It’s undoubtedly one of the greatest warplanes in America’s otherwise declining, unaffordable, and nigh-unmanageable warplane fleet. The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II—more commonly known as the A-10 Warthog—is a Close-Air Support (CAS) warplane that first flew for the United States Air Force in 1977. 

But the Warthog is so much more than just a CAS bird. It is a full-blown aerial tank—a personnel killer that can loiter over battlefields for protracted periods of time, protecting U.S. servicemen engaged in intense ground combat. 

That’s because the A-10 is built around a massive 30mm GAU-8 Avenger cannon that puts lethality and endurance over speed or stealth. Born out of the hard lessons learned from the Vietnam War, when fast jets like the third-generation F-4 Phantom II struggled to deliver precise, low-altitude strikes against entrenched North Vietnamese forces, the Air Force launched the A-X (Attack Experimental) program to develop a dedicated ground-attack warplane. 

Fairchild Republic’s design beat out Northrop’s YA-9 in a 1972 fly-off, and the first A-10s rolled out in 1975, entering service two years later. Fairchild Republic ceased to exist in 1984, and in 1987, Northrop (today Northrop Grumman) took over the production line. 

The A-10 missed the end of the Vietnam War by two years. But its service would redefine the way the United States Air Force did CAS mission sets for decades. The Warthog’s combat debut took place during the Gulf War in 1991, where it would go on to fly 8,100 sorties and destroy over 900 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 Iraqi military vehicles, and 1,200 artillery pieces.

To put that in perspective, in 1991, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army

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