Friday News Roundup - May 10, 2024
This week the cascading crisis that is the Israel-Hamas war hurtled towards a fateful inflection point.
The week began with the Hamas terrorist group behind the horrific October 7, 2023 attack on Israel announcing that it had agreed to a ceasefire deal, prompting jubilation in many quarters. The celebration was short-lived, however, after it was revealed later in the week the “deal” that Hamas negotiators had agreed to differed in critical areas from the proposal Israel put on the table. According to Israeli officials it crossed multiple of their “red lines.”
By the end of the week negotiations for a ceasefire had broken down in Egypt, and Israel had seized a critical aid crossing and begun dropping bombs and telling locals to flee in apparent preparation for a long threatened ground offensive in the crowded southern Gaza stronghold of Rafah, where more than one million Palestinian refugees have fled to escape fighting elsewhere in the strip.
President Joe Biden, having repeatedly warned that such an operation in Rafah would cross his own “red line,” responded by taking the very rare step of delaying an arms shipment to Israel, and he warned of more delays to follow. “If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons…We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells,” Biden declared in an interview with CNN this week. “I’ve made it clear to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and the war cabinet, they’re not going to get our support, if in fact they go in to these population centers.”
In replying to Israel’s primary backer on the international stage, Netanyahu indicated he was undeterred by the warnings from the White House. “If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone…If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails,” he said.
In reality both Netanyahu and Biden are hanging on by their respective fingernails, as domestic politics put them on opposite sides of a proposed Rafah offensive. If Netanyahu backs down and agrees to a ceasefire with Hamas bloodied but not defeated, many observers believe his rightwing coalition government will fall, precipitating elections that polls indicate he would lose badly. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations spreading across college campuses in the United States in recent weeks suggest that Biden could hemorrhage young voters in this election year if he continues to be seen as complicit in a Gaza conflict that has claimed an estimated 35,000 Palestinian lives, most of them civilians.
However the Rafah standoff between Biden and Netanyahu is decided, it is expected to have profound ripple effects on ceasefire negotiations and the course of the Israel-Hamas war writ large.
In the other major conflict destabilizing geopolitics, Russia stepped up its unprovoked attack on Ukraine this week in a war that has passed the two-year mark. Russian forces conducted a massive air assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, launching 55 missiles and 21 drones, even as a Russian plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top intelligence officials was revealed. Two relatively high-ranking Ukrainian colonels accused of participating in the plot were arrested on charges of treason.
Meanwhile, in Moscow this week Russian President Vladimir Putin was sworn in for another six-years, meaning that if he completes the term Putin will surpass his hero Josef Stalin as Russia’s longest serving ruler since Catherine the Great in the 18th century. After imprisoning or eliminating his leading political opponents, including notably Alexei Navalny, who died under mysterious circumstances in an Arctic penal colony last February, Putin pointed to his “landslide re-election” as proof that the country was united and on the right track. No word from the families of the estimated 450,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded in Ukraine.
This week the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress (CSPC) hosted an off-the-record lunch discussion with Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Great Britain’s Chief of the Defense Staff. With a celebration of NATO’s 75th Anniversary scheduled in Washington, D.C. this summer, the discussion revolved around the enduring strength of the transatlantic alliance and the special U.S.-United Kingdom security relationship.
On Friday, CSPC Senior Fellow James Kitfield appeared on National Public Radio’s “1A: Friday News Roundup” show to discuss international news. In this week’s roundup, CSPC Senior Fellow and former Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controller Ethan Brown analyzes lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war in terms of the future of the A-10 ground attack aircraft.
Ukraine’s lessons for the A-10
By Ethan Brown
The finding in this analysis will not endear me to my former Air Force tribe (Tactical Air Control Party and the JTAC community writ large), but Ukraine is demonstrating once again that, the war we got used to fighting (Afghanistan, Iraq, GWOT as a whole) left the West with a warfighting inventory unfit for the next major confrontation. If Russia’s use of twentieth-century platforms is any indication, the reticence of American strategists to recognize that the A-10 is no longer fit for the next war is an indicative game board to test such ideas.
I offer the Sukhoi Su-25 Frogman: Russia’s patently inferior response to the vaunted American A-10 Warthog. It’s smaller, faster, and weighs less than the Warthog, thus making it more maneuverable as it navigates the low-altitude white-knuckle flying more commonly thought of as “Close Air Support.” CAS, which is what I used to control as a JTAC, is when attack aircraft release ordnance “in close proximity to friendly forces requiring detailed planning and integration,” as stated in Joint Publication 3-09.3 “Close Air Support,” the doctrinal bible on such things. While just about every weapon-capable aircraft in the U.S. inventory provided some form of CAS during the post-9/11 wars–ranging from the behemoth B-52 and B-1 bombers to the minivan-sized AH-6 Little Bird helicopters–few are as synonymous with CAS as the Fairchild Republic A-10, better known as the “Warthog,” or simply, “HAWG.”
And the CAS community loves its HAWGs, and rightly so. I quite literally wouldn’t be writing this column, if not for multiple events where an A-10 was solely responsible for performing an airstrike I called in, veritably saving my life and the U.S. Army Rangers I was embedded with.
But the closest comparison we have in modern combat to ascertain how those lumbering T-frame A-10s would perform is in Ukraine, and it’s based on the abysmal performance of the Su-25s flown by Russians. First, we must acknowledge that Russian pilots are undoubtedly inferior to their American counterparts (and there is certainly the question of morale, commitment to the ‘cause’, and myriad other human components at play). Second, while the Su-25 was developed by the USSR in analog response to the American A-10 (which was literally built for the sole purpose of killing Soviet Tanks in the Fulda Gap), it is not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison.
Both aircraft are referred to affectionately as “flying tanks,” by their respective air forces, but there are distinct differences. The A-10, for example, was built around the GAU-8 Avenger–a seven-barrel 30mm gatling gun meant to shred Soviet tanks–while delivering enough thrust to accommodate more than 15,000 lbs of air-delivered munitions (bombs, rockets, and missiles). The Pilot cabin is sheathed in a titanium bathtub to protect the flier from shrapnel and small arms fire.
The “Frogfoot” is smaller, with a 30mm twin-barrel cannon (a much slower rate of fire and ammunition capacity than the GAU-8), and itself still is capable of a dizzying arsenal of rockets and bombs, but lacks the pilot-protection of its American counterpart, and itself was designed for engaging light-skinned vehicles and infantry in the open. Further, the Su-25 was built and intended as both a utility attack aircraft for Soviet air forces, as well as one of the countless military export platforms for the Soviet satellites around the world, while the A-10 was an all-American death machine with the most soul-chilling sound ever heard on the battlefield. Both are capable of operating from reduced-performance (austere) airfields, are ruggedized for forward-deployed maintenance cycles, and have higher survivability rates than, say, an F-16 or Su-27 under similar circumstances. Survivability meaning, their capacity to fly under rigorous conditions, not necessarily the dangers of combat, which includes small arms, Man-portable Surface-to-Air Defense (MANPAD) missile launchers, and the bigger, more advanced SA systems.
So these are clearly two distinct aircraft which share a slew of commonalities, but the thesis suggests that the performance of one (the Russian Su-25) presages the efficacy of the other in a future conflict. While the A-10 had nothing to fear in the skies over Afghanistan (ditto the Frogfoot, which flew there in the 1980s during the Soviet occupation), and only a few, easily-interdicted SA systems in the Iraq invasion, Ukraine has been the opposite scenario. Going back to near the beginning of the conflict, Ukrainian defenders have employed MANPAD systems to great effect against Russian Su-25s (among other, more advanced aircraft). In total, Russia has suffered approximately 349 aircraft downed since February 2022, and over thirty of those have been the Su-25. For additional context, much of those 349 downed aircraft have been helicopters, which are considerably more vulnerable to ground fire than fast-movers, but the Frogfoot is not alone in the attack aircraft category for losses: in addition to the geriatric Su-25, the newer and more advance Su-34 (akin to the American F-18) has also suffered more than two dozen shoot-downs by the same hodge-podge Ukrainian air defenses since the conflict began. There are also only a handful of Russia’s A-50 Radar aircraft (their equivalent of the USAF AWACs E-3 Sentry) still flying, as well.
What do we take from these developments? First, the A-10 and Su-25 performed admirably, and in the case of the former, devastatingly, in the battlefields of Afghanistan for one key reason: air supremacy. There were never any significant challenges to the freedom of movement in the airspace as other aircraft provided ‘top cover’ against adversary aircraft or surface-to-air systems (of which Afghanistan had essentially zero). Ukraine, of course, is a whole different affair. The A-10 was built for tearing through Soviet land hordes, but only after F-15’s and F-16’s had taken to the skies and battled MiG-25s, -27s, Sukhoi Su-27s while other U.S. and coalition aircraft had run the venerable gauntlet of Soviet surface-to-air missiles and guns (and there were a lot of them in this theorized-World War III scenario). Even still, the A-10 would face fearsome ground SA threats from those Soviet tank hordes and massed armies, precisely why the titanium tub was incorporated into the frame: a tiny shell to keep the pilots alive long enough to bail out.
Ukraine, certainly, is no Fulda Gap, but it shares some more similarities to the reality of ground-attack aircraft than any comparison with Afghanistan. And indeed, the A-10 has seen its share of avionics, radar, weapon and countermeasure upgrades to make it more survivable in a modern air-threat environment. But we must also recognize that Ukrainian forces had almost nothing with which to protect their skies when Russia invaded in 2022. What little assets they’ve employed to great effect are largely courtesy of international military aid pouring into Kyiv since the war began. The A-10 would likely enjoy better performance were it a Russian aircraft (this only due to the efficacy of the aircraft, and ot necessarily pilot proficiency), but the Su-25 serves as demonstration for the uncomfortable truth: such aircraft need many more assets (like the F-15 and F-16 air superiority fighters, or F-18’s in a maritime force generator capacity) to seal the air above so that they can protect forces on the ground. The lesson here is that Russia abysmally failed to achieve air supremacy, let alone superiority, when this fight began, leaving the Su-25 hopelessly unprotected from SA threats along the front against an inarguably inferior Ukrainian defense.
Whatever theater the A-10 might hope to fight in during a future war will face similar dangers, or even more dangerous and capable adversaries, and while the proficiency of Americans flying them will indeed reduce the overall volume of lost aircraft, the Frogfoot has been pitted against inferior forces with minimal SA defense, and has still proven to be vulnerable. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but serves as a useful measuring stick for defense planners.
Ethan Brown is a Senior Fellow at CSPC