La poco elegante tarea del apoyo aéreo cercano

Desde la misma creación de las primeras fuerzas aéreas se estableció la discusión. ¿Deben éstas ejecutar tareas de apoyo a las fuerzas terrestres o usar todos sus recursos para tratar de librar su propia campaña aérea? El autor trata de explicarlo en ocasión del retiro de un viejo guerrero: el A-10 Thunderbolt II.

 

Over the Horizon: The A-10 Battle and Military Turf Wars

El A-10 Thunderbolt II.

By Robert Farley | 08 Feb 2012

The four-decade-and-counting saga of the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground-attack aircraft continued last week, when the U.S. Air Force announced that it would cut five A-10 squadrons as part of its effort to reduce costs. The 246 remaining A-10s will, according to the Air Force, continue to perform the close air support (CAS) mission until they are eventually replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Defense wonks met the announcement with a storm of criticism, but little real surprise. The long-running fight over the A-10 represents not so much a disagreement over technology, but rather a bureaucratically driven dispute over the nature of warfare.

Daños en un A-10 que logró regresar
pese a los mismos.

The Air Force originally developed the A-10 as a pre-emptive strike against the Army’s planned Cheyenne attack helicopter. The Air Force worried that the Army’s use of advanced attack helicopters for CAS would simultaneously deprive the Air Force of a mission and lend the Army a hand in Congressional procurement wars. Insisting that it could do CAS better than the Army, the USAF sponsored development of the A-10, a plane capable of close anti-armor attack. Once the Cheyenne program was cancelled in development, however, the Air Force did little to hide its lack of enthusiasm for the A-10 and all that it represented. It attempted on numerous occasions to strangle the A-10, first during the procurement process, then after the end of the Cold War and finally in the early part of last decade. Army influence, Congressional pressure and popular enthusiasm for “the Warthog” repeatedly saved the fleet.

For whatever reason, the A-10 has become a people’s favorite. It graces the cover of such popular texts as Charles Gross' “American Military Aviation.” In the 1980s, it served as the inspiration for toys such as the Cobra Rattler and the Transformer Powerglide. Hollywood has also featured its anti-robot capabilities prominently, in “Transformers” and “Terminator: Salvation.”

But the Air Force comes by its contempt for the A-10 honestly, and not just for aesthetic reasons. The Air Force conceives of itself as a strategic institution dedicated to shaping the entirety of a campaign, rather than as an organization that plinks away at enemy tanks in support of ground troops. Not only does the A-10 stand outside of that self-image, it draws resources away from the Air Force’s preferred strategic mission. By contrast, the F-35 allows the Air Force to redistribute resources from what it considers the antiquated mission of close air support to the much more important, from the USAF’s point of view, strategic mission. What’s more, for the Air Force, a successful strategic campaign makes the A-10’s contribution largely irrelevant.

It’s also true that fans of the A-10 can be reluctant to acknowledge its limits. Any plane that flies low and slow over the battlefield will suffer badly against opponents with even mildly sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons. Sure enough, in spite of its heavy armor, the A-10 is extremely vulnerable to ground fire. In the Gulf War, Iraqi fire quickly pushed the A-10 to medium altitudes, at which the differences in capabilities between the A-10 and the F-35 disappear. In a future that may see smaller, ever-more-deadly anti-aircraft weapons, flying at low altitude will pose ever greater risks. As for permissive environments at lower altitudes, such as those often experienced during counterinsurgency campaigns, an Embraer Super Tucano can perform many of the missions currently delegated to the A-10 at a lower cost .

However, the chances that the Air Force would ever spend money for anything other than training purposes on a platform resembling the Super Tucano approach zero. Similarly, the Air Force seems radically unlikely to risk its tremendously expensive F-35s in close air support missions that might result in them getting shot down by enemy infantry. So while proponents of the A-10 recognize that it is a limited platform, they maintain that it is the best CAS aircraft they are going to get. And in all likelihood, they are correct.

The key issue, though, is not with the benefits or drawbacks of a particular technology, but rather with long-term doctrinal disagreements between the Army and the Air Force. The serial battles over the A-10 are the consequence of a basic conflict over the nature of war: The Army believes in the destruction of the fielded forces of the enemy, while the Air Force believes in conducting strategic operations to shape, disrupt and collapse the political and organizational sinews of a target state.

However popular the A-10 might be with the rank and file in the Army, and however much it might be in accord with the Army’s vision of war, there is little if any chance that the fleet could be transferred to Army control. The Army has little interest in developing the capabilities necessary to support a fleet of A-10s, which would involve developing significant basing and maintenance requirements. The Army would also worry about accepting the expense of maintaining and operating the A-10 during a period of defense austerity. Finally, transferring the plane would mean refighting the turf battles between the Army and the Air Force that help define which platforms belong where, a prospect that no one finds appealing.

The fundamental problem exemplified by the A-10 is this: The Warthog performs a mission that sits on the boundary between two services, and boundary conflicts inevitably result in pain for one service or the other. Precisely the same kind of turf war has played out over the course of nearly 90 years in British naval aviation, where the responsibility for carrier aircraft resides with both the navy and the air force. That the A-10 has managed to survive for as long as it has while straddling this boundary is a testament to the effectiveness and quirky beauty of the aircraft. But as long as the United States maintains the current structure of its national security bureaucracy, conflicts like the A-10 battle will recur over future weapons systems, long after the last Warthog is a memory.

Dr. Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His interests include national security, military doctrine and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination. His weekly WPR column, Over the Horizon, appears every Wednesday.