If a tentative cease-fire doesn’t hold, all forces will be in place by mid-April, should the president think they’re needed.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II is not the sleekest, swiftest jet in the U.S. Air Force’s arsenal. Its “slow and low” lumbering is so aerodynamically “ugly” that it is better known by its nickname, “Warthog.”
But to an infantryman under enemy fire or bracing to assault a well-defended position, seeing A-10s barrel onto the battlefield before him is a beautiful thing.
“I definitely had my bacon pulled out of the fire by A-10 pilots and the platform itself,” said retired Marine Special Operations Lt. Col. Ivan Ingraham, who led Marines in combat in Afghanistan and has seen the terrifying tenacity of the “flying gun” in decimating entrenched enemies while absorbing frantic fire no longer aimed at his advancing troops.
The fact that he is alive is “living proof” of the A-10’s devastating, low-altitude, close-air-support lethality, he told The Epoch Times.
Ingraham, a novelist who writes about leadership development on his substack The Logbook and on military matters for, among other outlets, Task & Purpose, The War Horse, and The Epoch Times, is among analysts who see significant portent in an otherwise little-noted development in Operation Epic Fury: the boosted presence of A-10s over targets in Iran.
As first reported on March 31 by Air & Space Forces Magazine, the Pentagon on March 30 began doubling its A-10 Thunderbolt II fleet in the Middle East, dispatching at least 18 additional Warthogs from the Royal Air Force station Lakenheath in the UK and Air National Guard bases in Michigan and New Hampshire into combat against Iran.
There are now as many as 40 in theater.
To infantry veterans and veteran military analysts, the dramatic increase in A-10s means two things: The United States does, indeed, have dominant air superiority and specific objectives are being targeted for the eventual introduction of ground troops.
“I don’t want to get too speculative,” Ingraham said. “But if they’re doubling the number of A-10s, it can only be for the fact that they are going to actually do boots on the ground, and they need something that’s going to be able to protect some sort of forces, or find some sort of overwatch for troops that are going to be engaged.”
By John Haughey
