The Plane They Couldn't Kill
The universe has a sense of humor. I know this not because I have studied the matter, but because I watch the news.
Actually, that’s exactly what it is. Evidence of a deranged intelligence behind things, one that took the Air Force’s thirty-year bureaucratic murder attempt on a subsonic tank-killer and responded by sending it to the Persian Gulf to hunt Revolutionary Guard speedboats. And if that’s the kind of thing passing for cosmic punchlines these days, I’m not sure I want to know what’s coming next.
As some may be aware, I keep one of the cats — the gray one, Klang — stationed at the workstation. Klang has claimed the keyboard tray for himself. He has been there for the better part of two hours. He is warm, he is elevated, and he has no opinion on whether I need the keyboard.
However, the thing about Klang is not that he’s inconvenient. That would be obvious. Cats do not inconvenience you — they simply occupy whatever they need to occupy, with the absolute serenity of something that has correctly calculated there is nothing you can do about it.
And so it was, this morning, that I found myself reading the news on the tablet instead. The NYT brief. I’ve been waiting for something interesting to happen for weeks. Nothing except the usual steady drip of institutional catastrophe. I knew from past mornings that nothing was going to surprise me, so I kept scrolling.
I scrolled past the oil price updates. I scrolled past the diplomatic communiqués, all of which were in the process of meaning nothing. I noted the Marines heading toward the Persian Gulf — redirected, the article said, from the Indo-Pacific, which means somebody had their hand hovering over a phone ready to redirect 2,200 people from wherever they were going to wherever they were needed. I found this admirable in an abstract way, the way I find any sufficiently purposeful thing admirable.
Then I got to the A-10 Warthog.
I read the paragraph twice. Not because it was difficult to understand, but because I needed a moment to appreciate it properly.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said the words “hunting and killing fast-attack watercraft.” He said this in public, in March 2026, about a plane designed in the 1970s to kill Soviet tanks in a European land war. “Hunting and killing.” Not “engaging.” Not “conducting precision strikes.” Hunting. Gen. Dan Caine chose that word. He knew.
“So the thing is still alive,” I thought.
This is the A-10. The plane the Air Force has been trying to retire for the better part of three decades. The plane built around a gun — not a vehicle that happens to carry a weapon, but a delivery system for a GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon: 30mm, depleted uranium shells, 3,900 rounds per minute. The engineers designed the airframe around the gun’s recoil. The gun weighs more than a Cessna 172. The plane is the gun, with wings and a titanium bathtub cockpit bolted on as an afterthought.
“Oh my God,” I thought, “they couldn’t even get rid of it.”
The Air Force wanted it gone. The F-35 was coming — the stealth multirole everything-fighter that costs $80 million a copy and was going to make subsonic ugly close-support aircraft obsolete. Congress blocked the retirement. Six times. Not because Congress had developed a sudden appreciation for the nuance of close air support doctrine. Because A-10 bases are in someone’s district. The plane is alive because of pure pork barrel self-interest producing, entirely by accident, the correct outcome. Nobody did the right thing for the right reason. The A-10 outlasted its death sentence by being too politically expensive to bury.
Now it’s hunting Iranian patrol boats at dawn.
The F-35, incidentally, flies at speeds where you cannot loiter over twenty-one miles of contested strait watching for speedboats. The A-10 flies at speeds where you can. The hundreds of billions spent on the replacement cannot do the job the obsolete truck is currently doing over the Persian Gulf. This is not an editorial opinion. This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs telling you about it.
I scrolled a bit further and found the GBU-72. The new bunker-busting bomb. First time used in combat. Designed to replace the GBU-28, which was designed to replace something before that. Five thousand pounds. Dropped on Iranian missile silos near the strait. The GBU-28 debuted in Desert Storm. The replacement for the replacement is in combat thirty-five years later.
I put down the tablet.
The entire military, it occurred to me, is a museum of things that were supposed to be temporary. The A-10 wasn’t supposed to still exist. The bomb it’s dropping the area of effect for was a replacement for a bomb from a previous war. The Marines were on their way somewhere else. The war wasn’t planned. It never is. Everything useful is already there, on the way to somewhere else, or simply too stubborn to be killed on schedule. The institutions that plan for the future are always wrong. The things that survive are the things that are just too difficult to get rid of.
I looked at Klang.
He had not moved. He had been occupying the keyboard tray since approximately 4 AM, which means he survived the morning briefing notification, survived my first attempt to dislodge him, survived the entire Strait of Hormuz situation unfolding before me, and has no current plans for relocation. He is extraordinarily good at one thing: being exactly where he is, doing nothing, and being completely impossible to retire.
“Fair enough,” I told him.
He did not respond.