In April 2026, the US Air Force closed the training pipeline that had produced every Fairchild Republic A-10 pilot it ever fielded. The 357th Fighter Squadron graduated its last class of Thunderbolt II students at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in April. That same week, and at that same base, an A-10 flying combat search and rescue escort over Iran took enemy fire, kept flying, and helped bring a downed fighter pilot home before its own pilot was forced to eject over Kuwait.

Weeks later, the Secretary of the Air Force pushed the aircraft’s retirement date back four years, to 2030 or beyond. On its face, that looks like an underdog story: the plane the service keeps trying to kill just proved itself again, but the A-10 fleet’s average airframe age now exceeds 43 years, on a design frozen since 1973. However, the Warthog cannot be meaningfully modernized against the kind of integrated, mobile air-defense network a peer adversary like China or Russia has.

Both the Air Force and Davis-Monthan need to evolve and adapt their airframes and tactics to meet the mission of tomorrow. As the A-10 departed on July 29 after five decades, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is stepping in to take up the mission of the Warthog. Now, Davis-Monthan is transitioning to be the Air Force’s premier center of excellence for close air support and combat search and rescue.

The End Of An Era In Tucson, Arizona

Credit: US Air Force

The 357th Fighter Squadron’s final ten student pilots completed mission qualification training in mid-March 2026, capped by a close air support exercise, and graduated in a formal ceremony on April 3. Then, on July 29, a two-ship formation flown by the 355th Operations Group commander and the 357th’s squadron commander performed the last fini-flight of an A-10 that will ever touch down at Davis-Monthan, a base also known as the boneyard.

After landing, Lt. Col. Ryan Rutter, 357th Fighter Squadron commander, remarked on the bittersweet sortie alongside Lt. Col. Rodney Dwyer, 355th Operations Group commander:

“I got out of the aircraft and went over to him [Dwyer] and told him, ‘I don’t want to do this, man. I don’t want to. It’s tough, and I think a lot of it is you’ve just spent years being part of this team and flying this aircraft all over the world and building friends and relationships in the community. So, when you shut down the jet for the last time, it’s that realization that some of that will change, some of that will go away.”

As the A-10 fleet stands down, its pilots and maintenance crews are shifting directly toward fifth-generation fighter operations. The 47th Fighter Squadron is slated to receive its first batch of F-35s to kickstart local training and readiness. The base is also transferring many troops from Nellis Air Force Base to substantially increase its CSAR training and operations mission. Numerous rescue, test, and weapons units are relocating permanently, including the 58th and 66th Rescue Squadrons, the 34th Weapon Squadron, and the 855th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron.

According to Air & Space Forces magazine, the USAF also wants to reinvent the 492nd Special Operations Wing from Hurlburt Field, Florida, as a new ‘power projection wing’ after moving to the boneyard in Tucson, Arizona. The relocation will introduce the new L3Harris OA-1K Sky Raider II Armed Overwatch turboprop planes. This combination of ‘fast mover’ F-35s with the ‘low and slow’ OA-1K alongside rescue helicopters is the new fleet structure that the Air Force intends to use to replace the capability of the A-10.

The Air Force’s Divest To Invest Plan

Credit: US Air Force

Air Force leadership first sought to retire the entire A-10 fleet in the 2015, 2016, and 2017 budget requests, but Congress blocked all three. While the Warthog is much loved by the troops on the front line and venerated by pilots for its unique ruggedness and hard-hitting attack capability, it does have limitations that have prompted the Air Force to repeatedly attempt to retire it.

Beyond simple airframe age, the A-10 has also been involved in more friendly-fire deaths of American troops than any other aircraft in the inventory, according to the Air Force Times. The cause of this is generally attributed to the lack of modern digital sensors to detect friend or foe, and the speed and accuracy of newer platforms. Still, the aircraft represents an incredibly high value to the US Armed Forces on the battlefield and has survived numerous attempts to decommission it to this day.

In the Gulf War, the Warthog had an over 95% mission-capable rate, and the A-10’s performance in Operation Epic Fury has been a compelling case for its retention once again. When the service moved in its fiscal 2026 request to retire all 162 remaining aircraft three years ahead of schedule, Congress intervened again. The final decision capped this year’s divestment at 59 airframes and set a floor of 103 combat-ready airframes.

The Flying Tank That Just Won’t Go Down

Credit: US Air Force

The most compelling testimony to keep the Thunderbolt II flying has come from the troops themselves. As many veteran pilots have recounted, the A-10 is uniquely capable of flying into a different kind of contested airspace that would shred an ‘exquisite’ jet like the F-35, and emerge victorious despite heavy battle damage. Nicknamed the ‘flying tank,’ it has famously suffered severe airframe damage, engine loss, and more to enemy fire and still brought its pilot home safely after putting its bombs on target.

Set aside the ground-troop testimony for a moment, and the reasoning from the Air Force’s top brass is neither irrational nor purely budgetary. The same low-and-slow profile that lets the A-10 loiter over friendly troops also puts it inside the engagement envelope of exactly the systems the Air Force expects to face in a future high-end fight. General Mark Welsh, former Air Force Chief of Staff and A-10 pilot, framed the calculus plainly in 2015:

“It’s not about not liking or not wanting the A-10. It’s about some very tough decisions that we have to make to recapitalize an Air Force for the threat 10 years from now.”

The financial case is concrete rather than abstract: the service estimated $4.2 billion in savings over five years from full divestment in its earlier proposals and $423 million annually in its 2026 budget request, even as it has simultaneously had to spend roughly $880 million keeping the existing fleet flying. And while its performance as a drone hunter and CSAR overwatch platform in OEF has boosted support, the A-10 limitations have also been highlighted by its vulnerability to Iranian air defenses.

The Rescue Of Dude 44 Alpha

Credit: US Air Force

On April 3, 2026, a Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle of the 494th Fighter Squadron was shot down over Iran. Thankfully, both crew members ejected. The resulting combat search and rescue operation involved hundreds of troops and dozens of aircraft. The pilot, callsign Dude 44 Alpha, was recovered under close-range gunfire after seven hours. The weapon systems officer wasn’t recovered until nearly two days later in a nighttime raid.

A-10s flew the ‘Sandy’ close air support role throughout, per doctrine dating to Vietnam, positioning themselves between the survivor and the enemy. One A-10 whose pilot had been in radio contact with the downed F-15E pilot was hit by enemy fire. Per Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dan Caine’s public account, the pilot kept fighting, exited the battlespace, and bailed out over Kuwait only after concluding the aircraft could not be landed safely.

Set against that same week, three F-15Es were lost days earlier to a friendly-fire incident involving Kuwaiti air defense; an F-35 pilot was wounded by shrapnel from ground fire on March 19 but was able to land. Then a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker midair collision killed six airmen. The A-10 was the platform that, after taking a hit doing the single most dangerous job in the operation, still completed its mission before going down.

What Comes Next For The A-10 And The Boneyard

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The recent legislative battles and the high-profile CSAR operational case Epic Fury are directly changing how AMARG will manage the A-10 fleet, its physical footprint, and its mission for the next decade. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink announced the aircraft, previously projected to be fully retired by 2028, would remain in service until at least 2030. Additionally, Rep. Abe Hamadeh’s bipartisan “BRRRRT Act” was introduced on July 20 to extend that through fiscal 2033.

Meanwhile, at the boneyard, a renaissance in air power is ramping up with the introduction of the fifth generation of F-35 strike fighters, the newly armed ‘flying tractors’ of AFSOC, and more CSAR capability than ever before. The 47th Fighter Squadron, which formerly trained A-10 pilots, has stood down its Warthog operations and is activating as a premier F-35A fighter unit. Simultaneously, the OA-1K inherited tasks long handled by the A-10, operating out of primitive, unpaved runways where standard fighter jets cannot land.

None of that resolves the underlying argument from the Air Force’s case. That is an airframe averaging 43 years old, unmodernizable against peer air defenses, and increasingly matched in the close-support mission by precision munitions dropped from safer altitudes. What Epic Fury actually did was hand Congress one more concrete, recent data point for the same argument it has been having with the Air Force since 2015. So while the drawdown may be slower than expected, the A-10’s true sundown is likely not far away.