I see that Joe among others beat me to the Warthog story. Yet I cannot help pointing other things I have said about it in the past in my Interview with a Wild Weasel Pilot. The A-10 has been on borrowed time since the first Gulf War.
Look at this bio I found on google on General Deptula, who ordered the A-10's removal from service:
Maj. Gen. David A. Deptula is director of plans and programs, Headquarters Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base, Va. He is responsible for providing plans, programs, manpower and doctrine for units that encompass more than 165,000 people, and a $17 billion budget.He was a distinguished graduate of the University of Virginia ROTC in 1974, and remained to complete a master’s degree in 1976. He earned his wings in 1977 and has flown more than 2,900 hours in fighter assignments. He has been an F-15C aerial demonstration pilot, weapons and tactics division chief, logistics group deputy commander, operations group commander, and a combined/joint task force commander. He has taken part in air operations, and defense planning and joint warfighting, from unit through service headquarters to unified command levels.
Deptula was the principal planner for the coalition offensive air campaign during Desert Storm, and commanded the Operation Northern Watch Combined/Joint Task Force during a period of renewed Iraqi aggression, in which he flew 82 combat missions over Iraq.
Prior to assuming his current position, the general was the director of the Air Force Quadrennial Defense Review at headquarters, where he was the focal point for Air Force efforts, analysis and articulation of aerospace power positions for the 2001 QDR."
If that isn't a resume for a Fighter Pilot Mafia capo, I'll eat my hat.
Continued...
The Fighter Pilot Mafia hates the A-10 because it is a pure air-to-ground fighter and in the War on Terrorism it is sexier than their beloved F-16s and irrelevant air superiority F-15Cs and F/A-22s.
The funny thing is that the A-10 was given birth by a maverick Tactical Air Command general named Richard Yudkin in the aftermath of Vietnam and McNamara's cancellation of the US Army's AH-56 Cheyenne compound helicopter.
This article from Slate explains the "Key West Agreement" on who flys what in the US military and the US Air Force and Congressional pork barrel politics that built the Warthog.
This passage is particularly telling:
"Yudkin was a bit of a rebel within the Air Force. The establishment generals (who, by the early '70s, were still dominated by the nuclear-bomber crowd) hated the idea of the A-X for the same reason they hated the close-air-support mission: It had nothing to do with the Air Force's bigger, more glamorous roles. Yudkin couldn't even get the Air Force R &D directorate to work on the project, so he set up his own staff to do it.It's real a shame Deptula can't figure out in 2003 what Yudkin did in 1968-73. That what is good for the USAF Brass (bomber pilots then and fighter pilots now) is bad for America, and vice versa.The A-10 rolled onto the tarmac in 1976. The brass still hated the thing. It survived only because of pork-barrel politics, it was built by Fairchild Industries in Bethpage, Long Island, home district of Rep. Joseph Addabbo, who was chairman of the House appropriations' defense subcommittee. The plan was to build 850 of the planes. By 1986, when Addabbo died, Fairchild had built just 627, and the program came to a crashing halt. No more A-10s were ordered, and 197 of those in existence were transferred to the Air National Guard and allowed to rot.
When the first Gulf War was being planned in 1990, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the chief of U.S. Central Command, had to fight the Air Force to send over a mere 174 A-10s for his use. Yet in the course of the war, those A-10s knocked out roughly half of the 1,700 Iraqi tanks that were destroyed from the air, as well as several hundred armored personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery guns. They also conducted search and rescue operations, blew up roads and bridges, and hunted for Scuds.
Even the Air Force brass had to admit the planes had done a good job, and they kept them in the fleet. (They had planned on replacing all of them with modified F-16s.) Though the statistics aren't yet in, the A-10s seemed to do well in Gulf War II, especially now that the Army, Air Force, and Marines are more inclined to coordinate their battle plans.
If the WOT has shown anything, it is that the air force needs more, and better, Air Support combat planes. The A-10 is good, but is based on dated 70's tech. Its time to start working on a replacement, perhaps something using vector thrust technology to give it better evasion capability.
Transfer the A-10 to the Army and/or the Marines.
The Marines would know how to use the A-10 in close air support!
I flew with Dave Deptula (we were F-15C pilots together in USAFE - Soesterberg AB, NL), and I suppose my resume would qualify me for the fighter mafia as well.
I now work as a civilian contractor at Davis-Monthan AFB AZ, where I provide academic and simulator training courseware to support the USAF's central A/OA-10 schoolhouse, or flying training unit.
Our current five-year contract ends this September 30th, and we're currently competing for the next five-year gig which starts October 1st. Several other contractors have put in bids.
My point is that we're still training A/OA-10 pilots, and we'll be doing so for at least five more years.
Many of us at the grunt level of the fighter pilot mafia are strong supporters of the A/OA-10, and wish the USAF had a stronger commitment to close air support.
Regards,
Skid
Just goes to show that the Army should be allowed to run its own close air support and design and operate an updated follow-on version of the A-10. Right. Like that'll happen.
The "Fighter Mafia" are not the bad-guys in the A-10 fight. The Mafia were a specific group of Air Force rebels from the late '60s and early '70s who stood up against the "Bomber Generals" who thought every warplane should be an XB-70--big, complicated, nuclear bombers.
Back then we had the F-105, the F-111 on the drawing board and the F-4 Phantom was considered "lightweight." All of them were way too complex, way too large, way too expensive, and built in smaller and smaller numbers.
The Fighter Mafia, inspired by Colonel John Boyd, fought very hard to break the Bomber Generals' stranglehold and build smaller, cheaper, more effective purpose-built aircraft: the F-16 was the main result. Nearly unrivalled still, thirty years later, as a dogfighter, solid range, and better than ever as a strike "utility infielder." It's not an A-10 because it was purpose built for something else.
If anything the Fighter Mafia's success with the purpose-built F-16 paved the way for the specialized A-10.
Today we've largely reverted to the "gold-plate" tendencies of the past. Take a good idea and attach "nice-to-have" gadgets until the machine barely gets off the ground and buying it breaks the bank. If the Fighter Mafia was still around the F-22 would cost half as much and the A-10's replacement would be in production (with the same defense budget!)
Bill, the problem with Marine A-10s, I'm sure, is that they wouldn't be easily carrier-deployable, and if you can't deploy it from sea, the USMC has little use for it. Much of what the A-10 is good for is what the Harrier is good for, and they've already cast their lot with that one.
You're all wrong.
The A-10 was a poor CAS platform from the moment it was designed solely to keep the Army below 200 knots as their own exponent of ground support.
As such, it was designed around a maze of conflicting requirements, /none/ of which represented the best way to do CAS, even in the period '70-'74 when the AAFSS was undergoing its death throws.
1. As originally spec'd the early A-10 concept art reflected a jet coming to the fight with a huge array of Mk.82 and SEA camouflage. This was invalidated the very instant the SA-7 and NATO fight again became the driving anti-system-not-personnel definition of CAS.
2. The GAU-8 is about 8,000lbs and there is another 6,000lbs of armor on the jet specific to protecting it's installation. That's half the airframes weight. The reason for this selection was to stay cheap enough to save the 'real money' for the A-X. Yet, as with the Mk.82 (a purely laydown weapon in the A-10 tactics book in USAFE) the gun requires a <2,500ft run which 'might as well be' an overflight because all the time and airframe area you spend banking away in front of the guns and MANPADS.
3. There WERE superior solutions to the (largely unsurvivable, IMO) D-A-y-10 mission set. The A-7D was one. The Pave Tack and Spike were others. Even in the late 60s and early 70s (A modified airlaunch version of Shillelagh and Hornet respectively) we had the beginnings of all weather and very lightweight = multicarriage missiles that could use EITHER command guidance, SALH or TV seeker heads. In the 80's this was followed up by the Assault Breaker and specifically WASP programs Then Maverick came along as a gut buster missile with a huge drag penalty and more motor range than could possibly be exploited by the seeker in Euromet conditions and all was forgotten as the AF Generals went 'bigger is better' instead. This left particularly the Hornet missile to eventually become Hellfire which, while qualified on the A-10, was never adopted because the original M272 'Wasn't operationally suitable for Fast Jets' (i.e. They didn't want something cheap and workable competing with the LANTIRN and DRF efforts). This left the USAF with a CAS missile that often had shorter lockon distances than the min gun range. On an airframe which had no powered optics to cue it. And not even a laser spot tracker for the first 2 years it was in theater. A gradual introduction of the AGM-65D (which was field tested in '79-81 and then sent back into the labs, not to reappear again until 1986 after the best 'window of vulnerability' on a Soviet attack was long over) solved some of this yet problems with the LAU-88 still restricted the airframe to all of two useful precision shots before it effectively became a target drone.
4. The A-10 has the high altitude performance of a kite in a hurricane. Its engines run out of thrust. Its airfoil runs out of lift for the relative Mach point and the resulting 'borderline power vs. aerostall' margin means it has to stay right in the weather belt as it refuels (with two non combat rated tanks). This means that not only is it incapable of simply flying over the trashfire floor, it is unable to deploy without the absolute /greatest/ of care regarding routing through every possible divert base in reaching the combat theater. I remember in Bright Star '81ish, one of the first A-10 deployments outside NATO and Korea, the route from Myrtle looked like a veritable hopscotch of leapfrogging across the pond and down to the Med and the entire KC-135 crew assigned to the drag /hated/ the A-10 by the time they got there.
5. The A-10 is natively slow. This means that it is unable to run quick BAI missions behind the active FSCL and survive to run back out before the threat can respond. Such is the difference between hitting 2-3 tanks in a battlefield filled with other fires, friendly units and much confusion. And bagging 100 vehicles on a road as F2F or CSS type support moving up. It is also the difference between an hour or three onstation at 250 miles from the tanker and maybe only 35-55 minutes because you spend half your time getting there (and the TF34 is a /bad/ engine in terms of aging graceful compression).
5. Weaponeering options have changed a great deal. What once took upwards of 200rds at full rate just to hit in the 'general area' of a moving armored target no longer applies because even the insurgent threat can reach well over 12,000ft with shoulder fire weapons and can increasingly do so at night. Indeed, even though LASTE and then IFFC and the new mission computer gave us computing sights able to reduce the dispersion down to perhaps 35-70 rounds on one motor; the ballistic variables of shooting on a long slant from height makes the CM useless because the DU round goes a little low and the HEI drops out of the circle completely. With the hue and cry over the former round poisoning the environment, coupled to the tendency of the threat to bury itself among civillians or by-the-belt-buckle close to friendlies, the gun becomes an untenable risk to all involved. Not least because you can now take a rocket (2,000 dollars each) like the 4,000fps CRV-7 and fit it with a SALH guidance package like the APKWS. And either a unitary, grenadelet or multidart warhead. To have a 1,500lb engagement system (2 LAU pods, 1 Targeting Pod) that can put down 14-38, 1 meter accurate, kills from over 20,000ft slants. As a direct fire alternative to weapons like the GBU-39 which can take these numbers out another order of magnitude to the point where only a heavy SAM (SA-2 or better) and radar direction can spot the target. And only the very latest in targeting gear (Sniper and Lynx) can enable a sophisticated platform to shoot safely.
6. The nature of the mission is completely different.
The enemy knows, to the minute, how long they can stay before air arrives and they are fired up without further option to disengage (we will kill them as they run). And they are quite satisfied with desultory kills of 1-2 people or units. Not least because they can score dozens of such attacks across an entire country, every week. Thus they are content to attack in small numbers and vanish rather than endure multiple passes worth of attack. Which means that the conventional definition of 'Close' Air Support, no longer applies. Because the weapon targeting not the airframe orientation (overhead or parallel) is what dictates your friendly force separations and while you must in fact respond faster than ever before, you are actually better off remaining far enough away to not cue the bad guys to the presence of friendlies nearby while (high enough) able to look down the road 20 minutes or so to see the threat setting up their ambush or IED.
Such a condition of engagement requires two things more than any other element of performance:
A. Cheap Sortie Generation.
B. Absolute Endurance On Station at Altitude.
Since you may well be playing night watchman and sentry for a ground force that is spending the night in Indian Country. Or doing NTISR in which even 200 sorties per day is worthless if they can only cover half of 1,000 friendly installations and chokepoints that are considered high-threat targets.
CONCLUSION:
An F-16 costs roughly 5,500 dollars per flying hour to operate. An A-10, depending on how it is nominally mission tagged and equipped, (OA or A, A or C) is about half to two thirds this. With often less than a 100 in each deployed theater and only a couple on ramp let alone airborne alert, these airframes are both no more useful than if they had stayed in the States. What is need is a 1,500 dollar per flying hour airframe which can stay up 10-15 hours and drop single bombs on enemy targets. As they TCT show themselves. All Day Long. With 70-90% of the force airborne at any time.
Such a system technology is available. And unlike most dedicated CAS solutions, it is capable of flying FDOW missions at 400 knots and 40,000ft as well as continuing occupational security missions at 200 knots and 20,000ft. It is unmanned so it's endurance is purely a function of tailoring the propulsion:fuel efficiencies to a_non_ 'fighter' mission. And because it needs never expose itself to direct enemy fire as the A-10 was designed to from the start, it can instead direct design funds into the sensor, PGM and observable categories of airframe design which is where the utility of an OEF type 'deep CAS' (killbox) platform can amd must concentrate on achieved performance in an undegraded IADS environment.
Grunts 'already approve' if their opinions of the Predator are any clue as to their Don't Leave Home Without It appreciation of truly endurant airpower.
The design for a followon CAS airframe to replace the A-10 is the X-45 or a similar jet-UCAV with 8 GBU-39 onboard and enough sensorization to look thru weather while maintaining the basic fundamentals of high altitude performance (Mach .85 and 40K) of a small business jet with roughly the same thrust to weight ratio and half the drag. of the Hog on a vastly superior wing design.
KPl.
P.S. The fighter mafia was a group of statistical analysts and gungho 'old school' fighter jocks including Pierre Sprey, John Boyd and Everest Riccioni specifically interested in the development of lightweight fighters to match the MiG-21 as dogfight platforms. They were directly responsible for the F-16 which has since proven to be a 'world beater' in the production sales department at the cost of being nearly useless to our own longrange expeditionary force doctrine. The man most responsible for turning the U.S. away from a policy of overwhelming nuclear response fixated upon the Soviet threat and towards a more mixed-mission set capability in regional conflicts was in fact none other than Robert McNamara and he began the process almost a decade before the Fighter Mafia were even formed.