Congress is getting its wish for the Air Force to keep the A-10 ground-attack plane around for a few more years, but analysts predict it’ll come at the expense of modernization programs like the F-35 joint strike fighter.
The Air Force has been asking for years to retire all of its Fairchild Republican A-10s to free up money and personnel to start bringing the next generation of aircraft into the fleet. Congress has repeatedly shot down the request, saying more recently that the A-10 has saved lives in the fight against the Islamic State.
But everything has a cost. The Air Force has said it would save $4.2 billion by mothballing the A-10s, money that would largely go to bringing Lockheed Martin’s F-35 online. Now the Air Force is expected to include a provision to keep in the A-10s in the fiscal 2017 budget request next month. The reason is its effectiveness against the Islamic State.
Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he didn’t expect the F-35, the Northrop Grumman long range strike-bomber or the service’s new Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tanker to be cut completely now that the A-10 was sticking around, but that the rate the service acquires them could slow.
“If we cannot realize savings from proposals, then we have to take action in other areas, like slowing pace of modernization, and not just F-35,” he said.
The Air Force is planning to buy 48 F-35As in fiscal 2017, according to reports in November. Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, said that could number could drop by six to eight planes to make up for the cost of keeping the A-10s in service. She also warned that smaller equipment programs could take a hit as well.
Slowing the pace that the service buys the aircraft will ultimately make them more expensive, but the Air Force has to balance its books, Gunzinger said.
“While you might accrue savings in the short term, you end up paying more in the long term,” he said. “It’s a bit of a Faustian bargain.”
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. and a champion of the A-10, said she’s not convinced the F-35 program will have to take a hit to keep the A-10s in the skies.
“The A-10 has proven its effectiveness right now in the fight against [the Islamic State]. This is one of the reasons why I’ve continued to push to have that close-air support capacity,” Ayotte told the Washington Examiner. “I just think the F-35/A-10 choice is a false choice in that they don’t have to undermine the F-35 program to keep the A-10.”
The Air Force declined to provide details of where it may have to cut to keep the A-10 flying since the service’s budget request for fiscal 2017 won’t be released until early February.
“This is part of the fiscal year 2017 budget and unfortunately it is too early to discuss,” Maj. Melissa Milner, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Gunzinger said the Air Force has already asked Congress to save money through a new round of base closures and changes to personnel programs, proposals that lawmakers have shot down. To balance budgets, the service reduced troop levels and readiness, things it can no longer afford to neglect now that it’s involved in an air campaign against the Islamic State.
With no more “pots” of money to pull from, slowing the pace of major acquisition projects is one of the only places the Air Force can find the savings needed to keep flying the A-10s, he said.
The service’s willingness to go along with Congress’ long-time request to keep the A-10 in the air could lead to a bigger overall budget, some analysts speculated. Richard Aboulafia, the vice president of analysis at Teal Group, said lawmakers could be “generous elsewhere” since the Air Force was finally following its wishes.
The Air Force’s decision to keep the A-10 in service shows a commitment by service leaders that the U.S. will be involved in conflicts in the Middle East for the foreseeable future, Aboulafia said.
The plane, designed to fly slow and low to fire on enemy troops and protect U.S. forces, is effective when fighting those without air defenses, such as terrorist groups in the Middle East. If taken into conflict against a peer competitor, like Russia or China, its usefulness drops dramatically.
“People are talking about planes here when there’s really a much bigger strategic issue,” Aboulafia said. “The sort of assets that they’d be funding — the F-35, bomber, tanker — they’re about superpower capabilities rather than fighting a counterinsurgency. Are we pivoting to Asia or are we just going to be stuck in the Middle East forever? It’s more of a broader society conversation.”
