A-10 Warthog Lives On: The Close-Air Support Beast Too Tough to Ground

The following piece first appeared on Warrior Maven, a Military Content Group member website.

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The “Flying Tank” A-10 Warthog’s 30mm cannon is armed with 1,150 rounds and fires as many as 70 rounds per second, a rate of fire and lethality that explains one of many reasons why the powerhouse aircraft has earned a permanent resting place in the hearts of ground soldiers.

This cannon, which aligns in a straight-ahead firing configuration parallel to the nose of the fuselage, allows the aircraft to simply lower its front and “blanket” and “smother” an enemy ground area with lethal and suppressive fire from the air.

A large part of the aircraft’s well-known and celebrated durability is not only due to its tank-like titanium hull but also a result of its built-in redundancy, an aspect of the plane strongly supported and enabled by the 30mm cannon, a former A-10 pilot told Warrior years ago.

“So when I lose all the computers and the calculations, the targeting pod and the heads up display, you can still point the aircraft using a degraded system at the target and shoot. We are actually trained for that,” former A-10 pilot Lt. Col. Ryan Haden, 23rd Fighter Group Deputy, Moody AFB, told Warrior in a previous interview several years ago.

The A-10 Warthog is truly something special for many reasons.

A-10 Flies Through Enemy Fire

As Haden explained, if most aircraft systems are damaged or even destroyed by the enemy, the A-10 can still slowly hover above ground combat and use line of sight to keep firing the cannon while taking small arms fire.

“The 30mm cannon has 7 barrels. They are centered the way the aircraft fires. The firing barrel goes right down the center line. You can point the aircraft and shoot at the ground. It is designed for air-to-ground attack,” Haden told Warrior Maven.

In a tactical sense, the plane can destroy maneuvering enemy ground troops with its high-rate-of-fire cannon while absorbing varying degrees of small-arms fire.

This kind of combat performance explains why the A-10 has so many years of impactful and highly successful combat performance.

FLYING A-10 On One Wing

The built-in redundancy of the A-10 is so adequate that a former US Gulf War A-10 pilot told Warrior Maven years ago that he could keep flying and essentially “save” himself and the aircraft with one wing after the other wing had been shot off by incoming enemy fire.

By design, the A-10 is built with redundant systems to support this kind of contingency, a combat performance aspect of the plane that has helped it earn a “soulful” love from servicemembers.

The A-10, while finally slowly being divested from the Air Force, has endured years of service attempts to cancel and remove the platform from the force yet survived due to its strong military and Congressional support.

Arguably, the A-10 will be viable as a critical and unique Close Air Support platform for years, depending upon the combat environment in which it operates.

In recent years, the Air Force has made deliberate, thought-out moves to replace the A-10 as a Close Air Support platform with faster fixed-wing fighter jets such as an F-16 or F-35. Such an effort has been the focus of years of debate for various factors, such as the potential vulnerability thinly skinned fighter jets might have against incoming small arms fire.

However, the thinking is that fighter jets can perform the mission with faster-range sensors and precision weaponry while remaining survivable successfully.

Also, the threat equation in recent years has evolved to the point where much greater percentages of enemy forces are likely to be armed with shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles with much greater destructive force than small-arms fire.

A-10S To The Philippines

Numerous A-10 proponents maintain that the time-tested “flying tank” should remain a vital part of the force, questioning the Air Force’s decision to divest the aircraft.

According to an interesting Air Force report, a group of A-10 aircraft visited the Philippines in December 2024 to support training and combat preparation initiatives.

This suggests that there may still be a substantial prevailing consensus that the combat value of the A-10 can never be fully replicated or replaced.

In addition, this move indicates that the A-10 Warthog might prove quite valuable in certain tactical scenarios in a great-power warfare engagement.