The Air Force Tees Up a Battle of the Fighter Jets

If you’re the Pentagon, how do you choose between an aging, but dependable, fighter jet and a brand new aircraft that you’re not quite sure is up to the job? You have them fight it out, naturally.

That’s essentially what the Air Force said it would do when it announced that starting in 2018, it would pit the A-10 “Warthog” against the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in a series of tests to see if the new F-35s can adequately replace the A-10s, which the military wants to retire. A 40-year-old platform, the A-10 has been described by Martin Dempsey, the joint chiefs chairman, as “the ugliest, most beautiful aircraft on the planet.” It may be old, but as a
On the other hand, if the Air Force’s position is that the F-35A will not cover some parts of the A-10’s CAS mission, the onus is on the Air Force to tell Congress and our ground troops what platform will meet those close air support requirements.

McCain spokesman Dustin Walker echoed those concerns. “Comparison tests on the close-air support mission will be an important step in assessing the capability of the F-35,” he said. “However, serious concerns remain about the Air Force’s capacity to perform the close-air support mission with the oldest and smallest fleet in its history, and when less than half of its fighter squadrons are completely combat ready.”

The F-35 is not going away, of course. As James Fallows wrote in his cover feature last year, the program is “a triumph of political engineering.” McCain and Ayotte have supported it publicly. Unlike other disputes between Congress and the Pentagon over a major defense program, their support for the A-10 doesn’t appear tied to parochial concerns, like the loss of a base or jobs in their state; they aren’t advocating for producing new planes, just to keep the current ones in service.

An added concern for lawmakers is timing. The Pentagon has said that it plans to finish phasing out the A-10 by 2019, but the F-35s won’t be completely ready until 2021. McCain and Ayotte say they haven’t received adequate answers on what the military will do if the U.S. is engaged in ground combat overseas within that gap. (Both Republicans, incidentally, have said that a more aggressive and prolonged U.S. military campaign against ISIS is needed.) Gilmore told reporters that other aircraft could be included in the close-air support testing as well. Given the political loyalty to the aging A-10, the Pentagon’s battle of the fighter jets could be aimed at proving the F-35’s capability to Congress—as much as to itself.