Vindication for A-10 backers
Score a big victory for the A-10 and its supporters. According a nonpartisan government agency, those who put up a fight for this fighter jet had good sense on their side. The Department of Defense? Not so much. In fact, the report could peel paint.
The Government Accountability Office says the DOD’s push to retire the A-10 fighter jet was ill-informed and poorly timed.
This is not only great news for Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, it is also powerful vindication of Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Martha McSally.
Both have offered spirited defense of the A-10 as an indispensable close-air support craft that remains valuable to the national defense.
Because the A-10 is also the mainstay of operations at Davis-Monthan, some might dismiss the very good arguments made by both McCain and McSally as more parochial than rational — even though both have the military experience to back up their words. Enter the GAO. In a report released Aug. 24, the nonpartisan GAO found “the Department of Defense and Air Force do not have enough quality information on the full implications of A-10 divestment.”
The report said the Air Force has not identified how retiring the A-10 would impact military capabilities. More specifically, despite steps being taken by the Air Force to mitigate the loss of the A-10, “it has not identified how or if it will replace the A-10’s role in combat search and rescue missions.”
Without the A-10, there would be a decrease in the capacity to provide close air support, the report says.
This is something McCain and McSally have stressed in their efforts to save this plane.
Nor is the designated replacement for the A-10 ready.
In noting that the Air Force plans to replace the A-10 squadrons with F-35 squadrons, the report noted that under the Air Force plan, “the loss of A-10 squadrons will outpace the F-35 squadron gain, with eight A-10 squadrons divested by the end of the 5-year budget plan but only six F-35 squadrons stood up.”
Nor can the Air Force provide a reliable estimate of the cost savings of retiring the A-10.
The recommendations in the report are as scathing as any delivered by the political opponents to mothballing this legendary plane.
But that criticism transcends politics and offers guidelines that the DOD ought to take seriously.
The GAO “recommends that the Air Force fully identify mission gaps, risks, and mitigation strategies, and also develop high-quality, reliable cost estimates of the savings from divestment before again proposing to divest its A-10 fleet, and that DOD establish quality information requirements to guide major weapon system divestments.”
Those recommendations are a stern criticism of how the Air Force handled this. It’s a big victory for supporters of the A-10.