First a bit of history. The A-10 was borne out of the a 1970s requirement for an aircraft specifically tailored to destroy Warsaw Pact armor in the event of a large scale war in Europe. Basically the Soviets had good tanks, and more importantly, they had them in vast quantities.



Here you have your basic commie horde.

The A-10 was designed to be a tank-killer second to none. The entire plane was built around a massive 30 mm Gatling Gun capable of defeating the armor of the day - from the top and rear. Note that 30 mm rounds will bounce harmlessly off a tank's frontal and side armor.

To ensure survivability the pilot sits inside a titanium "bathtub". The engines are spaced far apart so that a heat-seeking missile will hopefully only take one of them out. Most importantly, the flight controls have manual reversion in case the hydraulics are shot out. That's a big deal because a lot of fighters were lost in Vietnam due to loss of hydraulics.

So how do I think the A-10 would have done had it been called upon to do its original job? I think they would have died in large numbers.

Actually, I think everyone would have died in large numbers. Even if we could have kept it from going nuclear (not likely) I think the first week of any NATO/Warsaw Pact engagement would have been one of the bloodiest in human history. We never faced the best Russian stuff operated by people who really knew how to use it.

The A-10 got its first real test during the Gulf War and it did quite well, with a few caveats that I will get to momentarily. The A-10s racked up an impressive record, killing more than 900 tanks, 2000 other vehicles and 1200 artillery pieces. I don't know how many of those kills were with the gun and how many were by Maverick missiles. I suspect that most of the tank kills were with the Maverick, since roughly 5000 were used during the war and 90% of those were fired by A-10s. The gun was probably used more against "soft" targets like trucks and artillery. Keep in mind that the A-10s mostly operated at medium altitudes (10,000 - 15,000 feet) to stay above the AAA. That greatly reduced the effectiveness of their gun.



A-10 firing AGM-65 Maverick

Only the B-52 (had to get that in there) scared the Iraqis more than the A-10. Surprisingly what scared them most about the A-10 was its loiter time. It seemed like they were always around and there was no escaping them.

So far so good. The A-10s were kicking ass and taking names against the Iraqis, right up until they started hitting the Republican Guard divisions in February of 1991. After two A-10s were shot down and a third damaged on the same day, General Horner restricted the A-10 to within 20 miles of the border in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations (source: Gulf War Air Power Survey). After that F-111s dropping laser-guided bombs from medium altitude became the preferred aircraft for "tank plinking".

One of those A-10s that was shot down was a former student pilot of mine. He became a POW. His wingman was killed while trying to cover him, possibly by the same missile launcher.

Overall losses for the A-10 in Desert Storm were four shot down and three damaged to the point of being written off. The biggest threat to them proved to be tactical SAMs. Two where shot down by SA-13s, one by an SA-6 and one by an SA-16 (shoulder fired missile).



SA-6 aka "The three fingers of death". It's been around since 1970 and still gives us headaches.

Note that these systems were all developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They were not the best stuff the Russians had even in 1991. I certainly did not want to go up against an SA-6 and we had countermeasures the A-10 guys could only dream about. We were told we could defeat the SA-6 if we did everything right. There was no room for error. That's against a missile that's been around since 1970.

SAM technology has come a long way since then and they're only going to get scarier.

The thing that shot down the Malaysian airliner? That was an SA-11, a generation beyond the SA-6. Let's look at this little nightmare for a moment. It's on tracked vehicles so it will be right there with the tanks. It can be set up to fire in 5 minutes. Max range is 26 miles. Maximum altitude is somewhere around low earth orbit. Minimum altitude is 50 feet. Kill probability is upwards of 90 percent. Your best hope is to put a piece of dirt between you and the missile. This is no "tailpipe bender" either. It carries a 150 pound warhead that will just plain ruin your day. When Russia and Georgia had their little spat in 2008, these shot down a TU-22M bomber and three SU-25s. In case you didn't know, the SU-25 is the Russian equivalent of the A-10.



The SU-25 is the Russian counterpart to the A-10. Three of these were shot down in 2008 by SA-11s.

If the SA-11 isn't enough to give you nightmares, they're now a generation beyond it with the SA-17. I'm glad I retired.

The Israelis were scared enough of this thing to bomb a convoy that they suspected was carrying some of them to Lebanon. I'm hard on the Israelis sometimes but I can't really blame them for that one.



SA-17 (Buk-M2) Kill probability is 90-95%. If you're not afraid of it there's something wrong with you.

So where does that leave the A-10? Well it depends on what you think we're going to be doing 5, 10 or 20 years from now. You will get no argument from me that the A-10 is a great aircraft for what we're doing today. If anything it's overkill for what we're doing today. If you think that all we will face in the next decade or so are insurgents then A-10s will do the job just fine.

The problem is, we don't buy fighters for today. Fighter designs tend to have a 30 year lifespan these days. The F-15 was designed in the late 1960s and first flew in 1972. The F-16 first flew in 1974. The F/A-18 first flew in 1978. Great jets but they're old designs and they've been matched or even outclassed by the competition. The F-15 and F-16 will be tactically obsolete around the mid 2020s. Not too far off when you consider development time.

The F-15C (air superiority version) is being replaced by the F-22. The F-22 is an extremely capable aircraft but we're only buying 187 of them.

So where do we go from here? In a "perfect" world with unlimited defense budgets we'd design a bunch of new aircraft to replace all these 1970s designs. We may get to see that if the GOP ever takes all three branches of government and goes back to "Deficits don't matter. Reagan taught us that."

The problem is, we don't have unlimited budgets and some things have to get prioritized. Here's where it gets tricky. The Air Force has always given short shrift to the Close Air Support mission. For that matter the Army Air Corps did too back in the day. The Air Force is run by a bunch of F-15C air-to-air guys who only like sleek pointy-nosed fighters that go Mach 2 and shoot down other airplanes.

The problem is, they're at least partially right. Without air superiority, nothing else gets accomplished. The air-to-air guys can be a pain in the ass sometimes but you gotta have 'em.

One of the missions of the new fighter is going to be air superiority. Remember we only built 187 F-22s. We're replacing F-16s and F/A-18s here, both of which have pretty decent air-to-air capability. Any new fighter will need to augment the small F-22 fleet in the air superiority role.

It will also need to perform interdiction and strike missions. That is, attack enemy targets behind their lines to keep additional forces and supplies from getting to the front. The A-10 could not perform those missions in anything other than a very low threat environment.

So we need something that can do air-to-ground as its primary mission with a secondary air-to-air mission. Most importantly it has to be survivable against 4th generation air defenses. Even if you think we won't fight Russia or China in the next 10-20 years, and I sincerely hope we don't, we may very well fight someone who has their stuff.

What is that aircraft? I don't know for sure. It may or may not be an F-35 but it is definitely not an A-10. The A-10 has no air-to-air capability to speak of and it is most definitely not survivable against 4th generation SAMs. Unless its flaming wreckage happens to land on top of the bad guys, it will not get much close air support done if double-digit missiles (SA-10 or newer) are in the neighborhood.



SA-13 It can track you optically and by Infra Red. You won't know it's there until it shoots.

Any aircraft capable of doing this will, by definition, not be as good at close air support as an A-10. That is a given. A multi-role aircraft (and pilot) for any given mission is never as good as one that specializes in that mission. It's just that an F-35 at the front is better than an A-10 with an SA-11 sticking out of it. Plus the F-35 would be able to do other missions besides close air support. The A-10 is pretty much limited to close air support.

Does that mean I'm shilling for the F-35 here? I'm not totally sold on the F-35 either. I understand why the DOD wants this aircraft, I just don't know if it can do all that's being asked of it.

They want a single aircraft that can replace the F-16 and A-10 for the Air Force, the F/A-18 for the Navy and Marines and the AV-8B for the Marines and the Brits. That's a pretty tall order. I'm reminded of MacNamara's TFX that was supposed to fill the needs of both the Air Force and Navy. It didn't work out that way. It's very hard to design an aircraft for both the Air Force and Navy. Trying to do that and replace the Harrier at the same time? "Ambitious" doesn't begin to describe it. You can see this in how much different the Navy (F-35C) and Marine (F-35B) versions are to the Air Force's version. It's practically three different airplanes at this point.



Note the much larger wing on the F-35C (left). This was required to make the naval version capable of carrier ops.

The F-35 is over budget and has flaws. You can say the same for pretty much every fighter we've built in my memory. We said the same thing about the F-15 and F-16 back in the 70s and 80s. Both ended up being good airplanes. I'm speculating here, but with continued development the F-35 could probably do the same.

I don't know anyone who's actually flown the F-35. I am told by people in the know that its electronic suite is incredible. Aviation buffs tend to focus on the airframe and performance figures but I'm told by people in the F-22 community that the real magic today lies in the electronics.

Will the F-35 be vulnerable to modern air defenses? Yes, to a degree. "More survivable" does not mean "invincible". Contrary to popular misconception, stealth aircraft are not invisible to radar. They are hard to see and hard to engage. Being stealthy means you can't see them until they're very close and you don't get much time to take a shot at one. Used incorrectly they can still be shot down, as we found out when Serbia got an F-117 in 1999. Still, anything capable of getting a shot at an F-35 will eat A-10s for lunch.

So where does that leave us? It all comes down to funding. Faced with budget cuts the Air Force felt they had to either park the A-10 or make very deep cuts elsewhere. The bean counters estimated that they would have to park 360 F-16s to get the same cost savings as parking the A-10 fleet. There are savings multipliers associated with parking an entire fleet due to spare parts, training and such.

Note that in Iraq and Afghanistan (OIF and OEF) most of the close air support sorties were performed by other aircraft. F-16s flew 33% of the CAS sorties, with A-10s flying 19%. The rest was done by other aircraft like F-15Es and even B-1s.

A dedicated close air support version of the F-16 was floated at one point. They were never able to make it work quite right. The pod-mounted 30mm gun shook too much when fired and couldn't be used accurately.

One suggestion that gets floated periodically is to give the A-10s to the Army. I see a lot of problems with that idea not least of which is we'd have to rewrite the 1947 agreement that prevents the Army from operating fixed-wing aircraft. But let's say we did. The Army has no fixed-wing pilot training program and no fighter lead-in program so the pilots would still have to be trained by the Air Force. Meanwhile none of this addresses the problem of survivability. The SA-17 doesn't care if the plane says "US Army" or "USAF" on the side - it will die just the same.

The only way I see the A-10 being viable in the future would be after air defenses have been mostly neutralized by the stealth aircraft, drones, missiles, computer hackers plus a kitchen sink or two. Then, and only then, will you be able to let A-10s roam over the battlefield. Even then there will still be threats from old fashioned AAA and IR SAMs.

So ultimately the question is not "A-10 or F-35"? I don't envision the DOD and Congress giving up on the F-35 at this point. The real question is "F-35 and A-10 or just F-35"? The answer is: how much do you want to spend?