{"id":14397,"date":"2014-03-14T12:27:17","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T19:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14397"},"modified":"2014-03-17T18:03:27","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T01:03:27","slug":"air-minded-end-of-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14397","title":{"rendered":"Air-Minded: End of the Road (Updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"

3\/17\/14: I added some new information and corrected a couple of errors. Scroll to the bottom for the update.<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, the end of the road for the A-10, that is. And the U-2.<\/p>\n

People keep asking me what I think of the Pentagon’s plan to retire the A-10. As I said in a previous post<\/a>, I don’t see it as the end of the world. The Warthog was going to be gone by 2028 anyway. Under the latest five-year budget plan, it’ll be gone by 2020. The USAF has to carve out money for the F-35, and it has to come from somewhere.<\/p>\n

Here, finally, is a chart detailing the USAF’s five-year plan<\/a>. The chart shows, location by location and fiscal year by fiscal year, aircraft to be retired. The military fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30; when the chart references FY15, for example, that’s the fiscal year that starts this October. If you look at Arizona, you’ll see that the USAF plans to retire a total of 83 A-10s over a two-year period starting October 2014 and ending September 2016. That’s the entire Davis-Monthan AFB fleet, gone by mid-2016.<\/p>\n

\"FY15-adjustments\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The wing at Davis-Monthan trains pilots to fly the A-10. The chart implies that the last trainees will graduate by September 2016; no new A-10 pilots will be trained after that date. Warthog squadrons at other bases in the USA and overseas will be gone even sooner, by September of next year: Moody AFB, Georgia; Boise ANGB, Idaho; Osan AB, South Korea. Air National Guard units in some states will keep their Warthogs a little longer: Michigan to September 2017, Missouri to September 2018, Indiana to September 2019. And that’s it. Not quite all the way to FY2020, but close enough.<\/p>\n

The U-2s at Beale AFB in California are slated to be gone by September 2016. With other scheduled cuts, 500 aircraft in all will be retired by FY2020. The Aviationist<\/a>\u00a0offers this summary:<\/p>\n

Over the next 5 years, along with the about 340 A-10s and 33 U-2s, the \u201cadjustment\u201d will cut about 70 F-15Cs, 119 MQ-1 drones, 6 E-8 Joint Stars planes, 7 E-3 AWACS, and 7 EC-130 Compass Call aircraft; such aircraft will be partially replaced by some upgraded F-16s, made available as new F-35s replace them, and 36 MQ-9 Reaper drones, while all the remaining fleets will (more or less) be upgraded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Focusing locally, the cuts at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson will be substantial. Up to now, as mentioned, DMAFB has been the USAF’s A-10 schoolhouse. It’s also home base to the EC-130 Compass Call. Both aircraft will be gone in two years.<\/p>\n

What’ll be left at Davis-Monthan? A small helicopter rescue unit, a few plain-vanilla C-130 transport aircraft, 12th Air Force headquarters (which oversees USAF operations and relations in Central & South America and the Caribbean), and the famous “Boneyard<\/a>” (where all these soon-to-be retired aircraft will join those that went before them). Davis-Monthan lost the bid to be the training base for the F-35 (Luke AFB in Phoenix edged us out), and I’m afraid our base, a major employer in Tucson, will become a ghost town. I don’t see it going away — 12th Air Force and the Boneyard will keep it alive — but it won’t be the bustling center of activity it has been.<\/p>\n

As for the F-35 and whether it’ll be capable of fulfilling the A-10’s close air support mission, please permit me a momentary deviation from the party line. You didn’t think the USAF wanted to kill the A-10 just because it’s ugly and slow, did you? No, it’s because the USAF never wanted to fly close air support in the first place<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fighter I flew, the F-15 Eagle, experienced a host of problems early on. It was over budget and overweight, plagued by systems that didn’t work as advertised and a shortage of spare parts and engines. In some quarters it was considered a failure and many predicted its early demise. By 1978 we were well on our way to fixing all the problems, and from that point to today the F-15 has been a total success, not only the best air superiority fighter ever but the only fighter to date to achieve a perfect combat record, over a hundred kills and no losses<\/a>. There’s no doubt in my mind the F-35 will follow a similar curve, and that by 2020 it’ll be a damn good fighter.<\/p>\n

But the day the USAF willingly commits a squadron of F-35s to provide close air support to some Army general’s ground troops will be the day rivers flow with whiskey and T-bone steaks grow on trees.<\/p>\n

Update (3\/17\/14):<\/em><\/strong><\/span> Per this article<\/a> in yesterday’s Arizona Daily Star, I see that I was a bit too pessimistic about future USAF plans for Davis-Monthan AFB.<\/p>\n

First of all, with regard to DMAFB’s A-10s, I misread the chart above. It shows the removal of 55 A-10s over the course of the next two fiscal years. Those are the two active USAF A-10 squadrons, which will be gone by September 2016. But there is a third, an AF Reserve\u00a0squadron with 28 assigned A-10s. That unit is scheduled to remain, with its A-10s, until FY19, when it will transition to F-16s. It is possible that the reserve unit will train small numbers of replacement A-10 pilots for ANG units around the US, one of which (in Indiana) will also remain until FY19. A few A-10s, then, will remain at DMAFB until some time between October 2018 and September 2019. By September 2019 at the latest, the reserve unit here will be flying F-16s.<\/p>\n

I was also wrong about the complete closeout of EC-130 Compass Call operations at DMAFB. I thought there were only 7 or so aircraft, but in fact there are 15. So approximately half the fleet is retiring by September 2015, not the entire fleet.<\/p>\n

The impact on DMAFB and Tucson will still be significant. Two-thirds of the current A-10 fleet will be gone in two years, and likely less than that. Half the EC-130s will be gone in one. In four years, the few remaining A-10s will be replaced with F-16s. I’m not aware of any USAF plans to base other aircraft at DM, at least for now. Compared to today, tomorrow’s Davis-Monthan is going to feel like a ghost town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People keep asking me what I think of the Pentagon’s plan to retire the A-10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1381,1485,45,1483,1484,1482],"class_list":["post-14397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-a-10","tag-davis-monthan-afb","tag-f-15","tag-f-35","tag-five-year-budget","tag-u-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14397"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14431,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14397\/revisions\/14431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}