This may well be pure BS. If it’s not, though… ruh-roh, Russian tankies…
US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told a journalist who inquired about the possibility of transferring aircraft data.
Thus the US Air Force will be able to write off obsolete military aircraft in order to focus on modern programs. #Ukraine #UkraineRussianWar #Ukrainian
— 🇺🇦Ukraine News Live🇺🇦 (@UkraineNewsLive) July 21, 2022
The A-10 is, let’s face it, obsolete. As absolutely badass as the plane is, drones have kinda taken over the role… sure, they’re far more easily destroyed than the A-10, but who cares? They’re cheap and disposable and ain’t nobody on board. The modern battlefield is an unsafe place for something slow and targetable like the A-10. Buuuuuuuut…. the Russians, rather stupidly, have failed to gain absolute air dominance over all of Ukraine. This is the sort of environment that the A-10, properly employed and properly flown, can shine in. Swamp the Russian air defenses with cheap rocks and cheap drones, and then the A-10 comes striding in ten feet tall and lays waste with precision, determination and brutality. *Imagine* those long trains of resupply trucks, miles long, looking up and seeing a few A-10s drawing down on them. Whoopsie.
Of course, there are lots of problems with this idea. The A-10 is not in production, nor, I expect, are most of the spare parts needed to maintain the fleet. A Ukrainian A-10 gets damaged, repairing it might be quite problematic. Ukrainian pilots have, to my knowledge, zero training time on the A-10. Russian air defense has been kind of a joke; this might spur them to actually get on the job. And every A-10 sent to Ukraine is an A-10 that can’t be sent to the US Army (the Army should have fixed wing ground attack/support aircraft: fight me). The USAF has wanted to rid itself of the A-10 for decades, and, honestly, I guess I’d rather see them lost in combat shooting their way to Valhalla than in a scrap yard getting turned into nails and pop cans. At this point, losing airframes over enemy territory no longer holds the fear of “oh no, they’ll learn our secrets from examining the wreckage” that it might have 40 years ago.
A-10’s appear in the skies of Ukraine, the Russians will make taking them out a priority. That will certainly make for an interesting clash. And if the American plane and Ukrainian pilot put up a good showing of survivability… the Russians will probably bend themselves over backwards to take them out. The A-10s could thus be useful simply as a way to throw the Russian war effort into chaos, devoting effort and funds to some new goal, while now getting stingier on other more practical goals.