There will eventually arrive a year in which the Congress will allow the Air Force to retire the A-10 Warthog. It won’t be 2015.
Not just because John McCain has taken a blood oath to prevent it. Not just because Martha McSally pinned senior officials to a rhetorical clothesline for contemplating it. And not just because the A-10 is deployed worldwide, giving potential adversaries second thoughts on one continent while finalizing the thoughts of declared enemies on another.
Martha McSally, A-10 pilot, combat veteran, Member of Congress
There is a different reason the Hawg will live to fight another budget, and it’s both unmysterious and transcendent. At the end of the day, we’re all accountable to the thoughts between our ears, and human psychology is a bar to A-10 divestment under the current conditions.
Sen. Joni Ernst (who ironically rose to political fame touting her background as a hog castrator) perfectly captured this concept in a recent exchange with Air Force officials (1:23). She explained, in the simplest terms, that soldiers fighting on the ground prefer the A-10 when they look skyward for help, and that as a result, she would not defend a decision to divest it.
The word “defend” is important. Congress is an undeniably craven collection of mostly myopic and often self-obsessed rationalists. But even Congress is wise enough to avoid decisions that appear unconscionable. If legislators can’t explain the rationale for something back in their district, they’re not going to vote for it. Even a mostly unaccountable entity is still answerable at the clear extremes.
Congressional unease about retiring the A-10 is remarkable. The Hawg isn’t lining anyone’s campaign coffer. No one with electoral clout is pushing for it to stay in service. Yet it stubbornly hangs on, and it’s because the battlefield psychology of the A-10 has, quite incredibly, crept upstream into politics. ...
The squabble over the A-10 exposes differences between how infantrymen and airmen think about war, and the role of morale in it. From the air, war seems largely reducible to a scientific exercise. On the ground, as Carl von Clausewitz insisted, “military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects.”
For the rifleman, war is battle. Winning each engagement and adding them all up is the road to victory. Losing an engagement isn’t just a swerve or slowdown on the road to victory, but a threat to survival. Winning and living to fight another day are handmaidens. This, together with sensing the searing realities of war up close and personal, means that the grunt thinks about war viscerally.
By contrast, aviators wage war at arm’s length, creating effects distant from where the trigger is pulled. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually near the core of airpower’s advantage. The ability to hold the enemy at risk without him being able to touch you provides impunity. This limits the enemy’s mobility, constrains his options, and assails his reasoning. But it can also make war more of a clinical exercise.
As it turns out, distance from the fight has something to do with the psychological response to war. This helps explain why attack pilots think about war differently than most other airmen. They spend their time close to the ground-waged fight and interoperate constantly with grunts. Borrowing from the ground force mindset is part and parcel of being an A-10 pilot. ...
The A-10 makes enemy combatants piss their pants. When it arrives, they immediately realize the folly of their choice to oppose us. They go from organizing, shooting, and moving, to praying, hunkering, and running. This is a documented reality spanning from at least Desert Storm to the present day, and is the reason we have A-10s dispatched to Europe and the Middle East. We know its’ the case even if Air Force senior officials find it too inconvenient to state explicitly. ...
There is more.
What the Air Force brass can't seem to get is the importance of the guns on teh A-10 as well as the structure of the craft that makes it ideal for the low flight needed for close air support. It takes skill and courage to fly that close to the ground in support of the troops and it makes a difference on teh ground, to both the good guys and the bad guys. If I were still leading troops on teh ground, I would want an A-10 as my first choice for air support.
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