This Little Piggy Went To the Boneyard: 21 A-10s to be permanently retired

America’s most beloved and controversial Close Air Support platform is nearing an iconic end, as nearly two-dozen A-10s prepare to take their final journey to the graveyard of US airpower.

As the proposed 2030 retirement date for the iconic A-10 Thunderbolt II draws closer, several of the “hogs” are being sent to the “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona.

“I would say over the next five, six years we will actually probably be out of our A-10 inventory,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown in March.

Previously, the A-10 had a hopeful outlook for longer than current proposals, but a changing of administrations and subsequent leadership has prompted a review of such ideas.

The current regime within USAF leadership believes the F-35 and B-1 (the latter of which is also scheduled to be axed) can take over the A-10’s role, while long-running fans both in and out of the military (and all over the internet) will claim that the F-35 and B-1 cannot perform the “low and slow” mission the A-10 has been designed to do.

However, it should be noted that ‘Hawgs rarely operate in the manner intended, and generally go after targets with precision munitions. While gun runs did take place in Afghanistan up until near the end of the conflict, the effectiveness was mixed.

So what to do with the A-10? The most common thing shouted from the peanut gallery of the internet is to give them to the US Army, the US Marine Corps or Ukraine.

Unfortunately, this won’t work for a few reasons- the US Army has no interest in the A-10, and the Key West Agreement of the late 1940s (which set up rules for the services as the US Air Force came into being) forbids it.

The cash-strapped Marine Corps also has no interest in the A-10, which cannot operate from carriers/amphibious assault vessels and is very expensive to maintain and operate.

“But the A-10 doesn’t cost much to operate,” one might say in response. Perhaps, but the last A-10 was built during the time when the Soviet Union was still a threat and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” was ruling the airwaves. Bottom line up front, they aren’t making them anymore, and the airframes are wearing out.

Well, what about shilling them out to Ukraine? The US has already sunk what many Americans feel is a criminal amount of money into the proxy war, what’s a few planes?

Well, if this were Command and Conquer: Generals, that might work. Click on the HQ, send from the airfield and watch them roll over the fields with guns a’blazing.

However, it isn’t C&C. Planes require training on how to fly and maintain them, they require parts, and aircraft like the A-10 require proprietary items such as the “Dragon,” a machine that loads the A-10’s famous GAU-8 Avenger cannon. Then you have to move all that manpower, machinery and munitions. That becomes a costly affair.

That said, the Ukrainian government doesn’t even want the plane. The Drive even recently reported that the Ukrainians have snubbed the A-10 in favor of asking for more advanced multirole aircraft, particularly the F-16 Fighting Falcon Viper.

Even in the bizarro world that is the RUS-UKR battlefield (a mixture of World War I trench warfare and Cold War antics with drones, Javelins and cameraphone beheadings mixed in), the A-10 would likely not last long against Russian air defenses, even in their current state (to be fair, they were considered an acceptable loss against the same threats back when the fear of tanks rushing the Fulda Gap was still a thing).

At the end of the day, nostalgia only has so much staying power, and the A-10s days are numbered no matter who tries to keep it in the air for as long as possible. As an A-10 fan who has seen what they can do, it is indeed sad. However, the battlefield has changed, it will continue to change- and with every revolution around the sun, the A-10 grows grows one year older into obsolescence.

The thing about being one of “the few” is that there comes a time where there are fewer and fewer.


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