DoD wants to scrap the A-10 to keep the F-35

This seems like a bad idea. [Link]

Known for its survivability, the A-10 is capable of flying with half a wing, one tail fin, one elevator, and one engine torn off. It’s also cheaper to fly and can fly more frequent missions than the aircraft that the Air Force proposes to replace it with: the F-35. But because of its low glamor and low-tech nature, the A-10 is assigned largely to Air National Guard squadrons these days. So with the Department of Defense now planning to re-shuffle the roles of reserve and Guard units in a shrinking fighting force, the A-10s are an easy target for the budget knife. The Air Force announced in January that it would eliminate a third of the existing A-10s in its inventory—102 aircraft—with the remainder to go when the F-35 finally arrives for service. The new plan will retire the entire A-10 fleet.

The A-10 was originally built in the early 1970s, and it was designed to combat Soviet tank columns with its enormous seven-barrel 30-millimeter Gatling-gun cannon. Known for its pugnacious looks as the “Warthog,” the A-10 could also carry a variety of guided and unguided weapons, and it proved its usefulness against a wide range of enemies while flying close air support for troops in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force reported that the 60 A-10s that flew in Iraq had an 86 percent mission success rate.

Today, there are two arguments for cutting the A-10. The first argument from the Air Force is that in an era of shrinking budgets and pared-down ambitions, the military needs a more flexible, multi-role aircraft to do more jobs—not an airplane that's perfect for a smaller number of them. But considering the troubles that the F-35 has faced and the fact that not a single squadron of any of the variants of the F-35 has yet to be fielded, the wisdom of the Pentagon’s aircraft calculus is open to debate.

The F-35 is being built in three variants—one for the Air Force, one for the Navy, and a "jump jet" version for the Marine Corps. It has had a litany of woes in testing. A high-tech helmet that replaces nearly all the aircraft's instrumentation had problems with "jitter" on its display, which forced an investment in a backup plan that was eventually discarded. More recently, discoveries of cracks in a significant number of parts in the F-35s currently being tested led to the grounding of all the aircraft. A report by J. Michael Gilmore, the DOD's director of Operational Test and Evaluation, stated that the F-35 is not ready for combat. The aircraft's “overall suitability performance continues to be immature and relies heavily on contractor support and workarounds unacceptable for combat operations,” Gilmore wrote.

The Air Force has never liked the A-10. It's not glamorous enough, but they also don't want to cede their monopoly on aircraft to the Army.