Posted on 04/28/2015 8:24:45 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar
The Air Force will send some perfectly fine fighter jets to the boneyard or delay its F-35 Lightning II rollout for a year if Congress blocks retirement of the A-10 Thunderbolt, according to a document recently provided to military oversight committees.
The tradeoffs would occur at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, due to limited number of personnel to maintain the A-10s, F-16 Fighting Falcons and the first advanced F-35 joint strike fighters slated to arrive later this year, the service told lawmakers.
The Air Force and Congress have been grappling over the future of the A-10, known as the Warthog, for the past year. Hill recently unveiled plans to mothball 18 of the aircraft. The service wants to eliminate the close-air-support aircraft to save money but the House Armed Services Committee said it will vote this week on a draft defense budget that will bar the move.
“The Air Force, if compelled to retain the A-10, does not possess a sufficient number of experienced maintainers to sustain the original Hill AFB conversion plan [to] stand up [a] new F-35 fighter squadron and then convert two F-16 units,” the service wrote to the committee in an unclassified talking paper obtained by Stars and Stripes. The undated document was recently provided to House and Senate armed service committees, congressional staff said.
The F-16s were to be relocated to other bases – Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and Fort Wayne Air National Guard Base in Indiana – to replace A-10 units and make room for the F-35s.
Instead, the jets would be sent to the “boneyard” storage area at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, the service said.
If lawmakers try to block F-16s from the boneyard, the lack of qualified maintenance personnel would delay the F-35 from flying at Hill for “at least a year,” it said.
The Air Force has repeatedly asked Congress to support the A-10 retirement, which it says will save about $4.2 billion over the next four years and allow the fleet to be modernized. The A-10 has been flying since the 1970s and is now deployed in Iraq and Europe.
Lt. Col. Christopher Karns, an Air Force spokesman, said it is premature to speculate on what actions the service will take before Congress hashes out the annual defense budget.
“The Air Force has actively explored a range of options to address its maintainer shortage,” Karns wrote in an email. “An inability to divest A-10s will impact the ability to provide experienced maintainers to support the F-35 mission.”
The chairman of House Armed Services released his draft of the annual defense budget Monday and it included a measure fully funding the A-10 program, though it would allow the Air Force to mothball a maximum of 18 aircraft.
However, Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., said she plans to introduce an amendment Wednesday that will prohibit any retirement of the aircraft.
Take the Hogs, let the F-16s go. We can always get the F-16s back. but not the Hog once its gone.
The current state of manufacturing is such that new tooling would be available within months and the tooling would be far better than the tooling destroyed.
A10s would be rolling out the door in surprisingly short order.
“If lawmakers try to block F-16s from the boneyard, the lack of qualified maintenance personnel would delay the F-35 from flying at Hill for “at least a year,” it said.”
Sounds good.
Best idea I’ve heard so far.
You lucky guy.
As a former active duty Marine, I can tell you that if the Chair Force wants to mothball the A-10, give ‘em to the Marine Corps!
We could still be flying and fighting with those awesome bastards in 2040!
Awesome weapon and one of the best Air-Ground support “fast movers” in the air! It can fly low and slow to devastate the enemy in front of you (I have seen a pilot walk a trench line with his Gatlin!)! And it can come in hot and fast with air-to-ground missiles!
I know it is old, but it is still a VERY powerful and effective weapon for the close air-ground support which the Marine Corps (and often Army) needs!
RE B-25s... heck of an impression of a heavy fighter in a pinch...”:
Look up the B-25 Mitchell and A-20 Havoc Gunships operating in the Pacific during WWII. Skip bombing, parafrags, and a whole MESS of .50 calibers mounted in the nose...
Heavy fighter - indeed you are correct... there weren’t a lot of them, but they raised absolute HELL on Japanese ships and airfields.
Even if we had to reverse engineer the whole thing, it would be possible to reproduce the aircraft.
The whole 'production tooling scrapped' argument is simply an excuse.
This thread is both amusing and entertaining. For people clamoring that the A-10 should be given to the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps has already made its selection for its next CAS aircraft. It’s the F-35B. It will replace the AV-8B and older F-18C, both of which the Marine Corps has been using as very effective CAS platforms for decades (as a sidenote, the last major upgrade to the AV-8B was to give it a very nice radar which allowed it to employ AMRAAM missiles. For those in Rio Linda, that’s a beyond visual range air to air weapon. A capability the Marine Corps recognized as being important to even dedicated attack aircraft, and one the A-10 could never have). The Marine Corps is THE expert service on the CAS mission, so its decisions regarding how it will perform CAS are worth pondering. It doesn’t want the A-10, and got rid of its last slow moving, straight wing FAC/CAS platform shortly after it became obvious in the first Gulf War that flying those aircraft into anything but a low threat surface to air environment was a great way to put the whole CAS war on hold while you dedicated most of your assets to recovering downed pilots.
As far as giving the A-10 to the Army...they don’t want them. No room in their budget to support taking on a fixed wing attack aircraft and all the support assets it requires. Dead issue.
People who aren’t familiar with the modern CAS environment believe to be effective, it must be performed by aircraft flying low and slow. The advent of precision guided munitions changed that. Flying low and slow in a modern combat environment is about as tactically smart as employing horse cavalry in a modern combat environment. Looks really cool. Lots of chivalry. And then you permanently lose the asset you were counting on to help you win the war, when the enemy gets tired of looking at it. If the Army truly believed CAS was best performed by low and slow aircraft, it would use its AH-64s as dedicated CAS platforms. It never has.
The primary objective of CAS is to support ground troops in close combat with the enemy. To do that, you need to deliver the right ordnance, precisely on target, as quickly as possible. We do that now with everything from artillary, ballistic missiles, drones, bombers, helicopters, fighter aircraft of all types, and yes, the A-10. Other than its appearance, there is nothing unique the A-10 brings to the equation that gets ordnance on target any more precisely or anymore quickly than any of the other CAS assets. In fact, with the exception of its gun, it uses the same weapons and guidance systems as every other fixed wing aircraft. And while the gun is cool, it is used more and more rarely because it is more accurate and more effective to employ other precision guided munitions options against most targets. That wasn’t the case when the A-10 was developed. But....it was developed 40 years ago.
I love the A-10. Always have. But I also love the P-38, the F-4 and the Saturn V rocket.
Well said.
Part of the issue is, we have been accustomed during most of WWII, and nearly every conflict after, of having nearly complete air superiority in contested areas.
Sure, we tangled with MIGs up near the Yalu in Korea, and with MIGS in Vietnam, but for the most part, we have never had to deal with much more than SAMS and AA, both of which can be suppressed.
In a future conflict with China, Russia, or even one of the islamic states, the quality of what we might be expected to encounter in a battle for air superiority is pretty good, so it won’t be a given. Sure, our training and support will likely still be a lot better, but...it won’t be a given.
Your points about guided munitions is well put. So for ground support, we may well see hypersonic munitions delivered from far, FAR away, or even delivered by rail guns with high accuracy.
I am with you...I adore the A-10, and nearly every aircraft we have deployed has been a winner, but that ground support mission has changed. Ground support will be less dive bombing and more munition delivery from high altitude.
Because McClellan was closed a long time ago. Part of that 'Peace Dividend' we got from our new bestest friend Russia.
No, it was the A-1. My mistake.
My mistake. It was the A-1.
“Maybe send the retired Warthogs to Israel?”
“I’m certain they can use them.”
Israel has already rejected the acquisition of the A-10 for the same reasons as the U.S. Air Force; i.e. insufficient funding to deploy a single-role weapons system in a threat environment requiring multi-role weapons systems to deploy against multiple kinds of threats.
You must either increase funding to accommodate specialized single-role missions, or in the absence of sufficient funding your weapons systems must have the multi-role capability of using the same aircraft for many different kinds of missions. In other words, when you don’t have enough money and manpower, you must do more with less money, less manpower, and less resources.
“Why can’t they use McClellan AFB?”
At the same time as Congress mandated the continued use of the A-10, the Congress did not provide enough funding to keep all of the existing aircraft and the new F-35 aircraft flying.
“Let the Air Force brass spend 30 days on the ground, in the shit, so they can make an informed decision.”
Congress is using the Air Force as a scapegoat for its own actions in defunding the Air Force, Army, and Navy to the point where these military services have no better choice than to retire either one vital weapons system or another vital weapons system. Congress is not providing the funding necessary to keep all of the existing Air Force aircraft flying and add on the new F-35 aircraft at the same time. Congress is responsible for mandating the adoption of the F-35 too, yet is unwilling to pay for A-10, F-16, F-35, and other essential aircraft at the same time. Unfortunately, the A-10 has no capability whatsoever of performing in the mission roles of the other aircraft such as the F-16, F-15, F-35, B-1, air refueling tankers, and so forth which have to be retired if the A-10 is not retired. But some of those aircraft are more or less capable of performing the mission role of the A-10, even if they are not going to be nearly as proficient at doing so. If you don’t like the consequences of the Congress defunding the Air Force, then you can lobby Congress to fund all of the aircraft to include the A-10 and so forth.
The A-1 Skyraider was the premier close support aircraft in VN.
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