The beloved A-10 Warthog continues to show its worth even though the Air Force is rapidly draining them out of its current fleet and plans to retire all the aircraft in a few years.
Most recently, A-10s took part in airstrikes against the Islamic State group, or ISIS, from Dec. 30 to Jan. 6 around Iraq’s Hamrin mountains, U.S. Central Command recently announced.
“The A-10s tasked to support ground forces in the area were successful in eliminating the ISIS fighters within a cave,” a Jan. 6 news release from CENTCOM says.
This engagement comes after A-10 aircraft conducted an airstrike in Syria on Nov. 29 to take out people who the Pentagon said were preparing a rocket rail near a U.S. base.
Not bad for a plane that supposedly “doesn’t scare China,” as Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Congress in 2023.
In service since 1977, A-10s are designed for close air support and have buzzed over the heads of countless U.S. ground troops in the decades since. However, U.S. military officials do not expect the aircraft would be able to survive if it faced modern air defense systems used by China or Russia.
As of 2024, the Air Force had a total of 218 A-10s. The service is in the process of retiring all its Warthogs by Fiscal Year 2028.
The A-10 flies low and slow, and its 30mm gun fires depleted uranium rounds that can shred enemy tanks. But in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, A-10s became famous for providing close air support to U.S. troops, often flying “danger close” missions to keep enemy forces from overrunning American positions.
The debate about whether the A-10 would be relevant in a war against Russia or China has sometimes become rancorous. In 2015, an Air Force two-star general was fired as vice commander of Air Combat Command after telling other officers that advocating to Congress that the A-10 should be kept in service was tantamount to “treason.”
Although lawmakers initially opposed efforts to mothball the A-10s, in 2024 the Air Force sent 39 Warthogs to the service’s massive storage area known as the “boneyard.” That’s more than twice as many A-10s than the Air Force put in storage in 2023.
The Air Force has argued that it has other aircraft that can also provide close air support, including F-16s, F-15Es, B-1 bombers, AC-130 gunships, and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. The latest precision-guided weapons also allow B-52 bombers and MQ-9 Reapers to support American forces under attack.
“It is imperative to understand that close air support, or CAS, is a MISSION and NOT an aircraft,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies think tank, told Task & Purpose in June 2023. “If you are a friendly force coming under attack by enemy ground forces, and the enemy forces are put out of action, the friendly force does not care about the origin of the weapons that put the enemy forces out of action.”
Still, the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan watchdog group, revealed in February 2023 that an Air Force training document described close air support as a secondary mission that F-35 pilots must merely be familiar with.
And retired Air Force Col. Derek Oaks, who has more than 3,000 flight hours in the A-10, has argued that multirole aircraft such as the F-15 and F-16 are not as effective at close air support as single-mission aircraft, such as the Warthog.
“As a [close air support] pilot, I did some air-to-air awareness, I would never say I was an air-to-air pilot, because I wasn’t,” Oaks told Task & Purpose for a June 2023 story. “I understood basic fighter maneuvers, but I was not going to talk or act as effectively as an F-15 guy or an F-22 guy, because they’re the experts at it. I was not the expert, and I didn’t want to be the expert. That was their job.”
Nevertheless, the Warthogs’ days remain numbered. In September, the Air Force’s 354th Fighter Squadron, which had been flying A-10s for more than 30 years, officially inactivated. One of the unit’s plaques summed up the A-10s ethos: “Our mission is an 18-year-old with a rifle. ATTACK!”