I haven’t written much lately (except for my pre-Cubs Convention rant of yesterday) because things are getting so repetitious: the Administration extends another deadline for Obamacare; the economy is improving but not too much (in December the unemployment rate dropped 0.3% but the number of jobs increased way below expectations); the President of France has a mistress (just one?); President Obama will be giving a speech on Friday; John Kerry is going to the Middle East; etc. Congress is passing the appropriations bills needed to follow through on the Ryan-Murray budget agreement of last month, which is good, but that is about it.
Still, there is one thing I wanted to write about. It is a little obscure, but I think it’s important. With defense spending being cut back, each of the services has to come up with its own reductions. The Air Force’s plan includes the elimination of the A-10 Thunderbolt II, also known as the Warthog. This from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
“For more than two decades, the A-10 Thunderbolt II has provided aerial protection to ground troops, a task it has performed from Iraq's ‘Highway of Death’ in the first Gulf War to the Taliban strongholds of eastern Afghanistan. Few people at the Pentagon challenge the plane's reputation for providing forces with the best support possible.
Eliminating the Warthog – so named because of its ugly, snub-nosed design – is one way the Air Force is looking to deal with its need to trim more than $50 billion from its budget over the next five years as part of a broader congressional mandate that the Pentagon cut $500 billion over the next decade. Air Force officials say retiring the entire fleet of about 300 A-10s by 2020 would save a total of $3.7 billion. …
‘Is the A-10 the best airplane to perform close air support? Absolutely,’ said Maj. Gen. Paul T. Johnson, the Air Force director of Operational Capability Requirements. ‘Do we want to get rid of the A-10 performing close air support? No. But it's a measure of where we are fiscally.’
The A-10 may be the best at what it does, he argued, but ‘in the age of austerity we can't afford that.’ Other planes and helicopters are still able to provide the same kind of protection as the A-10, he said, even if they aren't as effective.”
A couple of thoughts. First, you have to wonder how much the Air Force cares about saving an airplane whose main mission is to support another branch of the military. Is this maybe about the Air Force wanting fancy fighter jets, like the new F-35, instead of old, rather pedestrian planes like the A-10?
Second, I have gotten the feeling, from other articles on the Warthog (see here and here), that the theory is we don’t need the Warthog because we aren’t going to be fighting wars like Iraq and Afghanistan again. If that is part of it, then that is dumb. After Vietnam, we said we would never fight another war like Vietnam, and so we promptly forgot all we had learned about counterinsurgency warfare. When Iraq turned into an insurgency, we weren’t ready or prepared, and it took us way too long to re-learn what we had forgotten after Vietnam.
We can’t say we’re never going to fight another war like this or that. We don’t know what or how we are going to have to fight until we know what our enemies decide to do. The one sure way to have to fight a particular type of war is to not be ready to fight it.
The Warthog does a great job. It protects our soldiers while beating the other side. I understand that, in a crunch, we could use helicopters and fighter jets to do the same job. You can use a wrench to hit a nail, but that doesn’t make it a hammer. We could use other planes to do what the Warthog does, but they wouldn’t be as good and they would be more expensive.
It is sort of amazing. We have a great weapons system that does its job and doesn’t cost a lot – and the Air Force wants to get rid of it. That seems a bad idea to me. It could be an even worse idea the next time we have to fight a war.
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