HAC Votes To Retire The A-10

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/06/hac-votes-to-retire-the-a-10/



HAC Votes To Retire The A-10
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 10, 2014 at 12:31 PM

CAPITOL HILL: The House Appropriations Committee bucked the trend today, voting 23 to 13 to retire the beloved A-10 Warthog ground attack plane. Both the House and Senate Armed Services committees have voted to save it. While HASC and SASC are the authorizers who set defense policy, it’s the appropriators who vote the money to keep planes in the air.

“We’ve got to pay for stuff,” said Rep. Pete Visclosky, the top Democrat on HAC’s defense subcommittee, at the HAC-D mark-up this morning. By rejecting proposed cuts to popular programs like the A-10, he said, Congress is refusing to face up to hard decisions required by the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration. “Staying the course and hoping for some fiscal relief next year is wishful thinking,” Visclosky said, echoing other top defenseDemocrats like Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Carl Levin.

Both Visclosky and the chairman of HAC’s defense subcommittee, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, acknowledged the A-10 had done honorable service. Flying low and slow over the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, with a combination of firepower and armor no other aircraft can match, the Warthog has become the American infantryman’s favorite airplane, the ugly steel angel on his shoulder.

But Army leadership has deferred to the Air Force on how to handle the Close Air Support mission. Air Force leadership, for its part, has repeatedly argued that the A-10 can’t survive in future conflicts against adversaries with better anti-aircraft weapons than the Taliban — sophisticated missile technology is proliferating alarmingly around the world — and that they can’t afford a single-mission aircraft in an era of sequester-strangled budgets. HASC and SASC rejected the Air Force’s argument, but House Appropriations accepted it.