Now that the US Air Force’s ongoing (As in: the wild blue yonder crowd has been trying to kill the plane since it was fielded) attempt to retire the A-10 close air support (CAS) aircraft is running into opposition, they are looking to, “reshape the discussion away from a binary A-10 versus F-35 fight.”

This translates to, “F%$# you. We want our new toy, and we don’t like doing CAS anyway”.

The Air Force even went so far as to release dishonestly cherry picked data to support getting rid of the A-10.

And now they want to redefine the debate:

Few procurement issues—with the exception of the unsuccessful fight to continue F-22 production—spark the kind of impassioned pleas among U.S. Air Force officers as the unsuccessful struggle to retire the A-10 and make way for the Lockheed Martin F-35.

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Not so in the case of the A-10. The Air Force is for the second year pushing to quickly retire the fleet in part because it is a single-mission aircraft, designed to provide close air support (CAS). Amid the budget crunch, the Air Force is shedding single-mission fleets.

Yet, the focus of its mission is exactly what has congealed support for the aptly named Warthog. The A-10 has been a visible savior for ground troops for decades and especially so in recent fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is being replaced by the multi-mission, single-engine, stealthy F-35. A-10 boosters fear the CAS mission will be lost if it is only one among a host of missions to be handled by the F-35, which is also replacing F-16s in the Air Force. Some say the Air Force has lost it way on the CAS mission. “That’s a ridiculous statement,” says Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, bristling at the notion during a roundtable with reporters Feb. 13 at the annual Air Force Association symposium in Orlando. “Guess how many CAS sorties we’ve flown? It’s about 20,000 a year. When is a little bit of credit given for that? . . . Let’s not change the facts to match whatever story we’re trying to tell.” Welsh also notes that CAS is “all the Marine Corps is buying [the F-35B] for, to replace the Harrier.”

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Now the Air Force is on the offense, reaching out to officers in its sister services to outline the future of CAS in an attempt to reshape the discussion away from a binary A-10 versus F-35 fight.

Air Combat Command chief Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle is hosting a week-long, multiservice summit on CAS early in March. Among the topics to be discussed are conducting CAS in a “contested” environment, a term referring to airspace that is defended, though not with high-end integrated defenses seen in the anti-access area-denied (A2AD) situations. An example would be if the Islamic State posed a strong threat to allied jets in Iraq and Syria—although the A-10 has an armored cockpit, it would be susceptible to such a threat and CAS sorties would be forced to fly higher and to use different tactics.

The summit will address CAS as it stands today, as well in the future when the F-35 enters service, Carlisle told reporters at the annual symposium. Among the alternatives, already in use for years, are precision-guided munitions deployed from a host of aircraft—B-1s, B-52s, F-16s, F-16s, and others—to provide support for troops in the midst of a fight. The F-35, however, will bring stealth to the table. “We just have to get to the point where the services all understand what the future looks like in this arena because there is a thread of conversation going on that really has become a little ridiculous,” Welsh, an A-10 pilot himself, said. The F-35 “will be a good CAS platform. It will take us a while to get to the point we want it to be, like it has with every other airplane [with which] we’ve fought, including the A-10,” he argues.

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Welsh says that the CAS discussion is intended to reset the mindset about the mission to allow for new operational concepts and technologies, including the next-generation of CAS weapons. “How do you just change our mindset? Let’s have gun pods with bullets this long and put 50,000 of them in the pod instead of everybody trying to get 1,000 or 600 out of the airplane during a CAS sortie,” Welsh said. “There are just different ways to look at this problem that technology can help us solve. . . . None of this is new. But we’ve just got to energize it.”

I want to have the bullsh%$ concession at the CAS discussion, because the demand for bullsh%$ when the USAF presents their case will be at levels approaching that of a Republican Presidential debate.