THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Which is why those that fly and those that rely on the A-10 Warthog for their safety are demanding that the US military keep it. On the other hand those brass assed REMFs in the Pentagon who want to retire and get some of that F-35 money flowing to the defense contractors are pushing to replace it with the F-35 which is fast, sexy looking and not much good for any mission assigned it.

The trust of several generations of soldiers and airmen in the A-10, known as the Warthog for its snout-like nose, has propelled opposition to the Pentagon’s plan to retire all 283 of the 1970s-era planes to save $4.2 billion over five years in a time of budget cuts.

The voices of combat veterans have added an extra edge to the hometown lobbying that makes it hard to kill any major weapons program, from tanks the military no longer wants to the troubled new Littoral Combat Ship.

The Defense Department proposal, part of the fiscal 2015 budget request sent to Congress in March, has even become the centerpiece of a political campaign in Arizona, where a former A-10 pilot is running for a U.S. House seat against an incumbent she says hasn’t done enough to save the plane. A base in the district is home to the biggest fleet of A-10s, and pilots are trained to fly them there.

The effort to save the A-10 may be a long shot. The House Armed Services Committee plans to include language tomorrow in its version of the annual defense policy measure allowing the Pentagon to retire the planes so long as it keeps them in good condition to fly if needed, according to draft legislation released by the panel.

“For the sake of every American who has been in a firefight, I want to save this plane,” Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon, the California Republican who heads the committee, said in remarks prepared for a speech in Washington today. “But I just can’t do it. Not at these budget levels. The money simply isn’t there.”

Top Army officers make clear that they and their troops would miss the protection the A-10 has long provided.

“It’s a game-changer,” General John F. Campbell, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said at a Senate hearing on March 26. “It’s ugly, it’s loud, but when it comes in and you hear that ‘bvvrr,’ it just makes a difference.”

The Air Force maintains that retiring the A-10 won’t put soldiers’ lives at greater risk. The service says newer, faster aircraft -- such as the F-16, the F-15E, bombers and, eventually, the new F-35 fighter from Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) -- can perform the A-10’s principal mission of “close air support,” striking targets on the ground to help soldiers in a land battle.

“The mission will continue,” General Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, said at an April 10 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’ll figure out how to do it better than it’s ever been done before with the platforms we have.”

First things first, Buck McKeon is full of shit, if he said the plane stays, it would stay but that Lock-Mart money is too good to refuse. And General Walsh is too if he believes even one word of what he said. He just wants that Lock-Mart job when he hangs up his brass. But the A-10 is an anomaly, a single purpose design that actually does a great job of supporting the "cannon fodder". But the current military is too quick to ignore the troops and too dependent on money for it to last much longer.