Pentagon issues $48 million contract to re-wing Cold War-era A-10 Warthog jets

CPI Aerostructures Inc.’s stock climbed Thursday after the company announced that it had won a contract worth as much as $48 million to re-wing Cold War-era A-10 “Warthog” jets, which the Pentagon previously had marked for retirement.

Vincent Palazzolo, chief financial officer of Edgewood-based CPI Aero, said in an email that the aerospace manufacturer has been seeking to add 10 to 15 employees to its workforce of 305 and that an additional 10 to 15 would be needed when A-10 work ramps up in 2020.

Shares of CPI Aero climbed 2.4 percent Thursday to close at $8.19. The stock was trading at $7.21 12 months ago.

In August 2014, CPI Aero took a $44.7 million noncash charge related to plans by the Pentagon to retire the A-10s, which were manufactured on Long Island.

“This award builds on our decadelong experience in manufacturing wing structures for the A-10 and cements our role as a key supply chain partner to Boeing on this aircraft to 2030 and beyond,” Douglas McCrosson, president and chief executive of CPI Aero said in a statement.

In its fiscal 2015 budget, the Air Force had estimated that retiring the A-10 would let it save $4.2 billion over five years.

Military campaigns in the Middle East, however, put the A-10 back to work. The ground-attack jet with a seven-barrel Gatling gun was designed to defeat Soviet tanks in Europe, but also proved adept at providing air support to ground troops seeking to defeat ISIS militants in the Middle East.

Under the new indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity agreement with prime contractor Boeing Co., CPI Aero will deliver structural assemblies and subassemblies for the wings of the A-10. The first delivery is expected in late 2020.

In August, Boeing announced it had won an Air Force contract with a maximum value of $999 million to re-wing up to 112 A-10s.

More than 700 A-10 Thunderbolts were made by Farmingdale-based Republic Aviation Co. (later to become Fairchild-Republic Co.).

The A-10s nickname sprang from an Air Force major who said the jet was “ugly as a warthog,” according to an account by Elliot Kazan, who died in August 2018. The Dix Hills aeronautical engineer was the project manager overseeing the jet’s production.

That would also be anyone who had anything to do with the A-10’s spiritual progenitor, the IL-2 Shturmovik. Early two seat IL-2s had the same idea - armor for pilot, none for backseater. Let’s just say this turned out to be a horrible idea and that nobody who saw the results was at all inclined to try that again. And in the 70s, there were still people in the West German government who had fought on the Eastern Front of the ETO who had seen the results of that idea first hand. Neither the Russians nor Germans were interested in repeating that.

But yes, titanium is a fungible material these days, if a bit expensive - but most of the expense these days is due to how hard the stuff is to work and form and not rarity of availability. I mean, they even make gearshift knobs and, er, ‘adult toys’ from the stuff now.

That reminds me of a portion of the Clive Cussler book "Night Probe".

Because the US is attempting a salvage for a diplomatic document on the Empress of Ireland wreck in the St. Lawrence seaway, a state of tension exists between the Canadian and US governments. A Canadian destroyer is close to the salvage ship when a fog comes in. At the same time, another vessel is observed on radar approaching, ignoring calls from the Canadian destroyer and eventually coming to a stop between the salvage vessel and the destroyer.

By this time, the Captain of the destroyer is extemely angry, demanding over the radio that the unknown vessel identify itself and depart the area. Finally, he transmits, "To the ship off my port stern: this is the HMCS destroyer, HURON. If you do not identify yourself immediately, we shall open fire and blow you out of the water."

The book continues:

"Perhaps five seconds passed, and then a voice rasped out of the bridge speaker in a pronounced Texas drawl:

"This is the US guided-missile cruiser PHOENIX. Draw when you're ready, pardner ..."."

There are too many people here that are like the Germans towards the end of WW2 - believing that their armed forces haven’t been gutted, that there’s some wonder weapon that will overcome their deficits and win the conflict. Just look at all the people who claimed and still claim that the US Navy hitting two merchant vessels in the Pacific were the victims of some hacking or some plot when it really was incompetence.

People really can’t believe just how badly our military has been gutted, how much we sat on our laurels - and how much potential enemies have caught up or even surpassed us. Look at all the time and money we dumped into the nearly useless LCS, then look at how hastily our Navy is now having to buy in a frigate design from other nations to fix the mistake.

In many of these exercises, we’re not holding anything back. It’s painfully clear to those who are not blind that we have some ugly deficits and that we’ve relied on some of our systems far too much. Syria has finally driven home that the Russian and Israeli APS for tanks actually work and that Russian ATGMs really are every bit as destructive against NATO front line composite armor as claimed, forcing the Army to hastily order Israeli APS to retrofit to our Abrams. Multiple friendly exercises against domestic NATO systems and friendly high-grade export Russian aircraft have shown really bad gaps in our capability once we lose AWACS coverage. Our enemies have not been idle in the 40 years since AWACS was conceived and the 30 years since it was deployed.

Once we lose AWACS, our aircraft are at a disadvantage to an enemy supported by a ground radar network, and/or with aircraft carrying the Infrared Search and Track systems that we neglected until recently. The MiG-29 and SU-27 (and subsequent developments) have had IRST systems installed since the 70s, with continuous developments since. The latest versions of the SU-27, for example, can see a US fighter at 80-100km, well enough to get an IR missile lock and fire with no warning. Our F-22 has NO IRST system and it was only hastily added to the F-35 before finalization. NONE of our USAF F-15s or F-16s have it (though the ones made for foreign countries do, we have until recent exercises decided we didn’t need it), and the integration into the F-35 has been problematic at best. Our off-bore missile capability is limited compared to the current Russian and Chinese capability, as we were late to the party there too. We assumed that nobody would be able to reach the AWACS aircraft - and the Russians designed, built, tested and demonstrated AWACS killer missiles.

The vulnerability of US aircraft once AWACS is removed is not a matter of “hiding our cards” - our aircraft visibly do not have the capabilities of other nations, and our exercises against them on their home turf have been tending to show this more and more of late.

Thanks to Obama, Bush 2 and Clinton, plus several feckless Congresses, we are more than a decade behind in many critical technical areas. This is something clearly demonstrable in most cases, and to believe we have some super wonder weapon that will save us in event of a real war and that we don’t need to scramble to catch up and pass potential adversaries is to be an idiot. Worse, it remove support from the few crash development programs to address the gap.

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