Overview

"The A-10 is the Air Force's unlikely success story, an airplane designed to support the Army, and one that ground troops came to venerate. Originally conceived with the express purpose of destroying Soviet tanks, the Air Force only developed it to keep funding away from the Army's response to the mission, the AH-56 Cheyenne helicopter. Inspired by the biography of a tank-busting German pilot in World War II, the engineering and design of the A-10 fell to Pierre Sprey, a precocious civilian who'd enrolled at Yale when he was just 15-years-old, and now, barely 30, wasexiled to a Pentagon backwater with little, if any, supervision. The end result was one of the finest military aircraft ever built, a plane essentially constructed around a 19.5-foot, 4,000-pound cannon that fired 30mm depleted uranium bullets at a blistering rate. Looking like it was built from discarded airplane parts, it was probably the ugliest combat aircraft ever built, thus the ""Warthog"" appellation. But it was also an incredibly reliable ground attack aircraft, beloved by ground troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Despite repeated attempts to replace it with stealth aircraft and drones, over 280 A-10s remain in service today, serviced by dedicated and imaginative engineers and maintainers, and defended by a fervent cohort of advocates descended from the Military Reform movement. This is the story of intra-service rivalries, Pentagon obsessions with speed and stealth over tactical simplicity, and an aircraft that shows no sign of obsolescence as it nears fifty years in service."

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9781493067718

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Reviews

"""This is a fascinating book, and an important one. I love narrative nonfiction that combines personality, history, technology, mystery -- and the larger consequence of the story for all of us. Hal Sundt has done just this."" --James Fallows, author of National Defense. ""Warplane? Not on my must-read list! But Sundt draws you in with a cast of bold truthtellers. They share a set of ideas about making things - in this case, the 50+ year old A10 - in ways that make rare sense. It works for the people who fly it and meets the perilous but simple purpose of protecting the lives of soldiers fighting on the ground. This continuing story makes a case too seldom made for the value of actual experience, of realistic testing and measuring results to make things that work. You will not read the daily news of multi-billion dollar fighter jets the same again."" --Valerie Fletcher, Executive Director, Institute for Human Centered Design"

Author Information

Hal Sundt is a writer from Rochester, Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Ringer, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

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