The US Air Force is finally getting rid of its A-10s, and its focus may be straying from the Warthog's unique mission

• After years of debate, Congress has approved a US Air Force plan to begin retiring A-10 Thunderbolts.
• The A-10 is the only US military aircraft purpose-built to provide close air support to ground forces.
• But training documents raise questions about the Air Force's focus on that mission going forward.

After repeatedly blocking the US Air Force's attempts to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II, Congress late last year approved a plan to decommission 21 of the venerable ground-attack aircraft, which is the only US military aircraft purpose-built for close air support.

Those retirements would shrink the Air Force's A-10 fleet to 260 aircraft, and Air Force leaders plan to continue decommissioning A-10s in the years ahead.

Air Force officials have said they want to replace the A-10, affectionately known as the Warthog, with the F-35 as the service's primary close-air-support aircraft.

However, according to the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan watchdog group, the Air Force seems to be de-emphasizing close-air-support training for F-35 pilots.

Close air support, or CAS, is defined as strikes by fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft against targets that are close to friendly forces. Such missions can affect the outcome of a fight but are difficult and require close coordination with ground troops to avoid hitting friendly forces.

Although other US military branches also conduct close-air-support missions with other aircraft, none of them have specialized platforms like the A-10, and the Air Force is the only branch specifically assigned to "furnish close combat and logistical air support" to the Army.

Not so close

Current and former Air Force officials have said that the F-35 would take over the A-10's mission after the Warthog left the fleet.

At a Senate hearing in 2016, Michael Gilmore, then the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, confirmed that the F-35 was intended to succeed the A-10 by citing the F-35's operational requirements document, which describes a weapon program's role and is created before a program enters development.

"On page 2, it says the F-35A will rely primarily upon the F-22 for air superiority and will assume the current F-16 role as the low end of the USAF high-low fighter mix strategy and the A-10 role," Gilmore said. "So that is in the operational requirements document."

At the same hearing, Frank Kendall, then the Pentagon's top acquisition official, said that the F-35 would take a distinct approach to the close-air-support role.

"The A-10 was designed to be low and slow and close to the targets that it was engaging, relatively speaking. We will not use the F-35 in the same way as the A-10. So it will perform the mission very differently," said Kendall, who is now the Air Force's top civilian official.

CAS training for F-35 pilots appears to have taken a backseat, however. According to POGO, the Air Force characterized close air support as a secondary mission for F-35 pilots across its active duty, National Guard, and reserve components, meaning they have to be familiar but not proficient with it.

Further, according to the Air Force's most recent F-35 training memorandum, which was issued in October and applies to training in 2023 and 2024, F-35 pilots are not required to fly any actual or simulated CAS training missions.

"Just to drive home the point: No F-35 pilot of any experience level in any component of the Air Force is required to fly a single close air support training mission in 2023 or 2024," Dan Grazier, senior defense policy fellow for POGO, wrote in the report.

By comparison, A-10 pilots are required to fly between 13 and 20 CAS training missions, depending on their level of experience and their component but they usually fly more, as commanders typically assign nearly 32 additional CAS sorties to A-10 pilots, according to POGO.

POGO said that the only F-35 Air Force pilots required to fly close-air-support missions are those attending the service's Weapons Course, a premier graduate-level course in weapons and tactics.

Yet only two of the 21 sorties that Weapons Course students fly are devoted to CAS, and the course's syllabus adds that "CAS fighter training objectives are permitted, but are secondary to approved syllabus objectives."

An Air Force spokesperson told POGO that CAS training was "a required element" of the F-35A ready aircrew program and that CAS training required integration of forward air controllers to be "an effective training event."

A change of course

Introduced in 1976, the A-10 was designed to counter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe by taking out Soviet armor with its 30 mm GAU-8 Avenger cannon and other air-to-surface weapons.

That mission would require attacking enemy forces in close proximity to friendly troops, and to do it, the A-10 would have to fly low and relatively slow in environments where anti-aircraft weapons would be plentiful.

The A-10 was therefore designed to be durable, with features like a titanium "bathtub" around the cockpit, but even Cold War-era planners expected it to take heavy losses.

The F-35 has a less powerful gun and is not as durable, putting it at higher risk when flying low-altitude CAS missions.

F-35 could conduct close air support from medium altitudes using its advanced sensors and smart bombs, but CAS from that height "does not work when the enemy is close" to friendly troops, Billie Flynn, a former Canadian air force officer and senior F-35 test pilot, told The Aviationist last year.

"There is no conversation ever that any aircraft can truly and effectively replace the A-10, even after all these years," Flynn added.

The Air Force's years-long effort to start retiring A-10s has been a point of conflict with Congress, which intervened several times over the past decade to keep the Warthog in service.

Given the inherent danger in attacking targets close to friendly forces, "routinely training" in CAS-related skills is vital, veteran A-10 pilot Brian Boeding told Grazier.

Those skills "are perishable," Boeding added, "and the stakes are too high to not train dedicated crews (ground and air) in purpose build close air support aircraft."

Constantine Atlamazoglou works on transatlantic and European security. He holds a master's degree in security studies and European affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. You can contact him on LinkedIn.