Fairchild Republic's A-10 Warthog

By Louis Case

Forty miles from where I'm writing this, on a stretch of Long Island that's mostly strip malls and split level houses now, there used to be a factory. Fairchild Republic built the A-10 Warthog in Farmingdale, New York, from 1972 to 1984, and at its peak the plant employed about 7,500 people.

On March 13, 1987, after the Air Force canceled a jet trainer contract the company was counting on, Fairchild Republic closed its doors for good. The site was sold to a mall developer the following year. Most of the workers who didn't retire went to Grumman, which itself would spend the next few decades being absorbed into what is now Northrop Grumman, one of five prime contractors left standing in an industry that used to have dozens.

I mention this because it matters more than the trivia value suggests.

Fairchild Republic, the company that built America's most beloved close air support aircraft does not exist anymore. There is no factory to call. When people talk about restarting the A-10 line as though it were a matter of flipping a switch, they are imagining an industrial base that Reagan era defense consolidation and a canceled trainer contract killed off before most of today's Air Force pilots were born.

This is what decades of merger, acquisition, and government contract dependency does to a manufacturing base. It doesn't just shrink. It disappears, and it takes the tooling, the workforce, and the institutional memory with it.

According to an announcement from Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink in April 2026, a retirement timeline that had, at various points, promised to ground the last A-10 by 2026, 2027, or 2029 was reversed. The Warthog will fly until at least 2030 now. The reason wasn't sentiment.

Based on reporting from Air and Space Forces Magazine and Military Times, the extension followed Operation Epic Fury, the air campaign over Iran, where A-10s flew close air support over the Strait of Hormuz, engaged fast attack boats and drone swarms with the GAU-8 cannon, and took part in the rescue of two downed F-15E crewmembers.

One Warthog was lost in that mission. The pilot survived.

That single data point contains the whole argument here.

I should say plainly, before going further, that I am about as big a fan of this airplane as it is possible to be. There is no other aircraft in the American inventory that inspires the kind of loyalty the Warthog does, from the pilots who fly it to the grunts on the ground who have heard the GAU-8 open up overhead and known, in that instant, that someone upstairs was on their side.

Everything that follows is written by someone who wants this airplane to keep flying, not someone looking for a reason to retire it.

Fairchild Republic originally built 716 A-10s.

According to FY 2026 Air Force budget documents, roughly 162 remain in service, with Congress capping further divestment at no fewer than 103 through the end of the fiscal year and a staged drawdown now planned out to 2030.

Based on reports from Air and Space Forces Magazine, the service has already stopped training new A-10 pilots, closed the depot line that overhauls the airframes, and built its last replacement engine.

Every Warthog lost from here forward, is lost permanently. Not eventually replaceable at higher cost. Lost permanently permanently. The factory closed in 1987 and nobody is reopening it.

Set that scarcity against what the airframe is actually being asked to do now, and something doesn't add up. Close air support, in the textbook sense, means direct support of troops in contact. But the missions generating headlines in 2025 and 2026, hunting Shahed type drones with jury rigged APKWS II laser guided rockets, engaging small boat swarms, flying maritime interdiction over a contested strait, are something closer to counter UAS and force protection. The vocabulary hasn't caught up to the mission set, and the Air Force is using its scarcest, least replaceable platform to do a job that ought to belong to something built to be lost without anyone losing sleep over it.

To be fair to the airframe, it earns some of this confidence honestly. Based on the aircraft's published design specifications, low wing loading and a straight wing layout built around slow, tight, low altitude maneuvering give the A-10 a turn radius that outclasses almost anything else in the inventory at that end of the speed envelope.

Against a target class like Shahed type drones and small attack boats, which aren't fast so much as numerous and hard to track, the idea that a Warthog can run circles around a loitering munition or a drone swarm and hold it in the gun's envelope is a reasonable read of the airframe's strengths. However, it's a much harder case against an actual inbound missile. Closing speeds there are an order of magnitude beyond anything a subsonic straight wing attack jet can out turn, so the honest version of the claim is drones and slow proximate threats, not missiles in general.

The airframe is built to back that maneuverability up with payload. According to Air Force fact sheets, eleven hardpoints, eight under the wings and three under the fuselage, carry up to 16,000 pounds of ordnance, and the wing stations are mirrored four pylons to port, four to starboard, so a loadout of Sidewinders, Mavericks, or rocket pods can be balanced symmetrically across either side without favoring one wing over the other. That modularity is also literal. Every one of the eleven pylons can be pulled to cut weight and drag when the mission doesn't call for it, which is part of what lets the same airframe flex between a heavy CAS loadout and a lighter, faster counter drone configuration without touching the hardware design.

None of that changes the arithmetic. A Shahed 136 costs somewhere in the low tens of thousands of dollars, based on widely reported unit cost estimates. An airframe that Fairchild Republic can no longer build at any price is being sent up to shoot them down. Successfully, but at a ratio that makes no economic sense at scale, and at a risk that makes no strategic sense given how few of them are left. The Warthog's April crash during that rescue mission, confirmed in the same Air Force reporting, is the reminder that successfully doesn't mean without cost. When the asset being risked can't be rebuilt, every sortie is a bet against a stockpile that will never be replenished.

There's a second layer to this that gets less attention: the A-10 has never been a self contained sensor platform. It depends on external ISR and targeting, AWACS, JTAC on the ground, satellite links, to find and prosecute the targets its cannon and rockets ultimately service. That dependency is fine in a permissive environment. It's a liability in exactly the contested, GPS degraded, EW saturated airspace that a serious drone and swarm threat implies. The platforms best suited to that fight are the ones that don't need a clean satellite link to know where they are, the ones using magnetometer, inertial, or terrain relative navigation as a hedge against jamming and spoofing, the same techniques increasingly standard on the small unmanned systems the A-10 is now being sent to kill.

None of this is an argument against the A-10. It's an argument about what should be standing between the A-10 and the threat. A distributed layer of cheap, attritable, GPS independent counter UAS platforms, sensor first, expendable by design, built to absorb the attrition that a fifty year old, unreplaceable airframe shouldn't have to, is the piece that's missing. Let the drones and swarm boats burn through platforms that were built to be burned through. Save the cannon, and the pilot, for what only the cannon and the pilot can do.

Nobody has built that layer yet, but the pieces are starting to show up, and interestingly, not from the primes that killed Fairchild Republic's competitors and consolidated the industry into the five companies we're now stuck depending on. No program today fields a literal unmanned A-10, a rugged, gun armed, straight wing loiterer built to soak up drone and swarm boat attrition the way the Warthog itself absorbed ground fire over Iraq and Afghanistan. What exists instead, based on public reporting and Anduril's own program disclosures, is a set of components that, assembled differently, start to look like one.

The closest thing to a miniaturized version of the running circles argument is already fielded: Anduril's Roadrunner-M. According to company and defense press reporting, it's a twin turbojet, VTOL interceptor about five feet long, small enough for one person to carry, that launches vertically, loiters, and either destroys a drone or cruise missile with a high explosive warhead, or, if the target turns out not to be a threat, flies back and lands itself for reuse. The Pentagon placed a $250 million order for 500 of them in 2024, and it has since gone into large scale production for SOCOM and the Navy. Where the A-10 is a fifty year old, unreplaceable airframe risked against a threat that costs a fraction of the sortie, Roadrunner-M inverts that math entirely. Reusable if it doesn't need to expend itself, and according to Anduril's own figures, cheap enough that even a one way intercept still comes out ahead of the interceptor missile it's replacing.

The closer analog to an unmanned gunship, something that carries the rockets and missiles instead of just the intercept warhead, is Anduril's Thunder, an autonomous attack rotorcraft developed with Archer Aviation and unveiled in July 2026. Based on the company's own briefings, Thunder is explicitly designed around affordable mass: modular payload bays that can carry Hellfire or JAGM missiles, dozens of 70mm rockets, or a dedicated nose module of counter drone interceptors, built cheaply enough that losing one doesn't gut a unit's combat power the way losing a crewed Apache would. It's a tilt rotor, not a straight wing jet, so it isn't a Warthog analog in airframe, but the mission logic, loitering fire support, force protection, flexible between missile carrier and drone hunter roles depending on the sortie, is the same logic argued for here. As of this writing it hasn't flown. Anduril is targeting a first flight in 2027.

The fixed wing evidence is more indirect. Anduril's FQ-44A Fury, selected for U.S. Air Force production in June 2026 alongside General Atomics' FQ-42A, is built for air to air work. It has flown alongside F-35s and fired a live AMRAAM, not close air support. But according to company statements, Anduril is already running integration and fit checks on 500 pound guided bombs, Small Diameter Bombs, rocket pods, and its own Barracuda cruise missiles for the same airframe, and the company took Fury from a napkin sketch to first flight in under two years using a purpose built factory. None of that makes Fury an A-10 replacement. It does mean the production infrastructure and airframe to payload pipeline that a genuine unmanned CAS aircraft would need already exists and is running, if anyone specs the mission.

Put together, that's the shape of the gap: a reusable, GPS independent intercept layer that exists today, a rocket and missile carrying loitering platform that's flying next year, and a fixed wing attritable production line that's proven it can move fast, but no single program stitching those into a straight wing, sensor first, gun or rocket armed loiterer built explicitly to eat the attrition an A-10 shouldn't have to. That's the specific gap the A-11 Pacificatore concept is aimed at. Not a fast jet with a missile bolted on, but the A-10's slow and tough philosophy: wood or composite airframe for RF transparency, modular sensor and rocket payload, GPS denied navigation as the default rather than the backup, built from the start to be the thing that gets shot at instead of the pilot.

One technical correction is worth making here, since the distinction matters for anyone designing toward this gap. Fly by wire, the control scheme the A-10 and most modern combat aircraft use, refers to electrical signals over copper wire. It is not, itself, a fiber optic system. The fiber optic variant, fly by light, is a separate and much rarer approach, adopted specifically where EMP and EMI hardening matter more than the marginal weight and interference advantages are worth. For a platform meant to operate in a jammed, contested, drone saturated environment, that hardening consideration isn't cosmetic. It's a design decision with real consequences for survivability, and one worth getting the terminology right on before it goes anywhere near a proposal.

The A-10's 2026 reprieve is good news for the people it's protecting this year. It shouldn't be mistaken for a solution. It's a fifty year old, non renewable asset being spent against a threat that was purpose built to be cheap, kept flying by a fleet number that keeps shrinking and a company that stopped existing before most of its current pilots were born. The fix isn't retiring the Warthog faster or slower. It's building the attritable layer that should have been absorbing this fight in the first place, so that the next time an aircrew is orbiting over a contested strait, the airframe doing the dying is one that can be replaced by Friday, not one that Fairchild Republic stopped making in 1984.

If you want to see one of these airplanes in person rather than take my word for any of this, you do not have to travel far if you are on Long Island. The Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, built on part of the old Mitchel Air Force Base and standing on ground that Republic Aviation and Grumman once called home, has a full size, early production A-10A on permanent display in its Hangar Two Jet Gallery, on loan from the National Museum of the United States Air Force. This particular airframe, serial number 76-0535, entered service in December 1977, flew with the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing out of Myrtle Beach and later with the 45th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Grissom Air Force Base, and now wears the markings of Captain Michael Baltzer of Albertson, Long Island, who flew 33 A-10 combat missions out of a base near Dhahran during the Gulf War in 1991. It is parked a short walk from an F-14 Tomcat and an A-6 Intruder, both built minutes away from where the museum now stands.

The museum is located at Charles Lindbergh Boulevard, Garden City, NY 11530, on Nassau County's Museum Row next to Nassau Community College. As of this writing it is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm and closed Mondays, though hours shift around holidays and occasional private events, so it is worth checking cradleofaviation.org or calling (516) 572-4111 before making the trip. Free parking is available on site, and the N16 bus route stops almost directly in front of the building for anyone coming without a car.

References

1. Losey, Stephen. "Air Force extends 3 A-10 squadrons, each expected to keep 18 Warthogs." Military Times, April 21, 2026. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/04/20/us-air-force-extends-a-10-warthog-through-2030/
2. "Air Force Delays A-10 Retirement Until 2030." Air and Space Forces Magazine, April 21, 2026. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-delays-a-10-retirement-until-2030/
3. "We Were Within Inches of the A-10 Warthog and Now Get Why She Can't Be Retired." 19FortyFive, April 22, 2026. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/we-were-within-inches-of-the-a-10-warthog-and-now-get-why-she-cant-be-retired/
4. "The US Air Force Extended the A-10 to 2030 After It Closed the Depot, the Pilot School and the Engine Line." 19FortyFive, August 1, 2026. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/07/the-us-air-force-extended-the-a-10-to-2030-after-it-closed-the-depot-the-pilot-school-and-the-engine-line/
5. "The US Air Force Retired Its Last A-10 Warthog From South Korea: Here's What Fills The Gap." Simple Flying, June 16, 2026. https://simpleflying.com/usaf-retired-last-a-10-warthod-what-fills-gap/
6. "The Aircraft The US Air Force Says Will Replace The A-10 Warthog, But Here's Why Critics Say It Can't." Simple Flying, September 2026. https://simpleflying.com/aircraft-us-air-force-says-replace-a-10-warthog-why-critics-say-cant/
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17. "Thunderstruck: Anduril unveils autonomous attack rotorcraft." Defense News, July 20, 2026. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2026/07/20/thunderstruck-anduril-unveils-autonomous-attack-rotorcraft/
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19. "Anduril's YFQ-44A Fury CCA Has Flown Alongside F-35s." The War Zone, September 2026. https://www.twz.com/air/andurils-yfq-44a-fury-cca-has-flown-alongside-f-35s
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