Article in the Blaster blog by Chuck Spinney, colleague of the late great John Boyd. 8th article in a series.The intervention of Congress temporarily has thwarted the AF game plan by directing the Pentagon's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E) to conduct a realistic fly-off and shoot-off between the A-10 and the F-35. The sensible goal of this approach is to use the scientific method to determine empirically which plane is more effective in supporting ground troops in combat. Currently that test is scheduled for 2018. That the Air Force was forced by Congress to conduct such a common-sense test is a telling message in itself.
But there is more. An A-10/F-35 fly-off in 2018, while well intentioned and entirely appropriate, is also a charade. The F-35 will not be cleared by 2018 to carry and fire the weapons appropriate for the Close Air Support mission, including its necessary command and control avionics. Even if one makes the patently absurd assumption that there are no more delays in the problem-plagued F-35 program, the OT&E report evaluating the F-35's capability to carry and fire these weapons in anything approaching a realistic CAS scenario will not be available until 2021. How can the F-35 pass a fly-off/shoot-off comparative CAS test against the A-10 before we know what, if any, CAS capabilities are possessed by the F-35? To ask such a question is to answer it, so don't expect any meaningful fly-off/shoot-off to be conducted in 2018.
Nevertheless, this mismatch between the F-35's availability and capability, has not deterred the AF from its goal of trashing the A-10 ‐ literally.
Notwithstanding, the speed bump imposed by Congress, as my good friend James Stevenson explains below, the AF is making the retirement of the A-10 in favor of the F-35 inevitable by quietly destroying those A-10s now in long term storage. There are currently 291 A-10s in active service, with another 99 A-10s in storage in the Arizona desert (including 50 recently modernized A-10Cs with gobs of flight time left on them). But the Air Force is sending these stored aircraft (including A-10Cs) to the breakers. In so doing, the AF is deliberately reducing its ability to maintain the existing active A-10 force structure over the long term.
In short, the quiet AF strategy of destroying perfectly good A-10s guarantees the F-35 will replace the A-10, thereby rendering Congress's direction for a fly-off/shoot-off irrelevant. This makes a mockery of the powers assigned to the Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution ‐ a document every member of the AF has sworn unconditionally to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic.