A mere 33 months later, the first MRAPs were in the field. In this instance, an entirely new vehicle had to progress from the drawing board through testing, production, and fielding. With the A-10 wings, the Air Force only has to reproduce something that has been flying for 40 years and that was still in production less than two years ago.

Air Force leaders are certainly not above using budgetary sleight of hand or extraordinary maneuvers to speed the acquisition process along when it suits their purposes. They have been using Operations and Maintenance funds to purchase off-the-shelf cyber capabilities in recent months. They also created a Rapid Capabilities Office for classified programs that they are now using to develop an entirely new program, the B-21 Raider.

In March 2018, the Air Force extended the charter for the Rapid Capabilities Office to include other programs to speed deliveries to the field. The glacial pace Air Force leaders have set for the A-10 wing contract shows that providing effective air support to the troops doesn’t merit such treatment in their eyes.

Continuing to slow-roll this process would certainly be in keeping with the Air Force’s actions regarding the A-10 fleet up to this point. When asked about the status of the project, the civilian A-10 Program Element Manager for the Air Force’s Air Combat Command told a gathering of officials recently that the re-winging project “was not going to happen,” although the Air Force’s chief of media operations attempted to qualify that statement by affirming the Air Force’s commitment to reestablishing the production line.

This current slow-motion contract means, at the very least, it is not going to happen anytime soon. This fits right into Air Force leader’s grand plans to rid itself of an aircraft and a mission it never wanted in the first place.

The Larger Context: 

To put this all in perspective, the Air Force leaders have repeatedly attempted to shrink or cancel outright the A-10 fleet for at least the past twenty-five years which is particularly striking since the A-10 has consistently proven its battlefield worth in every war since 1991.

The reason for this is simple. Air Force generals don’t like the airplane because it lacks the complexity and expense to justify ever-expanding budgets. Furthermore, they despise the mission: it places them in a supporting role to ground forces.

This attitude could be seen during an October 2015 F-35 hearing when then-program executive officer Air Force lieutenant general Christopher Bogdan said he opposed an F-35-versus-A-10 fly-off, preferring instead to test the F-35 by itself “in a realistic operational environment for the CAS mission that the Air Force intends the F-35 to do.”

That statement almost perfectly captures the longstanding, deeply ingrained cultural indifference to close support within the Air Force’s upper ranks that dates back well before World War II. In actuality, how the Air Force prefers to do close support is secondary; primary are the needs of actual ground combatants, a fact Air Force officials have been eager to suppress from early Army Air Corps days on.

At the end of the day, the efforts to keep the A-10 flying are simply part of a larger fight to maintain an effective close air support capability within the U.S. military. The A-10 will not be able to fly forever, although with proper maintenance and new wings, it will be able to fly well into the 2030s. That would be long enough to institute a new program to build a proper replacement for the A-10. This new effort should follow the best practices of the original A-X Attack Fighter Program.

How the Air Force intends to do close support is at the heart of their current drive to eliminate the A-10 fleet. In brief, they intend to replace the down-in-the-mud, CAS-dedicated A-10 with the multi-mission F-35, which would launch standoff guided weapons from 15,000 feet or higher.

Close air support is more than simply dropping bombs on a target. It requires detailed coordination between the pilot and troops on the ground. Decades of combat experience have shown that this can best be accomplished through radio communication, but in desperate circumstances it must be done through visual means. Soldiers in the middle of heavy combat can signal an A-10 pilot by flashing a mirror or using colored smoke. This only works when the pilot can fly down to a few hundred feet.

The close connection between the dreadfully slow pace of the Air Force’s A-10 re-winging contract and their commitment to replacing A-10s with F-35s was inadvertently let out of the bag by Harris to questioning by McSally.

Harris responded that the service opted to keep production of wings at a lower level until the Defense Department completes a number of studies of its combat aircraft inventory, to include the much-hyped comparative tests between the A-10 and F-35 that will measure both planes’ close air support bona fides. “We’re not going to make a further commitment until we know where we’re going with both the A-10 and the F-35,” he said.

The most important aspect about the A-10 and having a fleet of dedicated attack aircraft has been the community of expertise that grew up around it. The pilots and ground controllers have developed highly refined techniques and procedures to tightly integrate air and ground operations. The skills of the pilots in particular are at stake in this effort.

Were the A-10 to be cancelled before an effective successor aircraft can be produced, the expertise of the dedicated close air support professionals will be diluted into the multi-mission muddle of the F-35. Maintenance personnel have already been stripped from the A-10 program. Pilots flying the F-35 will have competing training requirements for the various missions they will be expected to perform.

With the F-35’s notoriously poor availability rates and general Air Force antipathy to the close air support mission, it is highly unlikely that pilots assigned to the F-35 will ever be able to fly enough hours to develop the close air support skills to perform the mission. The men and women fighting on the ground would be the ones suffering the consequences of that for generations.

This first appeared at the Project on Government Oversight here.