They want their largest and highest-priority weapons buy, the [troubled, $400-billion F-35](http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2018/f-35-still-no-finish-line-in-sight.html " Still No Finish Line in Sight") multi-mission fighter, to quickly replace the A-10 they’ve been [trying to get rid of](http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2018/air-force-leaders-deliberately-slow-rolling-a-10-refurbishment.html "Air Force Leaders Deliberately Slow-Rolling A-10 Refurbishment ") for over two decades. The now-former Pentagon weapons testing director, J. Michael Gilmore, said in 2016 that a fly-off would be the only way to determine how well the F-35 could perform the close-air-support role compared to the A-10—or whether the F-35 could perform that role at all.
Many Air Force leaders [strenuously objected to the fly-off](http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2015/lt-gen-bogdan-hedges-operational-testing.html "Lt. Gen. Bogdan Hedges on Operational Testing"), claiming that the F-35 would perform the mission differently so it wouldn’t be fair to compare its performance to the A-10. These tests are only happening now—albeit in an inadequate form—because Congress mandated them nearly three years ago.
The Congressionally-approved plan includes a schedule for tests and funding for elaborate tactical test ranges with combat-realistic, hard-to-find targets defended by carefully simulated missile and gun defenses, and appropriate ground-control teams for the close-support portion of the test scenarios. Testing to date has revealed the [F-35 is incapable](http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2018/f-35-still-no-finish-line-in-sight.html " Still No Finish Line in Sight") of performing most of the functions required for an acceptable close-support aircraft, and it seems unlikely the criteria outlined by Congress and testing officials would have produced the results Air Force leaders wanted.
> Both aircraft are given an equal one hour to attack targets, when in fact the A-10 has more than twice the F-35’s endurance over the battlefield, a key capability when friendly troops urgently need support in battles that last many hours, or even days.
> Both aircraft are assigned an equal number of attack sorties—even though the A-10 has demonstrated in combat an ability to generate sorties at a rate three times greater than the maintenance-intensive F-35 has been able to demonstrate under far less demanding peacetime conditions.
> Testing both planes’ critical ability to support troops under low cloud cover by imposing a 10,000-foot ceiling is irresponsibly unrealistic and clearly intended to mask the unmaneuverable and thin-skinned F-35’s inability to operate under the far lower 1,000-foot ceilings so common in Europe, Southeast Asia, Korea, Africa, and South America. The armored A-10 was specifically designed to be able to maneuver and survive the kind of ground fire expected during attacks under 1,000-foot ceilings. A-10s have demonstrated this on numerous occasions in Afghanistan, even in dangerous mountainous terrain.
> The weapons load assigned to the F-35—a single 500-pound guided bomb instead of the two it can carry—unrealistically lightens the F-35 in an attempt to give it a maneuverability advantage during these tests. At the same time, the 30-millimeter cannon, which is the A-10’s most effective weapon and the one most demanded by troops in close contact with the enemy, has been arbitrarily limited to 400 rounds instead of the 1,174 it actually carries in combat. Equally artificially, the testers loaded the A-10 with two unguided 500-pound bombs, weapons it never carries in combat because they are too inaccurate and too dangerous to friendly troops. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, the A-10 always carries a full complement of guided bombs instead of unguided ones.
> The absence of specialized testing equipment to determine the accuracy of anti-aircraft gun-aiming against the evasive maneuvering flight path of the attacking plane makes it impossible to gain useful insights about relative hits on the F-35 versus the A-10—and invites the use of highly biased, speculative figures to favor a predetermined outcome. Similarly, for the shoulder-fired small surface-to-air missiles, there was not instrumentation of the precise missile launch or guidance control, no precise tracking of the attacking aircraft’s trajectory, and no validated shoulder-fired missile simulation to determine the relative success of the A-10 and F-35 in defeating or surviving shoulder-fired missiles.
> Using only uncamouflaged targets—usually painted dark military green and placed in flat, open, light-colored desert terrain and thus easily seen from 15,000 feet above—completely contradicts the stark realities of actual combat, in which the enemy always has a life-and-death motivation to do whatever it takes to remain unseen as long as possible. Anyone with access to Google Earth can quickly find dozens of these targets in satellite imagery.
> By testing only against highly visible targets, the test completely masks the much more restricted view out of the F-35 cockpit as compared to the A-10—along with masking the surprisingly poor video and infrared image resolution of the [F-35 helmet’s display](http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2017/defense-contractors-holding-the-pentagon-hostage-with-service-contracts.html "Defense Contractors Holding the Pentagon Hostage with Service Contracts") compared to the high definition of the A-10’s instrument panel display when it’s coupled to the plane’s sniper and lightening pods.
> On a broader level, testing only against easy-to-see, static, non-reactive targets artificially confirms the Air Force’s delusional notion that future close air support can be successfully conducted by planes flying at 15,000 feet and 450 knots relying on supposedly accurate, digitally-transmitted target coordinates.
> Interestingly, the Congressionally-approved full operational fly-off test plan, as designed in detail by the previous testing director and the service testing agencies, avoids every one of these F-35–slanted, highly unrealistic, test-scenario biases.
This first appeared on the POGO websitehere.