🔷 R.I.P A-10

A-10
Gone in a Year

This week, the Pentagon (finally) released its formal FY26 defense budget request. In that release was a new revelation: the Air Force is accelerating its divestment of the venerable A-10 Warthog.

What

The current 162-jet fleet is already on the path for divestment in 2028, the Air Force wants to do it all by next year—a whopping 2 years early.

The news is included in the budget request because the Air Force is requesting $57M to facilitate the 2026 divestment, with the hope that it will result in savings in 2027 and 2028.

So What

Setting aside the entire A-10 divestment-without-a-suitable-replacement discussion, there are a number of second-order effects this could set in motion.

People

First, where will all those people go? Using pilots as an example, most units are manned at a roughly 1.5:1 pilot-to-aircraft ratio. That translates to approximately 240 A-10 pilots who will lose their ride in the next 12 months.

That means they either switch to a non-flying job or get trained in a new aircraft via an aircraft transition course.

While we don’t have exact figures, we can assure you there are not 240 extra transition course slots sitting empty throughout the Air Force.

And don’t forget the Air Force has a pilot crisis, so non-flying jobs seem like a non-starter.

It will be interesting to see the Air Force’s plan to keep these 240 pilots…piloting.

Once they solve for this, run the same drill for the aircraft maintainers (another quiet crisis that doesn’t get enough attention).

GFM

Although the A-10 divestment was scheduled to occur in 2028, doing this 2 years early is going to blow a massive hole in an already rickety Global Force Management (GFM) pool.

GFM is the process that the Pentagon uses to source units to fill requests, and it’s already running empty on Air Force assets due to two factors: 1) a rapidly shrinking Air Force, and 2) an insatiable demand for Air Force resources.

There is more demand than Air Force to fill that demand.

Ironically, GFM is partially to blame for why the Air Force has been shrinking—there has been no real global force management.

Aircraft have been deployed constantly over the past 30+ years and have had their lives flown out of them without any consideration for the consequences.

Why: the Pentagon’s provider-user dynamic is such that the requester for forces (the regional combatant commands) do not have to think about global strategy, force structure, or any consequence of their requests.

This unchecked, insatiable appetite wasn’t part of the plan when the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 went into effect, but rather an unintended byproduct of its coupling with the post-Cold War deployment tempo.

9/11 and Iraq threw fuel on that fire. Syria and Iran have made it a 5-alarm fire.

With 162 fewer aircraft to support global demands, those requests either go unfilled (unlikely) or put more stress on a brittle fighter force, creating a death spiral of readiness and retention across the F-15, F-16, F-22, and F-35 communities.

And it gets worse: The Air Force isn’t even buying enough aircraft, even without this 162-jet divestment.

Now What

The A-10 Warthog has been the go-to workhorse for the past 30 years.

It would be poetic if its final gift to the warfighter were that its divestment crumbled GFM, initiating a groundswell movement for Goldwater Nichols reform to revisit the current provider-user paradigm that has arguably destroyed more aircraft and morale in the past 20 years than anything we can think of.

You started this section reading about the A-10 and ended up learning about policy wonkiness that matters—you’re welcome.

In That Number

$961.6 billion

The Pentagon formally unveiled a $961.6 billion budget request for fiscal year 2026.

This top-line budget request relies heavily on $113B in the $150 billion ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ that’s currently in the reconciliation process in Congress. Expect significant adjustments and movement this week as Congress attempts to pass it before the July 4th holiday.

TRIVIA

The X-15 was a hypersonic rocket-powered experimental aircraft that set speed and altitude records in the 1960s.

On June 29, 1965, Air Force Captain Joe Engle flew the X-15 into the history books. What milestone did he achieve during this flight?

A) broke the hypersonic barrier
B) flew to space
C) first coast-to-coast suborbital flight

On the Radar

What's after MOP? Last week showcased 7 B-2s employing the first combat use of the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) in strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. A press conference later in the week revealed that the GBU-57 was explicitly created to attack Iran’s Fordow facility and that the effort began in 2009. The mission employed 14 GBU-57s, a large portion of the ~20 or so bombs known to exist, but there are other targets being monitored. Cue: The Next Generation Penetrator (NGP) program.

• The Merge's Take: From the beginning (circa 2009), MOP was always intended to be a gap-filler until NGP could be developed, but MOP became the de facto solution, and NGP was never prioritized (or resourced) to make it happen. Now that Operational Midnight Hammer has expended 69% of all known MOPs, keep an eye on the NGP happenings so the Air Force can continue to hold Hardened and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs) at risk into the 2030s. Maybe it will be a rocket-boosted 5,000-lb GBU-72?

UK F-35As. The UK announced plans to buy 12 F-35As this week, a surprising move given its F-35 plan only consisted of F-35B variants—they operate 38, are expanding to 48, and may buy up to 138. Unlike the B variant, the F-35A is designed to be nuclear-capable, setting the conditions for the UK to re-enter NATO’s dual-capable aircraft nuclear mission (they left the program in 1998).

• The Merge's Take: Buying F-35A variants may end up getting them back into the nuclear mission, but it’s also a very near-term pragmatic move. The 12 F-35As are being purchased in place of 12 F-35Bs in the upcoming 27-jet block buy, resulting in a 25% cost saving per jet. What the F-35As will really do, per the Royal Air Force: student pilot training, since they are cheaper to operate and carry more fuel. Here’s your meme.

 F-15EX. The Air Force’s latest plan is a 129-jet fleet.

• The Merge’s Take: More is better, but ~200 is where fighter fleet unit economics start to make sense. Think of the 281 A-10s, 218 F-15Es, and 186 F-22s that operated for a generation (R.I.P A-10).

• The Merge’s Spicy Take: Don’t put too much stock in 129. If there's one thing the Air Force can be counted on, it’s that it will change its F-15EX plan again next year. Don’t believe us, though, believe the data:

They Said It

“They’ve had a 10-year period of three ships in the Gulf of Aden. They’re there for counter-piracy, but they haven’t caught a single pirate. They’ve turned a complete blind eye to the years of flow of weapons into the Houthis that have ended up getting shot at Americans. I think that’s unacceptable.”

— Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, calling out China in the Middle East

Knowledge Bombs

• Platform Aerospace won a $30M Pentagon contract to produce its Vanilla ISR drone (flies for >8 days)

• The Air Force terminated its E-7 Wedgetail program due to cost and survivability concerns

• Ask Sage won a $10M deal to provide its LLM-agnostic GenAI platform for the Army

• Ukraine is going to start exporting its military tech to European allies

• Beacon AI completed its AI pilot assistance system AFWERX test flight campaign

• The MDA is eyeing the AIM-174B Gunslinger for air-to-air intercepts of hypersonic threats

• Bell Textron delivered the first MV-75 FLRAA virtual prototypes to the Army

• DARPA’s ANCILLARY shipboard drone program has a spin-off called EVADE that will rapidly field the demonstrators

• AV announced that its ANCILLARY Wildcat drone achieved key flight test milestones supporting EVADE (see above)

• South Korea is flight testing a domestic cruise missile launched from an FA-50 fighter

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ANSWER
B) Joe Engle reached 280,000 feet (53 miles) at nearly Mach 5. Surpassing the Air Force's 50-mile definition of space, he received military astronaut wings, making him the third Air Force astronaut. He later went on to fly two missions as a Space Shuttle commander.