A secret report detailing an official fly-off between the F-35 Lightning II and the A-10 Warthog has been released, five years after the competition took place. Forced from the Pentagon by a Freedom of Information Act request, the report is heavily censored but doesn’t paint the F-35, long touted as a alternative for the A-10, as a clear-cut winner.
In an exclusive, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) released a redacted copy of the report it received from the Air Force. The report details a “fly-off” through which the F-35 and A-10 were pitted against one another in similar missions, to find out which aircraft was superior at traditional A-10 roles.
In keeping with POGO, it requested a replica of the report in April 2022, a request that went ignored. Subsequent legal motion forced the Air Force to release a replica of the classified report that’s heavily blacked out to guard secret information.
The report was prepared by the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), an internal watchdog that monitors the event of recent Department of Defense equipment. In keeping with POGO, although the tests were conducted in 2018, the report itself was only written in 2022—a really very long time to organize a 48-page report.
Coupled with a Freedom of Information Act request that went unanswered and the necessity to resort to legal motion to finally release a replica, it does seem, as POGO asserts, that the “results were apparently not what the Air Force’s leaders expected, because they fought to cover them completely for years.”
An Uneasy Substitute
When the F-35 was conceived of within the late Nineties, the Air Force sold its version, the F-35A, as an aircraft that might concurrently replace the F-16 Fighting Falcon multirole fighter and the A-10 ‘Warthog’ Thunderbolt attack aircraft. Replacing two aircraft with one would, the service argued, simplify maintenance, reduce costs, and usually replace the aging A-10 with a brand new airframe.
The Air Force has been attempting to do away with the A-10 Warthog because the end of the 1991 Gulf War, arguing that it was now not able to surviving in a posh, high-end air defense environment. The A-10’s powerful lobby in Congress, in addition to the support of the Army, veterans, and the general public, have kept the aircraft in operation far longer than it was originally projected to fly.
Today, 281 A-10s are still in service with the Air Force, the Air Force Reserve, and the Air National Guard, with a mean age of 41 years. As of now, the Air Force plans to retire the aircraft entirely by 2028.
Critics have repeatedly stated that the F-35 is a poor alternative for the A-10. The F-35 is quicker, making it tougher for the pilot to watch the battlefield below, carries fewer munitions, will not be armored to shrug off anti-aircraft fire, and lacks a dedicated, armored vehicle-smashing gun just like the A-10’s GAU-8/A 30mm Gatling gun.
Within the mid-2010s, the Pentagon mandated a fly-off between the 2 aircraft to find out the F-35’s suitability for the A-10 role, and the tests were carried out in 2018.
The F-35 vs A-10 Fly-Off
The fly-off pitted the 2 aircraft types against each other in three areas:
- Close Air Support (CAS)—attacking enemy forces on the bottom in support of friendly ground forces.
- Forward Air Controller Airborne—acting as a flying coordinator of other close air support aircraft.
- Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR)—escorting other Air Force assets like helicopters and the CV-22 Osprey in rescuing pilots behind enemy lines.
The tests were conducted in low and medium threat air defense environments where aircraft would face light-caliber anti-aircraft guns and, at best, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. The tests didn’t include “high threat” missions, which would come with enemy fighters and modern air defenses, since the service stated the A-10 was “not designed” to operate in such environments. For those environments, the report implies, the F-35 is the one game on the town.
The outcomes of the tests are mostly classified and heavily redacted from the released report. Entire pages are blacked out with no useful information. Moreover, DOT&E’s recommendations are completely blacked out. It’s virtually unimaginable to get a way of the report’s findings from this unclassified version.
Probably the most useful information within the actual “meat” of the report is that A-10 and F-35 pilots like working together.
“A frequent comment by each F-35A and A-10C pilots during debriefings was the synergies that might occur if A-10C formations operated with F-35A escort during contested CSAR missions. This might mix the strengths of each platforms while mitigating their limitations to enhance the likelihood of mission success,” the report states.
Why do they like working together? That’s blacked out, too.
Know Your Lingo: “Strafing” is when an aircraft flies low to the bottom and attacks a ground goal with automatic weapons. Watch an F-35 jet practice strafing within the video below.
So What?
It’s hard to evaluate the report itself, because it says virtually nothing useful and offers no insights into which aircraft did a greater job. However the report does give the impression that the F-35 did worse than expected from the Air Force’s clear reluctance to release it.
One query that does come to mind is: So what if the A-10 did higher? The tests were limited to low and medium threat environments, comparable to Iraq and Afghanistan—conflicts which the U.S. got out of a while ago. The U.S. can be attempting to stay out of such conflicts within the foreseeable future, while preparing for major war and high threat environment battlefields against China and Russia.
The U.S. could hang onto a small variety of A-10s after which simply never use them, tying up resources which are needed elsewhere.
That being said, the U.S. doesn’t exactly get to select its wars and enemies. Washington ended the Iraq War but was forced to return because the Islamic State overran much of the country. A war against the Islamic State requiring low loiter speeds, precision munitions, and the power to strafe targets with an enormous gun is strictly the type of permissive air environment the A-10 excels in.
Other conflicts might arise which are entirely suited to the A-10. It may very well be clever to carry onto the service’s existing inventory of 281 A-10s as an insurance policy, especially with the Middle East heating up again.
The Takeaway
The Air Force originally sold the F-35 as a alternative for the A-10, but within the 20 years it took to develop the fifth-generation stealth jet, it became clear that there was still a distinct segment for the old attack jet—one which it excelled at.
Did the advanced F-35 beat the A-10 at its own game? Should the Air Force proceed to retire the A-10 and replace it with the F-35? All of the report tells us is that pilots of each planes would like to work together than work alone. Perhaps that’s the reply we’re on the lookout for.