Free Republic

The Air Force’s plan to retire its entire fleet of A-10C “Warthogs” could make Davis-Monthan Air Force Base vulnerable to the next round of base closures. In its proposed budget, the Air Force would eliminate the close air support jet, including 55 active-duty A-10Cs at D-M, by fiscal year 2016 and 28 Air Force Reserve A-10Cs at D-M by fiscal 2019. In 2019, 21 F-16s would be moved to a Reserve unit at the base. The Pentagon also plans to cut its fleet of EC-130H Compass Call electronic warfare planes — based solely at Davis-Monthan — roughly in half, to...

Electronic and computer attack—the futuristic segment of the Pentagon’s arsenal—will benefit from the proposed 2011 military spending plan, but identifying all the key pieces is difficult without close scrutiny. Electronic attack (EA) includes invading networks and releasing beams of energy against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). These blasts of energy are sometimes generated by U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowlers and Air Force EC-130 Compass Call aircraft to prematurely detonate or disable bombs. In addition, an EA-6B Prowler—and its EA-18G Growler successor— can drop a “cone of ­silence” on emitters within a given tactical area to prevent enemy communications. Computer invasion and network...

WASHINGTON - It was a quarter-century ago this month, April 24, 1980, that the secret American raid into Iran to rescue 53 hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran collapsed in disaster on a make-shift airstrip in the middle of the Iranian desert. The embarrassingly public failure of the raid, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, was a low-water mark for the Carter administration and for our military as well, still struggling to get back on its feet in the wake of the debacle in Vietnam just five years before. Eight American servicemen died when the raid came apart with the fiery...