-10 program and her role in preserving it in the face of repeated attempts by the Air Force to retire the aircraft. She was instrumental in getting language in successive annual defense policy bills that prevented the service from ditching the ground attack aircraft without having an adequate replacement ready to go and without conducting a comparative “fly-off” between the Warthog and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Air Force has long planned to replace the A-10 with the stealthy fighter jets and has hidden the head-to-head evaluation, which finally occurred last Summer, and its results from public view. Familiar with both the aircraft and the Air Force bureaucracy, McSally also had a knack for understanding various factors at play and knowing what questions to ask. During a hearing in June 2017, she picked up on the service’s first public disclosure of plans to cut three combat-coded A-10 squadrons entirely and immediately pushed back against that proposal.

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images Representative Martha McSally on Capitol Hill in February 2018.

At present, there are nine combat-coded Warthog squadrons in the active and reserve components of the Air Force, including the Air National Guard. There are a total of more than 280 A-10s are spread out across those units, as well as training and test squadrons. At the time of the June 2017 hearing, the Warthog was supporting combat operations in Iraq and Syria and were forward deployed in South Korea in order to respond to any potential North Korean aggression, as well as conducting various training engagements elsewhere around the world. “How are you going to maintain something like that with six squadrons?” she asked incredulously during the June 2017 hearing, referring to the combat capability offered by the current force. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.” Since then, the Air Force has ostensibly put those plans on hold. The service has also rebooted a program to re-wing dozens of Warthogs, extending their life expectancy at least until 2040.

USAF A stripped down A-10 undergoing maintenance work at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in 2013.