Critical Assessment: Air Force Close Air Support – F-35 vs A-10

Dan Grazier

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is finally going up against the battle-proven A-10 close-air-support attack plane for the long-promised fly-off. The unpublicized tests began on July 5, 2018 and will conclude on July 12, according to a copy of the testing schedule reviewed by the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.

But the tests, as designed, are unlikely to reveal anything of real value about the F-35’s ability to support ground troops in realistic combat situations—which the F-35, as the presumptive replacement for the A-10, must be able to demonstrate.

A close air support test should involve large numbers of ground troops in a highly fluid combat simulation in varied terrain, across many days. It should test the pilot’s ability to spot targets from the air in a chaotic and ever-changing situation. The test should also include a means of testing the program’s ability to fly several sorties a day, because combat doesn’t pause to wait for airplanes to become available.

But the Air Force scheduled just four days’ worth of tests at desert ranges in California and Arizona. And according to sources closely associated with the fly-off, not a single event includes ground troops, or any kind of fluid combat situation, which means these tests are hardly representative of the missions a close air support aircraft has to perform.

These tests put U.S. Air Force leadership in a difficult position.

They want their largest and highest-priority weapons buy, the troubled, $400-billion F-35 multi-mission fighter, to quickly replace the A-10 they’ve been trying to get rid of for over two decades. The now-former Pentagon weapons testing director, J. Michael Gilmore, said in 2016 that a fly-off would be the only way to determine how well the F-35 could perform the close-air-support role compared to the A-10—or whether the F-35 could perform that role at all.

The testing office and the various service testing agencies had already meticulously planned comparative tests to pit the F-35 against the A-10, F-16, and the F-18, because the F-35 program is contractually required to show better mission effectiveness than each of the legacy aircraft it is to replace.