As has widely been reported in recent months, the Air Force may be leaning toward scrapping its entire fleet of A-10 attack jets — among other aircraft — in order to deal with looming steep budget cuts, although the service won’t admit to which aircraft it’s looking at the most. Asked about how the recent budget compromise might affect the A-10 fleet at a a Dec. 13 press briefing at the Pentagon, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said the service still has a $12 billion annual bill for sequestration that it has to pay for, and therefore “we have got to find savings in big chunks.”
Welsh declined to identify the A-10 as the aircraft likely to be on the chopping block, but he noted the aircraft is replaceable in his briefing:
“Well, what I would tell you is that 75 percent of the close-air support sorties in Afghanistan today are not done by the A-10,” he said. “They’re done by the F-16, the F-15E, the B-1, the B-52 is close air support. We have a lot of airplanes that can perform that mission and perform it well. I’ve flown close-air support missions in the A-10 and the F-16. We can do it with other aircraft.
“An airman’s job, an air component commander’s job on a big fight is to eliminate the operational reserve,” he continued. “Get rid of the enemy’s second echelon forces so they can’t affect the ground fight. Eliminate the enemy’s will to continue to fight by taking out his strategic infrastructure and affecting his leadership and its centers of gravity. … Those things are done by the other airplanes I just mentioned, which can also do close air support. The A-10 can’t do those things. So when we get into the debate about which to keep and how many to keep, those are the kind of things we have to factor into this.”