The final A-10C Thunderbolt II ever to be flown in combat by a United States Air Force pilot is scheduled to land at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona at 14:30 local time, marking the end of a 50-year era of close air support that defined American ground combat doctrine. The aircraft, tail number 81-0968, is being flown by Colonel Marcus Webb, the last commander of the 355th Wing, in a ceremonial transfer flight from the boneyard at Davis-Monthan, where the remaining airframes await dismantlement. The flight comes hours after the Pentagon confirmed the accelerated divestment of the final 12 Warthogs, a decision that has ignited a furious debate among ground commanders, defense analysts, and veterans of the Global War on Terror, who argue the aircraft’s unique ability to loiter, absorb battle damage, and deliver precision 30mm fire in contested, low-ceiling environments remains irreplaceable by any platform in the current inventory.
The silence on the flight line is broken by a sound that has haunted America’s adversaries for half a century. It begins as a distant, guttural growl, the low-frequency rumble of two turbofan engines spooling up against the desert heat. As the aircraft descends from the eastern horizon, the noise transforms into the unmistakable, tearing brrrrt of the GAU-8/A Avenger cannon, fired in a three-second salute into the empty range complex north of the runway.
The the smoke clears, the silver and gray airframe, its titanium bathtub cockpit glinting in the harsh Arizona sun, touches down with a chirp of rubber. The canopy opens, and Colonel Webb, 56, removes his helmet, revealing gray hair cropped short, and a face etched with the lines of 34 years of service. He does not wave to the assembled crowd of several hundred, consisting of active duty pilots, retired maintainers, Army JTACs, and families.
He sits in the cockpit for a full minute, hands resting on the throttle and stick, before climbing down the ladder with deliberate slowness. He salutes the ground crew chief, a technical sergeant who was not born when Webb flew his first combat sortie over Afghanistan in 2015. Then he turns to the crowd, and the ceremony begins.
This moment, however, is not merely a farewell to a beloved aircraft. It is the culmination of a career that mirrors the entire lifecycle of the Warthog community, a journey from raw, 22-year-old second lieutenant to two-star general, each rank defined not by the insignia on the collar but by the weight of decisions made at 300 knots and 200 feet above the ground. The story of the A-10 is the story of the men and women who flew it, and their ranks tell that story better than any maintenance log or combat report
The journey begins not with a choice, but with a selection. At 22, a second lieutenant, O-1, fresh from ROTC at the University of Arizona, you do not pick the A-10. The aircraft picks you.
After 52 weeks of undergraduate pilot training at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi, where the attrition rate hovers near 30 percent and classmates vanish overnight after failed check rides, you receive your assignment based on class ranking, instructor recommendations, and a preference sheet submitted weeks earlier. The A-10 Thunderbolt II, based at Davis-Monthan, is your destination. Your father, a former Army Huey pilot, pins your wings on in the base auditorium, saying nothing, because nothing needs to be said.
You are a second lieutenant with wings, orders, and six months of mission qualification training ahead of you. The gold bar is the beginning, not the end
The first lieutenant, O-2, at 24, promotes automatically, a silver bar replacing gold, a handshake in the squadron hallway, and 20 minutes later, you are back in the planning room. But something has changed. You have completed the A-10C course, run by the 357th Fighter Squadron, and you are now a fully qualified combat pilot, a basic wingman assigned to the 74th Fighter Squadron at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia.
You are learning what the Warthog actually is. It is not a fighter jet in the traditional sense. It cruises at 340 mph, slower than a commercial airliner.
Its airframe, wide and angular, is built around a single purpose. The titanium armor surrounding the cockpit weighs nearly 1,200 pounds. The aircraft was designed to absorb damage, not avoid it.
The GAU-8/A Avenger, a 30mm, seven-barreled cannon capable of firing 3,900 rounds per minute, sits in the nose, its center barrel perfectly aligned with the aircraft’s centerline, forcing engineers to offset the nose landing gear. Everything followed the gun. As a first lieutenant, your job is narrow.
You are number two. You support the flight lead, protect the formation, execute assigned tasks, and do not become a problem. Your first deployment is to Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, in 2015.
The formal combat mission ended in 2014, but the war did not. Your flight lead, Captain Dana Ostrowski, briefs once, assumes you are prepared. Your first close air support mission is a show of force over Helmand province, where a convoy has been ambushed.
No weapons release authorized. You make low, fast passes to break up the attack. The JTAC, Staff Sergeant Cortez, gives you the nine-line brief in under 40 seconds.
You fly four passes. The radio goes quiet. Then, his voice returns.
Threat dispersed. Good effect. Thanks, Hog.
At 10,000 feet above the Helmand River Valley, you understand what the aircraft is for. It is a radio call away from someone about to die. And it shows up.
You fly 47 sorties that deployment. You come home quieter. Ostrowski puts your name in for early flight lead upgrade, writing in her evaluation that you have sound judgment and do not act beyond your authority.
For a first lieutenant, she writes, that is exactly right
The captain, O-3, at 26, promotes at four years of service, two silver bars, better donuts at the ceremony. But the rank doesn’t change you. The upgrade does.
You complete flight lead qualification, learning that a decision that produced the right outcome can still be the wrong decision, and a flight lead must know the difference. Your second deployment, 2017, Bagram, you lead two-ship formations on armed overwatch. One mission stands alone.
A patrol in Kunar province takes casualties from a machine gun position dug into a ridgeline. Weather is at 1,200 feet. You are below the clouds, visible to anything on the ground.
Friendly forces are 80 meters from the target. You roll in from the east, keeping the bullet path clear, and put the gun on the ridgeline. The JTAC, Sergeant Whitfield, comes up.
Good hits. Threat suppressed. We’re moving.
Back at the squadron, you review the gun camera footage three times. The geometry was correct. The shot was clean.
You watch it a fourth time anyway. That is what captains carry that lieutenants don’t yet understand. The authority to make the call is inseparable from the permanence of having made it.
You complete squadron officer school at Maxwell AFB, learning leadership theory, communication, and teamwork under pressure, learning to tell what matters from what is theater. At eight years of service, your name goes to the major promotion board
The major, O-4, at 32, is where the career bifurcates. The promotion is competitive, a board reviewing 10 years of performance reports, deployments, evaluations, and commander comments. You are selected, gold oak leaf, and then selected for the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis AFB, Nevada.
The weapons instructor course, six months, is the most rigorous academic and tactical training the Air Force offers. It is not a course in flying better. It is a course in thinking better.
Planning complex multi-domain missions, executing them under dynamic conditions, and debriefing them with total honesty, especially the parts where you were wrong. Your evaluator, Lieutenant Colonel Ashworth, a former F-16 pilot, grades not on whether your answers are right, but on whether you understand which questions you haven’t asked yet. You fail your first major academic brief.
You sit with it two days. You find what went wrong yourself. You brief again.
You pass. Ashworth says nothing about the first one. You graduate, earning the weapon school patch, worn on the left shoulder, recognized across the fighter community.
You return to the 74th Fighter Squadron as squadron weapons officer. You write the tactics manuals, design the training syllabus, certify pilots as flight leads. You are the standard every pilot is measured against.
You are also, for the first time, seeing things your rank didn’t let you see before. The A-10 fleet is aging. Average airframe age approaching 40 years.
Parts that used to arrive in a week now take months. You schedule a training event and two jets are grounded before it flies. You reschedule, then reschedule again.
You attend a Pentagon briefing on the A-10 transition to F-35A. You raise your hand. You note that the F-35 cannot replicate the Warthog’s loiter time, low-altitude survivability, or weapons payload in a close air support profile.
You note that CAS is not the same mission as air superiority. The briefer thanks you for your input. The slide doesn’t change.
You go back and make sure every pilot in the squadron knows exactly what the aircraft can do, because the people in that room don’t fly it. You do
The staff tour, still a major, O-4, at 35, is required for field grade officers. Career broadening, it is called. You leave the flight line and go to Air Combat Command staff at Langley AFB, Virginia, working on close air support requirements and employment doctrine.
You translate what happens on the flight line into documents that inform policy. You discover that staff work doesn’t move faster because you’re right. It moves at the same speed regardless.
Your job is to still be standing when it finishes. You co-author a joint capabilities brief with an Army Lieutenant Colonel named Vasquez, a former JTAC with two Iraq rotations and one in Afghanistan, more time calling in A-10s than you’ve spent flying them. You present to a two-star general.
He says it is well done. The retirement timeline moves forward unchanged. You maintain flight currency, driving to the flight line to fly minimum hours with the First Fighter Wing.
The cockpit feels the same. The staff work feels different from inside it. The paperwork becomes real again.
The requirements briefings become real again. At 16 years of service, your name goes to the Lieutenant Colonel promotion board
The Lieutenant Colonel, O-5, at 38, silver oak leaf, is the rank at which the Air Force assigns flying squadron command, not Colonel as outsiders assume. Over 90 percent of pilots who reach 20 years retire as Lieutenant Colonels. For most, this is the capstone.
You are selected to command the 23rd Fighter Squadron at Moody AFB, Georgia. Approximately 300 personnel. Pilots, maintenance crews, intelligence officers, weapons troops, schedulers, admin staff.
You are responsible for all of them. You read every pilot’s training record before your first day. Six weeks into command, a senior captain named Delgado files an incident report on himself.
During a training sortieat Avon Park Air Force Range, Florida, he exceeded a strafing altitude restriction by 200 feet. Minor. He caught it and logged it himself.
You ground him five days. You have him re-qualifythe range event. You brief the entire squadron without naming him, on why altitude restrictions are not margins to negotiate, and why habits formed in training get carried into combat.
A week later, Delgado finds you in the hallway and says, thank you. Not because he was glad to be grounded, because you treated the honest report as the correct behavior, not as the problem. Command is not about authority.
It is about creating conditions where people tell the truth when it costs them something. You deploy the squadron to Al Dhafra Air Base, UAE, in 2020, supporting counter-ISIS operations over Iraq and Syria. Rules of engagement layered.
Targets urban. Positive identification mandatory. You lead flights, mentor junior flight leads, and manage a squadron conducting combat missions from 7,000 miles away from home.
At the end of your command tour, you are rated in the top 10 percent of squadron commanders in your numbered Air Force. You are nominated for wing command and screened for colonel
The Colonel, O-6, at 44, silver eagle, is selected one in five. You pin on at 22 years of service and are assigned as commander of the 23rd Wing at Moody AFB, the same installation where you flew as a first lieutenant and commanded as a lieutenant colonel. A wing is not a squadron with more people.
It is four groups. Operations, maintenance, mission support, medical. Thousands of personnel, a budget, infrastructure, congressional relationships.
You sign the airworthiness authority for every aircraft that takes off from your runway. That is not a metaphor. It is a legal responsibility.
Two months in, you discover your maintenance reporting has been optimized for appearances. Aircraft listed as mission capable technically meet the definition, but broadly interpreted. Jets that can fly, but cannot carry the full weapons load they’d be tasked with on a real mission.
The numbers look fine. The actual capability is not what the numbers say. You change the reporting standards.
The numbers drop. You brief your two-star commander on what changed and why. He is not pleased with the readiness figures.
He is satisfied that you found it and corrected it without being asked. You testify in a closed congressional hearing on A-10 operational readiness. You bring the maintenance data, the joint capabilities brief, your own squadron records.
You tell the truth about what the aircraft can do, what it costs to sustain, and what it would cost operationally to retire it before a viable CAS replacement exists. Three months later, the A-10 retirement timeline is extended by two fiscal years. A depot maintenance contract is renewed.
A GAU-8 parts manufacturing agreement is restarted. You don’t know if your testimony changed anything. These decisions involve funding streams and interservice politics beyond your visibility.
You said what was accurate. Something moved. You hold that carefully, not as a victory, as evidence that the truth is worth saying even when you can’t measure its effect
The Brigadier General, O-7, at 50, one star, is not selected. You are nominated, vetted, and appointed. You are assigned as Director of Operations at Air Combat Command, Langley AFB, overseeing operational planning, readiness metrics, flying hour programs, and employment concepts for ACC’s fighter and attack communities, including the remaining A-10 fleet.
The A-10 retirement is no longer a debate. It is a plan with a date. The last operational A-10 squadron is scheduled to transition to F-35As by 2030.
The fleet fully divested by 2032. Congress extended the timeline twice. The budget pressure has not relented.
You have stopped arguing about the platform. You now argue about the mission. In meeting after meeting, you make the same point with different data.
The close air support mission doesn’t retire when the aircraft does. In some future conflict, unscheduled, unscripted, ground forces will be in contact. Weather below 1,000 feet, communications degraded.
The aircraft that answers that call will need to get low and slow, confirm the target visually, and make the decision from inside the threat. Not from altitude, not from standoff. If the Air Force doesn’t train pilots to do that in peacetime, they won’t be able to do it in war.
You fight for CAS training requirements inthe F-35 transition syllabus. You fight for loiter time specifications infuture attack aircraft requirements. You fight for joint training standards between successor aircraft and Army JTAC units.
You win some, you lose some. You show up to the next meeting
The Major General, O-8, at 54, two stars, is the final rank. You are assigned as Commander of 12th Air Force, based at Davis-Monthan AFB, Tucson, Arizona. Where it started.
You command multiple wings and tens of thousands of personnel spread across installations and deployments worldwide. But you are at Davis-Monthan. You know this flight line.
You attend the deactivation ceremony for the 357th Fighter Squadron, the schoolhouse that trained every A-10 pilot since the 1980s. The final class of B course graduates receives their mission qualification certificates. They will transition to other airframes within the year.
The schoolhouse is closing. You stand in the back of the room with two stars on your shoulder and you watch. You think about being 22 on this same flight line.
About Ostrowski and Cortez on the radio over Helmand. About Delgado’s honest report. About the maintenance numbers that didn’t add up.
About every meeting where you said what was accurate and hoped something moved. The hardest part of this moment is not grief. Aircraft don’t last forever.
Missions outlast them. The hardest part is the gap. There is no aircraft inthe current inventory that does exactly what the Warthog did at low altitude in bad weather over complex terrain with troops in close contact.
The F-35 is capable. It is not this. And the doctrine and training required to use it in this specific mission profile does not yet exist at the level of detail the mission demands.
You are spending the remaining years of your command making sure that gap is documented, funded, and addressed. Not with the Warthog, which is finished, but with whatever follows it and with the training standards that ensure whoever flies it understands what they are actually being asked to do. You sign the final operational orders for the last A-10 unit under your command.
You keep the pen
The last flight, at 56, is not a combat mission. It is a ceremonial transfer. Your retirement ceremony is held on the Davis-Monthan flight line inthe Arizona late afternoon heat infront of one of the last A-10Cs still inflyable condition, now assigned to static display outside the 355th Wing Headquarters.
Up close, the aircraft looks like what it is. Old. Paint faded in places.
Stress marks near the wing root from 30 years of low-altitude maneuvering. The GAU-8 barrel protruding slightly left of center from the nose. It always was.
That’s where the engineering led. Your last flight was six months ago. A sortie with a young captain from the final transition class.
Your last chance to pass on what the aircraft felt like to fly. What it asked of the pilot in its seat. You told him what Major Hollis told you on your third flight inthe B course 33 years ago.
The Warthog does not reward pilots who think speed is the answer. Accuracy is the answer. Persistence is the answer.
The willingness to make a second pass when the first one didn’t resolve it. The willingness to get low, stay low, and remain inthe fight until the fight is finished. He wrote it down.
At the ceremony, the wing commander reads your record correctly. Deployments, commands, staff tours, congressional testimony, the training standards now embedded inthe F-35 CAS syllabus. The citations are accurate, but what he says that matters most is the shortest.
He says, the soldiers on the ground always knew when a Warthog was overhead. Not because they were told, because they could hear it. That sound, low turbofan engines at altitude, and then the tearing brrrt of the cannon when it fired, was not a weapon sound.
It was a presence. It was proof that someone heard the radio call and showed up and got low enough to fight beside you. You spent your career making sure that answer always existed.
Whatever aircraft carried it. However the mission was written. Whoever was trained to fly it.
The answer has to be there. It has to show up. That’s the job.
It always was
As the crowd disperses and the sun sinks below the Santa Catalina Mountains, Colonel Webb remains standing by the aircraft, one hand resting on the intake lip. A young lieutenant, no more than 25, approaches hesitantly, holding a notebook. She asks if she can ask a question.
Webb nods. She asks, what was it like, flying it. He looks at the aircraft, then back at her.
He says, it was like being the answer to a question someone didn’t think they’d get to ask. It was loud, and hot, and it shook, and sometimes it got hit, and it kept flying. It was the difference between a radio call and a rescue.
It was the difference between waiting for help and knowing help was already overhead, waiting for the word. He pauses. He says, the aircraft is gone now.
The mission isn’t. The training isn’t. The standard isn’t.
You’re the answer now. Don’t forget what the question sounds like. He turns and walks toward the waiting staff car, leaving the lieutenant standing alone on the flight line, the silence now absolute, broken only by the wind across the empty ramp, where the last Warthog sits, silent, its cannon cold, its titanium skin still warm from the desert sun, a monument not to a machine, but to the ranks of men and women who understood that the job was never to fly the aircraft.
The job was to show up. To get low. To stay low.
To make the second pass. To be the answer. It always was
