What will become of close air support when an aircraft designed with this purpose ceases to be rebuilt? The A-10 Thunderbird II, the “Warthog” has had a long life as a familiar solution to a difficult engineering challenge: how to provide enough lift to aircraft overhead, at low altitude, as well as devoid of toughness, to assist ground forces in contact. The A-10 was designed in the 1970s with the GAU-8/A Avenger cannon around it, combined with redundancy and heavy armored with the capability to work on austere locations. Reputation of the platform was established in permissive airspace when the loiter time and visibility of the pilot were frequently critical than stealth shaping or long range sensors.
Such design logic does not meet a contemporary integrated air defense situation. The low-slow strategies that used to enhance the capabilities of the A-10 squeeze the survival bands in relation to layered radars, networked missiles, and emerging man-portable air defense. The Air Force has focused resources on stealth, long-range strike, and networked sensing in high-end planning, which conform to programs like the F-35, and the next-generation air dominance family of systems as a whole.
The long goodbye of the A-10 became somewhat industrial in early 2026 at Hill Air Force Base. The Ogden Air Logistics Complex was set to launch off its last depot-maintained A-10, which marked the end of a sustainment line that had done depot level maintenance since 1998 such as structural repairs and wing replacements. The very description of the command has focused on what was retiring with the airplane as well as the maintainers: mysterious was Brig. Gen. Hall Sebren to an Air Force Materiel Command release, saying that the maintainers had given the aircraft a second and a third life. The 571st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron that did much of that work will shut down once it completes the final jet and the soldiers will be transferred to other airframes in the complex.
The reason that sustainment pivot is important is that the A-10 debate has never been a one-tail number issue. It has also been concerning the ability of the Air Force to maintain the specialized knowledge necessary to conduct close support in large scale: fast coordination, correlation of targets in clutter, and the culture of operating closely with ground controllers. A massively censored Pentagon report on the A-10C and F-35A flyoff, which was done in February 2022, highlighted the challenges of shrinking those competencies into tidy scorecards. It tested low- and medium-threat conditions and recognized limitations which reduced the realism, such as the lack of maneuvering ground forces. This document also represented a classic tradeoff of A-10 range and time on station vs. F-35 survivability and multi-mission capability, but also suggested modifications and corrections to the latter aircraft, such as to “correct the F-35A gun” as quoted in reports on the released document.
The logic of modernization at the force-structure level has been clear in the Air Force. According to the Air Force retirement package, retiring the last 162 A-10s in fiscal 2026 was a divisive part of a larger divestment package. The trend of travel has stayed the same, despite congressional criticism over the years though, the dollars and manpower have moved away on the aging single-mission fleets, making their way to platforms capable of surviving dense air-defenses.
The question that engineering has abandoned is not as sentimental as operational: how to achieve the combination of persistence, responsiveness, and pilot-ground integration of the A-10 without using a “low and slow” plane where it simply cannot survive. The solution lies more and more in dispersing the mission among systems, with airplanes being stealthy, and standoff weapons being reachy, and drones being persistent in sensing, and in attempting to keep the human skills with which close air support work used to be done whenever seconds and not sorties decided the game.
