In 1990, this quiet beach was transformed into a war zone. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, prompting a coalition of countries to combine forces to expel his army. Iraq had over a half a million frontline troops with another million in reserve, armed with a formidable array of Soviet weapons, including 5,000 tanks. The USAF had an aircraft in their inventory designed specifically to obliterate Soviet armor and provide the much needed support for the coalition ground forces, the A-10. Curiously, General Horner, commander of air operations, almost left it behind. General Horner was called in by General Schwarzkopf before the actual assault launch to review what airplanes were going to be there. There were 1,900 airplanes to be assigned, zero A-10s. And Schwarzkopf looks at them and says, where's my A-10s? And General Horner says, oh, we have F-16s specially armed up, they'll do the job." Schwarzkopf looks at him and says, I don't want to hear any of your Air Force political bullshit. Give me my A-10s. The A-10s, aircraft that were at the time 20 years old, managed to outshine the 1900 aircraft that had been chosen ahead of them, destroying 4,000 tactical targets, a tally higher than all the others combined. With such an impressive performance, why was the USAF so reluctant to bring the Warthog to war? What was it about this tank-busting machine that repulsed them so much? To understand the mystery of the A-10, we have to look back to the origins of the USAF. In World War I and II, the Air Force had been a branch of the U.S. Army. Over time, the role of the Air Force evolved with improved technology and battlefield experience. Aircraft could provide vital aerial intelligence, drop bombs on strategic targets, and move troops and equipment. One of the Air Force's most important jobs was providing close support for troops on the ground. That is, working closely with soldiers on the battlefield and executing the difficult mission of destroying enemy forces without causing casualties to nearby friendlies. As important as this mission was to the overall success of military campaigns, it was despised by many Air Force generals of the day. From the day one, the United States Air Force going all the way back to the Army Air Corps, there has been this antipathy to the mission called close air support because it is tied to the Army or ground warfare. And it was a mission that did not fit their view of them being able to independently carry out whatever war they wanted to and not be tied to what was going on the ground, not be tied to another service. They very early on decided that what they needed to do to get a decent budget was to emphasize that bombing could win wars. That idea, a very false notion by the way, still runs the Air Force today. They thought they could get much more money if they built bigger and fancier airplanes like bombers and if they put out a tremendous amount of propaganda that bombers by themselves could win wars. As much as the Air Force resented and resisted the close support mission, it was a necessary evil. Time and again, bombing alone proved ineffective at breaking the will of the people. Whether it was Germany's Blitz of Britain or endless bombing raids of the Allies against German targets. Allied ground forces supported by aircraft have a dirty job of taking back Europe mile by mile. Soldiers often found themselves mired in the quicksand of war, the situation shifting from minute to minute. They needed pilots tuned into the chaos of battle. on a patrol, they want something above them that can see all, communicate with them, help them with their navigation problems, help them see ahead, and so they won't be surprised. And if they do get surprised and they come in contact, they can get published immediately, fire on the target. By immediately, I mean within a minute. As much as the Air Force wanted to focus on bombing missions, they still managed to produce some legendary close support aircraft, albeit by blind luck. The P-47, which was the original Thunderbolt, that airplane turned out to be a close support airplane totally by accident, which is typical of the Air Force. Since the Air Force didn't care to do close support, obviously they weren't going to design airplanes for it. They designed the P-47 as their approach to the greatest thing in the sky to shoot down Messerschmitts. In fact, it was not the greatest thing in the sky to shoot down Messerschmitts. It racked up a very good combat record in air-to-air combat because it had some, you know, fabulously good pilots, which count far more than airplanes. By pure accident, it turned out it was a wonderful close support machine because it had a huge radial cast iron engine right in front of the pilot, which was like built in armor for him from the front. Could carry a big load because it was a big airplane, too big to be a good air to air fighter. And the engine was very survivable because it didn't have a liquid cooled engine and radiator. So basically rifle bullets couldn't bring it down very easily. The P-47 could come home with, you know, 20 or 30 holes in it. And so it racked up a terrific record. Close support was not considered the most glamorous job, but it was a vital one. The pilots of the 365th Fighter Group, also known as the Hellhawks, flew their P-47 Thunderbolts in one of the most important operations of the war. It was realized in the Allied headquarters that they needed a tactical air force to support the ground troops directly during the process of the invasion of Normandy. So they needed a dedicated fleet of aircraft, both bombers, transport and fighters, to seize control of the air and then support the ground troops. So the Hellhawks got drafted, probably not by choice, into that role. They dreamed of themselves as the high-flying pilots with the scarf streaming behind their neck, but they began to realize that they could play a crucial role on the battlefield, and they became very connected emotionally with the GIs on the ground and helping them out. The Thunderbolts' impact would last long after World War II. The aircraft's success would set the norm for all future close support missions. The importance of the P-47, the Halifax, and the way they used that airplane in combat is still with us today, 65 years later. Since World War II, with a few exceptions in Korea in the early days of that war, American ground troops have never fought without air superiority, without complete confidence that any aircraft they saw overhead was a friendly one. And that's a legacy of the P-47's ability to control the battlefield immediately over the front lines, where the fighting was heaviest. As the war came to the close, a new weapon emerged which changed warfare forever. The dropping of atomic bombs sealed the fate of Japan in World War II. It also seemed to solidify the position of bomber generals who believed that bombing could win wars alone. The U.S. Air Force was in a powerful position, as it was the only service capable of delivering a bomb, albeit one constructed with the Navy's oversight. Though the Army and Navy were not enthused about sharing their budgets with a young competitor, and slowed and sabotaged the process wherever they could, they could not stop the inevitable, and on September 18, 1947, an independent United States Air Force was born. Though the Army and Air Force were separate entities, the Army relied on aircraft to operate, to transport troops and equipment, and for the vital mission of close support. In 1947, a document was hammered out between the armed services to divide up the roles and missions of the respective fleets of aircraft. The Army and the Air Force had negotiated a set of unbelievably bad agreements, I mean bad for the taxpayer and bad for the soldier, called the Key West Agreements, by which they agreed to divvy up air assets. The Army would be in control of all helicopters and the Air Force would be in control of all fixed-wing airplanes. And the deal was that the Air Force would not object to the Army getting very large numbers of these, would not object to them, you know, doing armed versions of them. And in return, the Air Force promised, we'll give you lots of close support. A young Colonel, Avery Kaye, took part in these negotiations. He was a highly decorated and respected officer, having navigated the lead B-17 in the Schweinfurt-Brig, a treacherous mission to cripple Germany's industrial might. Colonel Kay soon realized that navigating through the politics stemming from the inter-service rivalries was no easier. He was probably one of the most ethical officers I've ever known. A guy of enormous character and courage, almost to the extent of naivete, being just naive about what bureaucratic chicanery is all about. He came to realize within a year or two after having served in these negotiations and written some of this language where the Air Force promised to deliver close support, he realized the Air Force had no intention of ever delivering that support. And out of conscience, he felt personally responsible and guilty that the Air Force had not delivered and that he had personally participated in a lie. And he dedicated the rest of his career to creating a close support airplane that would deliver on the promises that he had been part of. In just a few years, the USAF's short-sightedness when it came to close support became blatantly obvious. The Korean War was not decided with an atomic bomb blast, it was a grueling conventional war. Here, the USAF pinned their hopes on their speedy new jet fighters. They may have been state-of-the-art, but they were too fast and without the range to be effective close support aircraft. P-51 Mustangs left over from World War II were taken out of storage and shipped over as a makeshift solution. These aging aircraft suffered heavy losses as their engines were vulnerable to ground fire. The Navy and Marines with their A-1 Sky Raiders and F-4U Corsairs respectively took the lion's share of the close support work and they did so brilliantly. Close support was of the essence particularly when troops were moving, when we were moving forward or when the Chinese were pouring over the border and driving us back. The A-1 was in fact a wonderful workhorse, shared the virtues of the T-47, had a big rotary engine up front to protect the pilot, was very hard to shoot down, you could put lots of holes in it, and because it had been designed to pull really big loads off carriers, had a very big wing which allowed it to maneuver very well at low speed. That airplane did brilliant work, particularly in the hands of the Navy squadrons that had it. The USAF seemed blind to the lessons learned in Korea, and oblivious to the idea that there might be another conventional war. In the years that followed, they continued to focus on building nuclear-armed bombers and jets in preparation for an atomic war with the Soviets. The Army realized that they might have to take the close support mission into their own hands. Chuck Myers recalls Army tests he participated in at Fort Rucker. A lot of guys in the Army, particularly on the aviation side, felt that the Navy and the Air Force were not going to provide them what they needed, which they referred to as organic air support. The only option they had was somehow try to figure out how to do it with helicopters. And that's what was going on at Fort Rucker, was experimenting with helicopters. They were reinventing our old Army Air Corps. My primary helicopter that I was using was an H-13. They had strapped.30 caliber machine guns to the rails. When hostilities boiled over in a tiny country in Southeast Asia, the USAF once again found themselves unprepared. Well, what happened in Vietnam, uh, is we went into Vietnam and the Air Force in particular with aircraft that were not suitable for, uh, the USAF needed agile dogfighters capable of keeping up with Soviet-made MiGs. Instead, they had aircraft built to drop atomic bombs and fighters that lacked the basic cannon for shooting down opponents at close range. In terms of close support, they were just as ill-equipped as they had been for the Korean campaign. The USAF were forced to use ancient Navy A-1 Sky Raiders to take up the slack. In Vietnam, the great hero of the war was the A-1 again. And the A-1 by that time had been sent to the boneyard. The Navy didn't want to hear about it. And somebody in Special Forces had the sense to see, we need that airplane. I'd convinced Secretary McNamara to bring A-1s back out of the boneyard, refurbish them. Not surprisingly, the Air Force were less than enthusiastic about having the Skyraider jammed down their throat by McNamara. There was nothing that was more hated in the Air Force than to pull out a Navy airplane that had reciprocating engines, no jet, you know, cruised at about 140 miles an hour. I mean, this was like anathema to the Air Force. Though the Sky Raiders were an unwelcome gift from the Navy, they proved themselves again, just as they had in Korea. The A-1 was a very fine bombing platform, and we could get close to the target and be far more active than you could with an F-100 who had to go up, drop his bombs, and get back home quickly before I ran out of fuel. It saved probably several hundred CIA camps in the jungle that had been overrun, you know, at night by VC and some North Vietnamese regulars. It would take ultimate damage. Bernie Fisher, who landed during the Battle of Aisheau and picked up a lad who had crashed just off the runway. He had, I forget what, 20 or 30 bullet holes through that thing. While the USAF was trudging forward in Vietnam with the Skyraider, Colonel Kaye, an advocate for close-aboard aircraft, found himself in a new office with a clandestine mission. Colonel Avery Kaye, he wound up in 1966 in an office, a staff office to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force at the Pentagon Headquarters called Concepts and Doctrine. Concepts and Doctrine was a smoke screen. What it really was about was a term of art in the military called roles and missions. What roles and missions means is your job is to defend the Air Force budget against raids by the Army and by the Navy. At the time, the US Army was in development of a costly new helicopter called the Cheyenne. It was built for the mission that the USAF detested, close support. 50% more than the Air Force's most expensive fighter, the F-4, Kay recognized that the Cheyenne was a threat to the Air Force's budget. He also saw an opportunity to leverage the situation to fulfill the Air Force's old promise to the Army. He realized, you know, if the Army does this, if the Army builds this super expensive $4.5 million helicopter, they're going to want a thousand of them at least. Where's the money going to come from? It's going to come out of the Air Force budget. Perfectly correct correct perception. He also perceived that this would be a powerful incentive for the chief of staff to develop a close support airplane to make sure that the army didn't get all that money. Kay's plan of creating a close support aircraft to thwart the Cheyenne filtered its way up to the chief of staff of the time, John P. McConnell. Though McConnell was a bomber general and loathed the close support mission, he had fears about relinquishing it to the Army. If you let the Army get away with that Cheyenne helicopter, you know, that costs 50% more than our most expensive fighter, that money is going to come out of your hide, and you're going to go down in history as the chief of staff who gave up the close support mission. Of course, no chief of staff wants to do that. They're all very worried about their legacy. March on. Start developing a close support airplane, make sure it's cheaper than the Cheyenne, and make sure it's much more lethal and much more survivable, so that we have a real case that the money should go to our airplane. Given the green light to create the USAF's first purpose-built close support plane, Colonel Kaye had to build the brain trust that would help shape the aircraft's specifications. At the time, Pierre Spray was working for Secretary of Defense McNamara, analyzing the USAF's aircraft inventory in Europe. I've been assigned to do, are we wasting our money on airplanes in Europe? Are we doing the right thing? Are we buying the right fighters to stop 90 or 100 divisions of Soviets from sweeping over Europe? That was the number one threat in the US military strategy at that point. My conclusion was, we are wasting our money, we need to stop buying so many bombing airplanes. At that time it was called interdiction. We need to focus on close support, on actually helping our defending tank troops and anti-armor and so on with airplanes that can do the job right at the point of battle. That made me public enemy number one of the Air Force instantly. Realizing he had found a like-minded maverick in Pierre Spray, Colonel Kaye approached him about joining his team. He says, Mr. Spray, I've read your paper. I see that you're a big supporter of close support and you think we should be spending lots more money on it. I've been assigned through my boss and the chief of staff has approved that we start a great close support airplane. He says, I'm stuck because the entire Air Force is sabotaging me. The rest of them don't want to do it, just the chief of staff. And we badly need help. We have no real technical people. Will you help us? There was no way in conscience that I could turn him down. It was such an absolutely correct thing to do and so badly needed. I said I'll help you in any way I can. To help Spray and Colonel Kaye develop the ultimate close support aircraft, they enlisted the help of A-1 pilots fresh out of Vietnam. Their first-hand experience working with the Army would prove invaluable in creating the new aircraft then simply known as A-X. Tom Christie, who helped examine potential contenders for the AX's weaponry, recalls the passion of Kay's group. And so I can remember coming up to Washington, TDY, from Eglin Air Force Base, which I did quite often, and meeting with Pierre Spray, you know, that were part of this cabal. And the one in particular that I remember was a guy by the name of Avery Kaye. And they wanted to make sure that the Air Force did not go wandering off and make the same mistakes they'd made in previous years. They wanted an aircraft that was dedicated to and designed for close air support. The interesting thing is you would have imagined that an airplane born in this kind of sin, designed to simply kill an army helicopter, couldn't possibly become a good airplane. But the interesting thing is for us down in the trenches trying to shape this airplane airplane once we had the chief of staff's approval. These were absolutely ideal circumstances for creating a really good airplane at very low cost. I mean, normally you're told, include this technology, you've got to include that radar, you've got to include this piece of junk, make sure it's plenty expensive so that the contractors get lots of money. Whatever you do, don't make it cheaper than the last airplane. That's what really shapes airplanes today. We have the dead opposite, because our instructions were make the airplane much more lethal, much more obviously lethal than the Cheyenne helicopter, make it much cheaper and make it much more survivable. That's exactly what you want to do for a close support airplane. So, out of the political mayhem of the Pentagon budget battles, we actually had marching instructions that you know, the designers would kill for. Pierre Spray, Tom Christie and Chuck Myers all pushed for the development of America's first close support plane. In the 1970s, these renegades would bond into a group known as the Fighter Mafia. Together with other like-minded officers and defense analysts, they battled against the establishment to help create the best aircraft to meet the demands of war within the restraints of the government's purse. Though they had their critics, more often than not, the fighter mafia were proven to be right. including Northrop and Fairchild, and reviewed hundreds of designs in the quest to make the ultimate close-up warp plane. But what exactly are the ingredients of such an aircraft? The primary things you have to have, you have to be able to maneuver very well at low speed, and that's both to get close to the target so you can distinguish friends from enemies, you can pick up things that the ground guys can't see, and very important, particularly since some of this focus was on Europe, you have to be able to fly under weather. When you've got clouds at a thousand feet, 500 knot jets become hopeless. You have clouds at a thousand feet and you have hills that are 500 feet high and you try to come booming down through those clouds at 500 knots, that's simply not feasible. The aircraft also needed to be capable of loitering over targets for extended periods, at least two and hopefully four hours with a full bomb load, 250 miles from base. If a plane had to leave the battle to refuel after just a few short minutes, it wouldn't be around long enough to provide any real support. The A-1 pilots were adamant about this, and about the need for an excellent radio communication system. You had to have great communications. This was in a day, and by the way, the day extends to today, when essentially no Air Force airplane could talk to the ground. They had radios that deliberately could only talk to other Air Force airplanes or to headquarters or to Air Force radar airplanes, and no direct way to talk to a guy, you know, holding a small tactical radio sitting in a foxhole. My A-1 guys were so insistent on that, they're just pounding me into it every day. You can give up anything else, don't give up those radios, that's how important they were. Another key element of close-up war aircraft is survivability. Pilots going on such a treacherous mission, close to enemy fire, need to have a reasonable chance of coming back in one piece. You can't ask pilots to go into an environment this dangerous to airplanes if you can't guarantee them that they're going to, you know, for the most part, get home. And so we put a huge amount of work into survivability. There was so much attention paid to the aircraft being able to survive in what was forecast to be a very critical environment that we were going to be flying in with a lot of air defenses, in particular the 23mm gun system that the Soviets allegedly were fielding in great numbers. You put a.22 rifle into any modern jet, a.22 rifle into any modern jet, and it will penetrate the tank, will very likely create a leak or light a fire, and the leak itself will catch on fire if it's right next to the engine. A lot of attention, unprecedented attention, was paid to that whole concept of reducing the vulnerable area, being given a hit, will you go down or not. A plethora of survivability specifications were laid out for the AX, using cables rather than flammable hydraulics to control the flaps and other control surfaces, and building the structure of the aircraft the old-fashioned way, with spars covered by skin, a feature that allowed the old A-1s to return home with gaping holes in their wings. But perhaps the greatest feature of the A-X was, of all things, a titanium bathtub. We demanded armor, essentially completely around the pilot, certainly up to this level, from the front, the back and everywhere, they would stop an American.50 caliber bullet or the Russian equivalent. And that led to a 2,000 pound titanium bathtub. They still call it the bathtub to this day, and the pilots love it. Because it gives them all kinds of confidence when they're pressing an attack and they're hearing impacts of bullets on the airplane and so on. As important as survivability was, the AX was an offensive weapon, built to destroy tanks. The whole of the aircraft was designed around a massive gun capable of blowing away the competition. While designing the gun specs, spray a look for inspiration from a most unusual source, a hero of Nazi Germany. In the 1960s, the US Air Force had a helicopter in their crosshairs. Surprisingly, it did not belong to one of its opponents behind the Iron Curtain, but rather, the US Army. The costly Cheyenne helicopter, built by the Army to support its troops, was seen as a potential drain on the Air Force began drawing up the specifications for a new close support plane, known as the A-X. It was an aircraft and mission the Air Force really didn't want. However, the team at the Pentagon behind the A-X saw things differently. They saw supporting troops on the ground as one of the Air Force's most lethal weapons. The A-X was an offensive weapon, built to destroy tanks, armored personnel carriers, and soldiers entrenched in foxholes, or behind sandbags. The hull of the aircraft was to be designed around a massive gun capable of blowing away the competition. While designing the gun specs, defense analyst Pierre Spray looked for an inspiration from a most unusual source, a hero of Nazi Germany. Because I was adamant that we had to do this purely from the point of view of the effectiveness demanded by combat experience, I assigned everybody on the team to read a book called Stuka Pilot by Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, because I had found nothing in the entire literature on close support that gave a more precise and more objective view of what close support is really about. Rudel flew an incredible two and a half thousand missions where he rained havoc on opposing armies, destroying an astonishing number of enemy vehicles including 519 tanks. His tank-busting aircraft of choice was a specially modified Stuka, armed with two 37mm cannons. Spray began a worldwide search for a caliber of bullet powerful enough to pierce Soviet tank armor, while not so large as to make it unwieldy for an aircraft to fire. He found the perfect bullet in the land of fine chocolate and watches, Switzerland. Munitions manufacturer Orlaitner produced a devastating 30mm round, which penetrated with Swiss watch-like precision. Now that Spree had found his bullet, he had to figure out a way to fit a thousand rounds worth on the AX. The massive amount of ammo was housed in a drum three-quarters the size of a Volkswagen. Of course, when we started sizing the weapon, see how big it was, a huge ammunition storage, because we wanted enough ammunition for twenty repeated passes. See, that was part of the long loiter, long endurance. It's not just hanging around, you also have to hang around and be dangerous, have weapons. Carrying so much ammo in such a powerful weapon, the AX might be best described as a flying piece of artillery. Though the 30 millimeter shells were potent and capable of penetrating the thick Soviet armor, they wouldn't necessarily stop a tank in its tracks. At that time, a new type of bullet was in development which packed a depleted uranium punch. Depleted uranium has exactly the same properties as magnesium. When you hit with a high velocity, you actually light off the metal. The metal burns inextinguishably, just like magnesium does in a flare. This thing is so incendiary that if you just have grease, the normal grease that's in the sump under the engine, you're very likely to light the tank on fire because there's burning fragments everywhere once you've penetrated. By 1970, Spray and his team had put together all the specifications for the Ray-X aircraft into a concept formulation package. The tremendous amount of work they did paid off. The USAF, still eager to kill the Cheyenne helicopter, approved the plans, as did Secretary of Defense McNamara and Congress. The US Army, with the Cheyenne and the USAF with the AX, weren't the only ones fighting for a piece of the government's bending pie. The Marines had a futuristic close-up or aircraft of their own, the AV-8 carrier. Chuck Myers took part in an evaluation of the three designs. The group leader turned to me and said, well we need a plan. Who are we going to visit? Who are we going to talk to about this subject? And I said, well, I think we probably ought to start with the Marine Corps because they probably know more about the subject than anybody else and have great interest in air support. I set up the meetings for them over at Marine Corps headquarters and our little group went over there and we spent a whole morning listening to Marine Corps expound on the subject. And of course they were pushing this thing called a Harrier, which if I could think of an airplane least appropriate for close air support, that would be it, because of its vulnerability to small arms fire. Meyers soon realized the bomber generals in the USAF weren't the only ones who had antipathy for the close support mission. We all convened for lunch, and it broke up into little groups, and I remember sitting at a round table having lunch with a couple of Marines, and one of them was a colonel, and I never forget the colonel saying, he thumped the tail, he said, boy, we can hardly wait to get our F-14s. And the other guys in my group looked at me like, they're F-14s. They were no more interested in close air support. All they could think of was they were going to get the F-14 along with the Navy. Everybody wants to do this horseshit mission down there in the dirt. While Congress evaluated the aircraft available for the close support mission, Spray's paper airplanes were turned into prototypes. When it came to testing, Spray once again carved his own path. I had felt very strongly all along that the right way to do this was to get prototypes built, two or three prototypes by each company, and have a real firing, a shoot-off, a competition, a fly-off. The 89A10 were the two entries into the AX program, which was our first foray into a fly-on. That was a different approach. Four aircraft, two from each company, were flown over a period of many months at Edwards Air Force Base. That had never been done in the Air Force before. They built lots of prototypes and people were very reminiscent and very nostalgic about how great it was when we built them, but they never flew against each other. They were kind of engineering models. They went to Edwards Air Force Base, the test pilots flew them, clocked how fast they flew, how long, how high, how fast, and then kind of on paper compared them to other airplanes. We didn't want that. We wanted a real competition where you went and did the mission as realistically as you could with two manufacturers fighting it out, and the guy who did the mission best would win. Northrop and Fairchild Republic were given a little over a year to construct three prototypes each, two flying and one in pieces just for test fire experiments. The possibility of being struck by ground fire was a reality of the close support mission, something not factored into the designs of most jets of the era, which made them vulnerable to attack. Spray challenged aircraft manufacturers Northrop and Fairchild to design planes which kept the volatile fuel supply in the hot burning engines as far away from each other as possible. While Northrop buried the engines next to the fuselage, Fairchild came up with their own innovative solution. Fairchild came up with a superb solution. They have the engines out on pylons away from the fuselage. There's no fuel between the engines. All the fuel is way forward in the wings and it's brought a lot of pilots home. It would have been in airplanes that were burning and crashing. Spray once again rattled the establishment, this time with his choice of test pilots. We had the shoot-off at Edwards Air Force Base. Half the pilots were test pilots. This was another huge battle. Half of them were fighter pilots, real pilots, which was crucial because we were going to do so much bombing and strafing. That's not something the test pilots particularly adept at. So that was another revolution, another bureaucratic mess. Of course, the test pilot community has their own little sacred cows. were flown first by company pilots and then turned over to a team from the Air Force to go through a whole procedure in flight and in other logistics analyses the whole oil appliance. It was an extremely close competition between Northrop's A-9 and Fairchild's A-10. It was hard to choose a winner before counting up all the bullet holes and tallying up the scores on each test. I had thought that Northrop was going to win because they were somewhat slicker design, a little better aired mammoths. And lo and behold, after all the shooting was done and all the testing, Fairchild had taken the survivability a little more seriously, had an edge there, had a slight edge on some of the accuracy, dive bombing accuracy stuff, and they were awarded the contract. It's exactly what's supposed to happen. The guy you didn't think was going to win won because he did a little better. It was pretty close to us. It was a really tight race. We wouldn't have been badly served by either airplane. The A-10 was an excellent design, but Fairchild still had to work out some serious technical issues. We were doing all the follow-on tests on the A-10, primarily gunfire. When you're firing guns, the engines would get, would quit. And when the engine would quit, it would be very quiet. And we, you didn't hear, it wasn't like a compressor fell where it makes a lot of noise. It would just, the temperatures would go up on the engines and ruin them, or the RPM would come down. So I'd do thousands and thousands of rounds at the ground to try to solve this engine problem. The problem with the A-10, with the engines, were twofold. One was the gun gas going in the engines and causing the engine to quit. The other one was pulling high angle attack or high turn rates, because the airplane had good handling qualities, so nothing bad happened aerodynamically. But the engines couldn't stand the lack of the air. So the solution to both problems was to put continuous ignition on the trigger. So any time you fired that, the continuous ignition came on to both engines. So if it quit, it restarted immediately. And also high angle attack, an angle attack. So ignition comes on, at high angle attack, the engines keep running. Well, they don't keep running, but the pilot doesn't know the difference. With the A-10 selected for production, the Air Force found itself in an unpleasant situation. Their motive for supporting the A-10 was always to kill the Army Cheyenne. In 1972, that became a reality. With the Cheyenne dead, they suddenly had a new close support plane in their hands. An aircraft they really didn't want for a mission they despised. 1972, the Cheyenne was safely dead. It had been killed. The Air Force had accomplished its mission and now started an unending series of assaults to kill the A-10. There wasn't a month that went by that some general didn't have some idea about how to kill the A-10. The Air Force felt the A-10 was primarily supporting the Army, and they really didn't like that mission. In fact, at one point, the General was talking about giving the A-10s to the Army, but then the Air Force decided that was, their mission is to fly airplanes and not the Army's mission. So that got to be a controversy, so the Air Force said, okay, we'll support the Army. Air Force generals got together with an airplane manufacturer in Texas, Wing Tactical Vought, the old Chance Vought company that had been building A-7s for Vietnam. Pretty poor bombing airplane, highly vulnerable, full of flammable hydraulics and all that. And they claimed they had a model, they would do close support superbly. They got some congressmen to back them, along with these Air Force generals, and they actually forced us to do a fly-off of the A-7 against the then still in development A-10. So we dragged out the Y-A-10 prototype and had a little fly-off. The A-7 was so laughably worse that nobody could pretend that this was a good excuse for killing the A-10. The A-10 seemed to be equally resistant to battle damage as it was from assaults from the Air Force. Production continued and in March of 1976, the 355th Tactical Training Wing, based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, became the first unit to receive the A-10 Thunderbolt II. This did not dissuade the Air Force from continuing to do all it could to whittle production numbers. Interestingly enough, the Reagan administration comes in, and as I recall, the A-10, we had a procurement goal of 733 airplanes, something like that total. We had one more year to go, and the Reagan administration rolls in, and of course, throws money at everything the services wanted, and then Stockman, we call him Mr. Stockman, who was OMB at the time, sort of said, my God, we need to take a look at all this money we're spending, you know, we're going in the hole, tax cuts and all that. So he took aim on the defense budget. Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, battled with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger over Reagan's bloated defense budget. A compromise was reached which would leave A-10 production in the crosshairs. Weinberger came back and said, hey, we've got to show that we're stewards of the budget, so we need to cut some things. Lo and behold, what does the Air Force offer up? The last year of A-10 production, I think, it was a smaller number. We had been up to, I think, 144 aircraft a year. And they also tried to cancel the ammo procurement. Unbelievable! They didn't get away with that. It wasn't just the Air Force brass who had misgivings about the A-10. Pilots of the day would have preferred to be flying the latest supersonic fighters. But it didn't take long for them to come around. The guys who joined the A-10 community, for one reason or another, a lot of them were there as punishment tourists, because it wasn't a glamorous tour for anybody. But they became committed to the airplane. The more they learned about the airplane, the mission, what it takes to help guys on the ground, how demanding the mission was, because it takes an enormous order of skill. I mean, it takes a whole set of skills air-to-air pilots don't even dream of. It's a totally different world. And they became dedicated to that world. And then actually, you know, a bunch of wars came along where they could actually exercise those skills and refine them. And what's interesting is they had the same opposition from the Air Force in the wars as we had when we were trying to produce the airplane. The A-10's first combat mission was the invasion of Panama in 1989 when the U.S. ousted Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Though the aircraft faced no real resistance, it would soon have an opportunity to prove itself fully. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. There was international condemnation of the event, and the Iraqi dictator was given a hard deadline of January 15, 1991 to withdraw his army. Coalition forces built an impressive armada of weapons to push Hussein out of Kuwait, including 1,900 aircraft. Curiously, General Horner, commander of air operations, almost left the A-10 behind. General Horner was called in by General Schwarzkopf before the actual assault launch, and Schwarzkopf looks at the list and he says, Where's my A-10s? And General Horner says, Oh, we have F-16s specially armed, they'll do the job. Schwarzkopf looks at it and says, I don't want to hear any of your Air Force political bullshit. Give me my A-10s. General Schwarzkopf recognized the abilities of the A-10 as a tank buster in close support planes. It had been built to destroy Soviet tanks, and the Iraqis had more than 5,000 of them. He made a wise choice. The A-10 destroyed more tactical targets than all other aircraft combined. Even General Horner could not deny the A-10s did such a good job of bailing out the failures of other airplanes that the same General Horner, who had refused to deliver A-10s at the beginning of the war, said, right in the middle of his staff in the famous black hole bunker in Saudi Arabia that was commanding the whole air war, after he saw the results of the A-10s, particularly even in wiping out missile sites, mind you, which they'd never been intended to do. He said, I take back every bad thing I said about the A-10. They saved our asses. And that was heard by a whole bunch of staff members and has been widely quoted since then. Now, here's the interesting thing. After the war, when everything had died down, people had done the battle damage assessment, and by the way, the Air Force had totally suppressed the successes of the A-10 that I just quoted, and had put out a whole bunch of junk about how brilliantly the F-117 did and all that. It was all hogwash. General Horner was forced by his fellow generals to renege on what he had said and join the assaults on the A-10, you know, actually went back on what he had said about how they saved our assets. He said, no, they weren't that important. Now, you ask yourself, how could a guy who had spent his career, you know, flying airplanes, he had flown a lot of fighters, he wasn't just a bomber guy. But once he got to be a general, he was so infected by the culture around him of the other general officers and that culture dating again back to the 1920s was a bomber culture. It's you know we go we bomb targets that we assign to our Air Force. We do it independently of the Army. We do it with airplanes that are very expensive because they're good for getting us a bigger budget and that's what the Air Force is about. Though the A-10 had done excellent work against Iraqi forces, by the end of the first Gulf War, the Air Force should have had a replacement in the pipeline. Aircraft have long gestation periods, and the A-10 was based on 1970s technology. But the bomber culture that permeated the upper echelons of the Air Force made a new aircraft nearly impossible. A lot of the people in the close support community, the military reform community, in 1983 started proposing developing a far better, far more modern A-10. We called it variously the mud fighter or the blitz fighter. It was going to be smaller, hotter, much better maneuverability, better able to get close in, better able to survive, have even more lethal weapons than the A-10, and we were ambitious to make it even cheaper than the A-10. And we had designs laid out, and we briefed them all over the Pentagon, and the Air Force came down like one man to kill it. The Air Force went bonkers. When they found out that Lockheed at Marietta, there were people down there doing some work on that. They told Lockheed, either you back off this and stop all this or you don't have a pres chance of competing with what was coming down the road, which was the advanced tactical fighter, which became the F-22. So they stopped. To put the final nail in this new aircraft's coffin, the Air Force offered a compromise of sorts. An Air Force two-star came down and said, okay, we want to sign a peace treaty. You guys back off pushing this new aircraft, okay? You do that and we promise we will back off upgrade them. So we agreed. So they did. They took away the planned retirement, which was a start probably in 1990-91. Without a replacement, close support pilots were forced to soldier on with aging A-10s. Now the Air Force had a new excuse to rid themselves of the A-10. It was too old. Nothing changes about these assaults. The first one is always, ah, the airplane is so old, you know. It's aging, it's decrepit, it's going to cost a lot to maintain. It's a perfectly silly argument. First of all, the A-10 is not the only old airplane in the Air Force. The Air Force generals are defending a far older airplane, the B-52. It's okay, we've so refurbished and remodernized it, even if it is older than all the pilots, who cares? Well, oddly enough, the same thing is true of the A-10. The A-10 has been heavily refurbished. In fact, it's an amazingly modern airplane now. First of all, most of the fleet has been re-winged, although the Air Force is now trying to steal that money for the F-35, the re-winging money, but most of them have already been re-winged and will be good to 2040. Secondly, it's completely false that older airplanes get more expensive to maintain. The older airplanes, B-52 included, are vastly cheaper to maintain than any of the new airplanes that replace them. And they're just like old cars. If you find somebody to make the parts, you can keep a car going forever, and people who love the car do. As the airplane stands today, there's nothing and nothing that can touch it in terms of performing this mission. There's just no way. It can do all the things that the ultra-high tech systems, like F-15s and F-18s and so on. It could do all those things just as well as they can, but it can work the other end of the spectrum down low. And lack of anything else, I would open the line and build more A-10s. From the invasion of Iraq to Afghanistan to the war against ISIS, the Air Force has been equally reluctant to bring the raging warrior to battle with them. Though the A-10s took part in the initial assault on Iraq, they were mothballed from 2003 to 2007. The USAF tried to rely on F-16s and other fighters to hit targets on the ground, but they were often inaccurate and caused casualties amongst friendlies. It wasn't until 2007 that the Air Force was forced to concede they still needed the A-10, an aircraft originally designed for a jungle war. The A-10 was a Vietnam follow-on because all the airplanes in Vietnam didn't have much fuel to stay around the target area. And of course, Vietnam was over, but it turns out now that the A-10 was perfect for Iraq and Afghanistan because it can loiter for long times, it's got plenty of ammo. That gun is absolutely outstanding as far as the 30mm. You put the piper on the target and the first dozen bullets go there. You know, no question. That's where they go. Like the USAF, the Russian Air Force has a dedicated ground support aircraft of their own, the Sukhoi Su-25, an aircraft with an uncanny resemblance to Northrop's A9. Introduced in 1981, it is still in production and with multiple upgrades it continues to support Russian troops and the troops of buyers from around the world. The Russian Air Force does not seem to have the same hang-ups about close support as the USAF and in 2015, the Su-25 was brought into Syria to combat ISIS. crisis. Rather than create a new dedicated close support aircraft, the USAF is pinning their hopes and dollars on stealth multirole fighter, the F-35. This versatile aircraft was designed to handle the missions of not only the A-10, but also the F-16 and F-18, and A-V-8 for the USAF, Navy and Marines. Critics of the A-10 label it a single-purpose aircraft. But could a jack-of-all-trades master any of these missions? Here we are now with the A-10 obviously now 40 years old, 30 to 40 years old, though it's still got life. And we have one program going, F-35, and that's going to fill all these missions. And that's just outrageous to even, you know, think about that. Multitasking is a huge waste of money, because it leads to enormously expensive airplanes. Instead of that quarter-billion-dollar airplane, we could have a great close-support airplane for $20 million or $25 million. We could have a great fighter, air-to-air fighter, for $30 or $35 million. And then we could have whatever else you need, a reconnaissance airplane, or some other, those other kind of missions that maybe it does, we could have one of those for 30 or 35 million. It's uncertain when the F-35 will be able to take over for the A-10, and how effective it will be. Though the A-10s have been upgraded into the most advanced close support aircraft in the world, the USAF is almost embarrassed to bring them to front lines as they battle ISIS and prepare for a potential conflict in the Ukraine. I agree with the Air Force. It is a disgrace that we're flying that ancient airplane, and it's their fault. Because we should have been started, by the mid-80s, we should have been started prototyping something that was better than the A-10, and then let it prove that it was better. If it wasn't better, then we wouldn't build it. We never did that because the Air Force never wanted to do that mission. Over the years, the A-10 has proven itself the premier close support aircraft in the world. Sadly, it has also become a symbol of the strife between the branches of the armed services. The A-10 was authorized by the Air Force as a means to destroy an Army helicopter. Though it ended up doing an exceptional job supporting the army, from day one it has been under attack from within. The A-10 still has its detractors, but the resilient aircraft is ready to prove itself if given the chance. As each branch fights for its share of the defense budget, perhaps they are blinded to the bigger picture. That they are at war with their enemies, not each other. Now, each other. It starts out as something that you've trained for all your life, trying to make a difference. The cool thing is, as an A-10 pilot, on times when the stars align and you're up on that mission where you get to make a difference. You get to see the reward. It's a pretty easy answer to in terms of why are we here. Number one priority is always saving the guys on the ground. The people that we so closely work with, the guy on the ground. That's my whole soul and being is that guy on the ground. You know, he could be an 18-year-old guy, 18-year-old kid with a rifle. That's all he's got and I'm here to protect him. Sanitize dog tags, ID card in the left breast pocket, E&E kit, watch tape, smart tag, good flight guides, maps, VTTs, alarm menus. We'll see, buy your fiddle packs, water, snacks, seat cushions, if you guys want to take that. Telephone, you got one, you can have yours, okay, signed up. Yep. One random Friday, spring of 03, so right after the Iraqi invasion, three guys in flight suits walked into the bar on campus and started talking about flying. I was a year away from graduating, not really knowing what I wanted to do in life, and this guy started talking about flying fighters and being a fighter pilot, being in the Air Force and how awesome it was, and it kind of hit a nerve with me, if you will. How I got interested in the A-10, I can still remember it to this day. I was at a hobby store because I, like a lot of kids, interested in aviation. I built a lot of airplane models. And this was 1979. I was in high school and went to the hobby store and they had a Revell model of the, for then, brand new A-10. It had only been operational for a couple of years at that point. And I just saw it and I remember, I can still remember to this day looking at the wall of models and just trying to pick what I was going to build next. And I saw this, the box and the picture on it. I was like, what in the world is that? During about the last month of pilot training is where you put in for what airplanes you want to fly. And I was torn on the F-15E and all he said to me was, Mitchell what pass do I wear on my shoulder on Fridays? And the pass you always had on was the A-10. So I ended up putting the A-10 as number one and I loved the mission, the thought of the mission at the time and now looking back on it I clearly made the best choice of my life on the Hickam to go to the A-10 and then of course I was less than fortunate to get picked up by the Air Force to go fly the A-10 so that's how I am right here. So I was a first lieutenant. I was 26 years old when Desert Storm kicked off. The 26-year-old fighter pilot caught the nation's attention a few months ago when he and a partner shot down a record number of Iraqi tanks. You just never forget when you look down and realize that somebody's trying to shoot you down, and you've got to kill him first. My first full two years in the Air Force, it was pretty much a completely Cold War type of mentality. Our training was all very low altitude. It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I know talking to a lot of the guys now, it's been quite a while ago, and when you look at the airplane from then to now it's it's pretty amazing the different upgrades and that we've gone through since then. The A-10 is the only airframe ever that was built entirely for this mission. Yo come on man they're about to do a gun run you need to get down let's go buddy come on man It's an awesome testament to the aircraft, I think, that the same gun that we used to I think that the same gun that we used to kill main battle tanks in 1991 is the same gun where we can shoot a single insurgent that's fleeing on a motorcycle or shooting at our guys from a treeline. Point is, the A-10 was built for ground combat. Ground combat has, we had the old linear battlefield type where we're going to go fight a bunch of tanks going low at 100 feet, and then we've morphed into a medium altitude precision strike platform because the airplane has been updated and modified to be able to do that. Sensors are great, they're amazing, they enable precision strike, they enable us to generate coordinates that are pristine, that are right on the target, but that will never replace just, you know, looking right outside of my cockpit and looking at the battle space. What am I seeing out there in the big picture? We do have this personal connection with the people that we so closely work with, the guy on the ground. We hear him getting scared. The question, maybe we're going to attack same remote, same restrictions, from last hit, north 75 meters. We hear him getting excited. Here we go, that's it. Good hit, good hit, good hit. That's two on EGM, same remarks, same restrictions. We hear the bullets flying. We hear him taking cover, we hear him breathing hard. And it becomes a very personal, a very personal mission, especially when you start hearing about guys taking casualties down there. That hits very, very close to home. Nobody ever wants to hear that. We care about guys on the ground. We do our mission in relationship to guys on the ground. We are a support element, essentially, for the Army. We care about the guy on the ground. I'm not saying air interdiction mission isn't caring about the guy on the ground, but it's not tangible. You can't really grab the benefits of it right then. You're going to wait a certain amount of time to see its effects. Air to air, how's that about the guy on the ground? Well, you're billing air superiority, air supremacy. Correct. But is the guy on the ground going to see it, get the tangible benefits of it? No. Close air support is about the guy on the ground. Combat search and rescue is about the guy on the ground. We're joint. We're a joint airframe and an air force. And that's what makes us different. Okay, today we're going down to San De Sufa. We've been there recently, so we've got a good lay of the land. Keep in mind, Spidey's been pretty hot recently and they've had some contact from the same area around San De Sufa. He went over the recent activity. Keep in mind the kind of MO we've had recently out of there. They've seen the Taliban commander kind of looking at the objective first, doing a quick meeting, picking up weapons en route. Usually there's motorcycles involved. You've also got the Taliban commander that they seeked a couple weeks ago. So you've got all that stuff going on right there in Asbandi. We're going right into the heat of that so keep that in mind as as we get down there keep your eyes open and stay vigilant. Alright so our actions on contact near and far ambush return fire look to me we'll either maneuver or we'll push through. IED get 360 degree security and clear the danger area and then we'll look to Kazevac. In the case of a complex attack we're going to return fire move out of the kill zone. Indirect fire, get down, look for a distance and direction from me. Our actions on Holt, take a knee, face out, and the march intervals that we're going to use are going to be dependent on where we are in the open area, spread out as much as you can. The bigger we can look and the more intimidated we can look, the less likely we're going to take contact as we move down there. That's all I've got. What are your questions? All right, we're kitting up at 0615. 0615, kittime. Yesterday, as most days, we went out on a dismounted patrol south of our FOB to a village of Vespondee. Basically, we got some intel that some bad guys were storing weapons in a building, and we had contacted them before, we had run into them before. So we went down there to kind of check back up. And as we got down into the village, we ran into some sketchy guys. It just, everything felt weird from the time we got down there. There was high tension. You could tell by the body language. It was antsy, pacing back and forth. Second that happened, we spread out, let the PL do his link up. It was just high tension, I felt, from the get-go. Go, go push. It's not the way we're going to come here. I said everybody is the teachers here, so we are good people. Okay, if they're good people, they have nothing to worry about. We're not going to take anything. Just a lot of sketchy reports. No one had the same story. They were all family, they all lived in the same compound, but no one's story matched up. Unfortunately, we weren't able to detain them. So as we started to RTB, to head back to the base, we got word that the Taliban were maneuvering on us from the south. Right now we're picking up and moving back through Esfandi towards Ghazni. Mutant energy, go. And, Hog, if I could get you overhead of our lead element through a spondee, if at all possible. As we were headed back to the base, we had to cross about two kilometers of open desert. We're definitely in a huge open danger area. We got about 500 meters outside of the village and started taking some pretty accurate fire. I'm on it. I'm on it. I'm on it. There was no cover. I mean there were people trying to find tire tracks to hide, to get a little bit of a defilade behind. You know, in that position, the best you can do is spread out, gain fire superiority, you know, and then wait for some air support. Our comms were a bit of an issue at the time, and so they had a little bit of a struggle, but they did have A-10s, luckily, being pushed down to us. I have your position south of the tree line. We quickly responded and working with the JFO on the ground and one of my JTACs were able to get Hog on station quite quickly. We were taking some harassing fire at that point. Right here. I know you're busy, but I need full security, brother. Who's shooting? Somebody's fucking shooting at us. But luckily we had the A-10s on station to come in and do a nice show of force, which is always a clincher for the enemy. Just its mere presence alone is enough to keep the enemy at bay. And in that situation right there, again, just bringing those guys in quick and fast was enough to push the enemy away from our forces. The ground troops that I work with, when they think close air support, they think A-10s. And I think the reason for that is they almost share the same mentality. If you were to say that there's a grunt in the sky, it would be a hog pilot. They're very user friendly. I mean, any one of these dudes can pick up the radio if I get shot in the face and, you know, employ. Those guys are really professional, very well trained, and if, you know, you have a random Joe who doesn't know what to do, those guys can pull it from them. To win a war you need boots on the ground and to have boots on the ground you need support and you need the right kind of support to have boots on the ground and it's the A-10 honestly. Even sometimes just the sound or just telling the ground commander, hey, A-10's on its way or we have aircraft supporting the wing and we're five mikes and you ask what it is you say, hey, we've got an A-10 coming on. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it picks them up a little bit. That sound is so distinguishable. Literally shakes the ground. It is amazing. You hear it first when it fires and then you hear it echo from the gun in the sky. That sound right there just drives 11 Bravo nuts. It's that sound of corny like freedom, but it really is. It's just, it's the sound of don't mess with me. it scares off everyone and shows you're in good hands. I think when people 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road look back on it, I think people will look at this airframe and it will always be known as an airframe that was, some people view it as ugly, who'd wanna fly that thing? But you know what, it was an airframe that got the job done. It got bombs on target when it mattered most and guys went home to their wives and kids because of the airframe. It makes it, it's very humbling. It's that we are so trusted and liked by the ground forces. I think that's something that I'm very, very proud of. They love this airplane, and they trust us is the biggest thing. I mean, when you're shooting last night, we just looked at it, it was between 65 and 100 meters away from the friendly guys, and for those guys to trust us to do that on a regular basis is very gratifying. I got the greatest job in the world, man. I get to fly fighters when people need me to do my job. I have a chance to save lives and make a difference on the battlefield. That is the moment when you hear the machine guns going off in the background, when JTAC's screaming, the bullets are hitting him to speed. And you can hear the bullets pinging off the Humvee that he's hiding behind. And then all of a sudden you roll in, you know, put some rounds down and take care of his problem for him. And then, you know, you can hear the relief in his voice. That is the most rewarding and fulfilling thing that I can think of. You've got a huge group of experts in what they do with a singular focus. And you can't really get that back once it's broken out. It's broken out. There's no doubt that if Colonel Bob Dilger hadn't been there, the A-10 would have been a real failure. Basically, I'm being a bull in a china shop. Colonel Dilger, a great fighter pilot who had been one of the best fighter instructors. He was an air-to-air type, you know, silk starfish kind of guy, a brilliant tactician. Had been one of the best instructors at Nellis Air Force Base's fighter weapons school, which was the ancestor of the Navy's Top Gun, was doing that kind of work long before the Navy ever thought of doing Top Gun. And he, peculiarly enough, and kind of against his wishes, because he wanted to just fly airplanes and shoot down other people, right? And which, by the way, he did in the Vietnam War. He was a brilliant flight leader in the Vietnam War, one of the best. He wound up in a bureaucracy, and this was a guy who really hated bureaucracies, right at Wright-Patterson, and got himself assigned to be head of the 30mm program. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, if he hadn't been there, simply no other guy could have accomplished the job that needed to be done. When Dilger was handed this assignment, you're now the project manager for the cannon. They really handed him a bag of worms. He didn't know that, of course, he just stepped in and looked at it. The first thing he saw that was real obvious was the engineers had already estimated that the round would cost over $100, something like a hundred five dollars a piece. If you stop and think about that, that's a deal breaker. Because if you're going to have a cannon, you have to have war reserve ammunition. You're talking about millions of rounds of ammunition. You know, if you're going to rely on a cannon, you're going to carry 20 passes worth of ammunition in every sortie. If you can't have a stockpile of weapons, of ammunition, that'll last you at least 30 days. You know, you might as well not go to war. And at $100 or $105 a round, this was hopeless. You could eat up the budget for a major fighter just buying ammunition. And he looked at it, and of course being a total non-bureaucrat himself, he looked at it and he said, this is hogwash. He said, I can do it for a tenth of that. And he came very close to it. He actually delivered the round, a round that everybody had told him all the cost estimators said would cost $105 a piece. He delivered it for $13 a piece. And to do that, he had to trample over every ordinance bureaucracy in the Air Force. It was amazing. It was amazing. But he turned out to have a natural knack for production engineering, and he knew how to pick people who were great production engineers. The packaging was a huge amount of the cost. The brass case was a huge amount. He innovated aluminum cases to save money. He just saved nickels and dimes everywhere, all of them violating some military specification and some bureaucrat behind that military specification. He went through them like the Mongol army. Not only did he do that, but being naturally suspicious of purely theoretical engineering, he said, we've got to test it every step of the way. And the Air Force was prepared at that point to simply, you know, fire the gun a lot on the ground, which is traditionally what, you know, Army and Air Force gun guys do. And if it fired pretty well, fine, it's qualified to go fly with the airplane. It'll be fine. Pilger didn't believe that. He believed, very rightly, that the things that happen when you fire an airplane off an airplane that are not the same as firing it off a cast iron mount, you know, at Fort Huachuca or something. He demanded airborne tests. Furthermore, he wasn't really sure that we were right about how lethal this thing was. I mean, we'd done a fair amount of ground firing at pieces of armor and even at armor with gas cans behind it and stuff like that. But that's not the same as firing at the real deal. So he devised a program under a wonderful cover name. It was called the LAVP, the Lot Ammunition Verification Program, which was to fly real A-10s with real cannons and real ammunition and shoot them at real Soviet tanks. And he scoured up money out of the most improbable places. He got a lot of stuff for free just by kind of horse trading. This is the kind of thing that fighter pilots and fighter maintenance people are really good at, is this kind of black market kind of wheeling and dealing. He found somebody in the intelligence community who was importing tanks, Soviet tanks under very high classification, because nobody wanted to reveal who we were buying them from, but there were various satellite nations who had Soviet tanks, and who'd have a general that could be bribed, and you could buy some tanks from him, right? And it turned out this organization was so effective that they were getting far more tanks than anybody needed in fact they didn't know what to do with them and somehow he wangled an authorization, probably illegally, to get a bunch of these tanks and then he got a bunch of cast-off M48 army tanks that they no longer wanted he assembled the fifth largest tank army in the world. He had close to 400 tanks out in the desert in Nevada. He'd even wangled some marine maintenance battalion, somehow he got next to them, to fix his tanks because he said these tanks have to be loaded with ammunition, they have to have fuel in them, they have to have oil in them, and they have to have engines that can run, right? Otherwise, they're not real targets because of the issue of fire. Fire is so important, you fire at some dead tank, you don't know whether you're going to light it on fire or not. So out in the desert, outside Nellis Air Force Base, he assembled the fifth largest tank army in the world for live A-10s to come in and shoot at. We learned so much from that program. The first thing we learned was that if we had sent the cannon to combat with this approved ammunition and everything, it would have failed the first day of combat, because there were some real problems with, first of all, the gun gases were in fact obscuring the vision of the pilot. Secondly, they were causing the engine to fail. There was such huge gun gas being developed out at the muzzle, it was blowing straight back into the engines behind the cockpit. They were actually causing engines to shut down, to have compressor stalls, and all this kind of thing. But once you had made your live firing passes, the very first one, the problems were real obvious. He got on it, he changed the formulation of the propellant a little to reduce the smoke, they got a different deflector for the muzzle gases so that the gases wouldn't go into the engine and thank God we're able to solve those problems but only because we've had that fifth largest tank army to shoot at. And by the way, he installed cameras inside the tanks so you could see the inside effects. They counted up kills very meticulously and by the way fixed the tanks again and shot at them again and we found out the cannon was devastatingly lethal. lethal, much more lethal than any anti-tank weapon available up to that time, much more lethal than the computer models had predicted, because the fire was so devastating that we were getting like tank kills of well over 60% per pass, which was astonishing. The upshot was that this really brilliant, mostly illegal, terrifically opposed program, saved the whole A-10. And by the way, its after-effects still exist today, because out of that, the military reform movement of which I was a part, realized the importance of live fire testing, of testing at real targets with real ammunition. And that became legislated as part of the operational test legislation that created the office of the operational test and evaluation director Who exists to this day who oversees all that he has a special responsibility in the legislation For seeing that every vehicle platform ship airplane that carries American Military people is tested with live enemy ammunition to make sure the people inside can survive. If it wasn't for Dilger's stolen tank army, the entire A-10 program would have been a failure and we would have never had the live-fire testing that we have today, demanded by the Congress. Aviation, the art of aeronautics, began with the dreamers, inventors and daredevils who dared to defy gravity. The journey of aviation was nurtured by pioneers like the Wright brothers, whose first flight marked a historic milestone. The role of aircrafts in world wars was groundbreaking, dramatically changing warfare strategies. This initiated a technological evolution in aviation, transforming the simplistic wings of a biplane into the thunderous roar of jet engines. Let's journey through the ages of aviation. Behind every great aircraft there were great minds. These visionaries, like Sir Frank Whittle, the genius behind the SR-71 Blackbird. His designs combined speed, stealth and power, crafting machines that dominated the heavens. The contributions of these pioneers have left an indelible mark on the canvas of aviation, shaping the course of history and inspiring generations of engineers and aviators. Each epoch in aviation history gave birth to extraordinary aircrafts, each with their own unique features and roles. The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was a marvel of speed and stealth. The F-105 Thunderchief, a supersonic fighter bomber, was vital in the Vietnam War. The P-51 Mustang, a long-range fighter, was critical in World War II. The P-47 Thunderbolt, a heavyweight fighter, was used extensively in the same war. The A-10 Thunderbolt II, the Warthog, is a close air support icon. The Messerschmitt ME-262 marked a leap forward in aviation technology. Each of these game changers were instrumental in their eras and their legacies still resonate today. Beyond the game changers, there are those that have transcended their practical roles to become icons. The Concorde was not just an aircraft, it was a supersonic symbol of luxury and speed. The B-52 Stratofortress, a strategic bomber, is an icon of power and resilience. These magnificent machines and others like them have become much more than just aircrafts. They are enduring icons that encapsulate the audacious spirit, the relentless innovation and the boundless ambition that define the world of aviation. For more amazing aerial footage and to join us in this incredible journey, check out the Dronescapes YouTube channel. If you enjoyed this video, please remember to like and subscribe. And as always, thank you for watching. So, So, you
