00:00In 1991, over the deserts of Kuwait, Iraqi soldiers started surrendering to an aircraft
00:07before it had even fired a shot. Not to tanks rolling toward their position, not to infantry
00:13closing in, to a plane circling overhead, one so ugly the US Air Force itself almost refused
00:21to build it. Nicknamed after a wild pig, they called it the Warthog. And by the time the
00:29Gulf War ended, it had become one of the most feared aircraft in the sky. Not because it was fast,
00:36and it wasn't. Not because it was stealthy, because it was about as far from stealthy as an aircraft
00:42gets, but because everyone who saw it knew exactly what came next. This is the story of how a slow,
00:50ugly, twin-engine jet, built around a gun instead of the other way around, became the thing enemy
00:57pilots and enemy soldiers alike prayed they'd never see circling above them.
01:03To understand why the A-10 terrified people, you have to go back to a problem the Air Force spent
01:09years refusing to admit it had. Through the Vietnam War, the job of close air support, hitting enemy
01:16troops fighting close enough to touch American soldiers on the ground, kept getting handed to
01:22aircraft that were never built for it. The F-100 Super Sabre, the F-4 Phantom, fast jets built to
01:31intercept other fast jets, doing a job that demanded almost the opposite skill set. A jet moving at 500
01:38miles an hour has maybe a second and a half to spot a target on the ground, line it up
01:44and fire before the
01:45terrain underneath is already a memory. Pilots were doing the most precise job in the entire war at the
01:53least precise speed available to them. Ground troops paid first, friendly fire incidents happened, targets
02:01got missed, but the aircraft paid too because speed doesn't protect you from small arms fire and
02:07shrapnel when the mission requires you to fly in low anyway. And by the war's end, the Air Force had
02:14lost
02:14hundreds of aircraft to exactly that kind of ground fire. By the early 1970s, someone finally asked a
02:22different question out loud. Instead of adapting a fighter jet for a job it was never designed to do,
02:27what if you built an aircraft around the job itself, from the ground up, with nothing borrowed? That
02:34question ran straight into resistance from inside the Air Force's own ranks. This was an institution built by
02:41fighter pilots for fighter pilots and the idea of investing serious money in something slow,
02:48unglamorous and incapable of dogfighting a MiG offended a lot of people with stars on their shoulders.
02:55It took a program called AX, a design competition and a genuine internal fight to get the aircraft built at
03:02all. Fairchild Republic won that competition and the result was the A10 Thunderbolt 2, though almost nobody who
03:10ever flew it, worked on it, or watched it overhead ever called it that. The gun came first, the airplane
03:17came second, built around it, which is not how aircraft normally get made. The gun was the GAU-8 Avenger,
03:26a seven-barrel rotary cannon so enormous that engineers had to offset the aircraft's own nose landing gear
03:33just to fit the ammunition drum sitting behind it. It fires 30 millimetre rounds at a rate of roughly
03:403,900 rounds a minute, and the rounds themselves come tipped with depleted uranium, dense enough to punch
03:48straight through the armoured hull of a main battle tank. Pilots and ground crews came to know the sound
03:54it made as one continuous tearing note, the BRRRRRRT that would later turn into its own strange piece
04:02of internet culture, memes and merchandise built around a sound most people will thankfully never
04:08hear pointed at them. But long before anyone was printing it on a T-shirt, it was the sound that
04:14made
04:15Iraqi tank crews climb out of their vehicles and run, because there was nothing inside that armour worth
04:21staying for once that gun opened up. Around that gun, engineers built what pilots still call
04:28a flying bathtub. Not a metaphor, not close to one. The cockpit sits inside an actual tub of titanium armour,
04:38roughly 1,200 pounds of it, thick enough to deflect rounds up to 23 millimetres. The two engines sit high
04:47on the fuselage and set apart from each other so that a single hit doesn't take out both at once,
04:53and the aircraft can limp home on whichever one survives. The flight controls run on redundant
05:00hydraulic systems, and if both of those fail, a set of manual cables lets a pilot fly the aircraft,
05:07using nothing but physical strength pulling on pulleys. No hydraulics, no computer assistance,
05:14just cable and muscle. This wasn't an aircraft engineered to avoid getting hit. It was engineered
05:22on the assumption that it would get hit repeatedly in combat and keep flying anyway. Every design choice
05:30underneath that ugly airframe was built around one idea. Absorb the damage and bring the pilot home
05:37regardless. Which is exactly what happened, again and again, in ways that turned individual missions
05:46into legend inside the squadron rooms where pilots tell these stories to each other.
05:53In April 2003, over Baghdad, Captain Kim Campbell was flying close air support when Iraqi ground fire tore
06:02through her A-10 and destroyed the hydraulic system completely. In most modern fighters, that failure ends
06:11the flight immediately, often with the pilot ejecting. Campbell lost stick control entirely. No stick,
06:20no hydraulics. Instead, she reverted to manual reversion, hand flying the aircraft using nothing but cables
06:28and raw mechanical linkage for close to an hour, all the way back to base. When the ground crew inspected
06:36the jet afterward, they counted more than a hundred holes in the airframe. She landed it anyway. The aircraft
06:43that should have been unflyable brought her home regardless, and her callsign afterward, killer chick,
06:50became one more entry in a long list of A-10 stories that sound made up until you check the
06:57record and
06:58find out they aren't. Stories like that didn't stay contained inside the air force. They travelled to the
07:05people standing on the other end of that gun. And that's where the fear stopped being abstract and
07:12started shaping actual battlefield decisions. By the time Operation Desert Storm began in 1991, Iraqi
07:20ground forces had already built a reputation around the aircraft loitering above their positions for
07:26hours at a time, patient in a way fast jets never could be. Gulf War veterans have described Iraqi units
07:35surrendering directly to A-10s circling overhead, soldiers waving white cloth at a plane that hadn't
07:43fired a single round at them yet, because they'd already watched or heard about what it did to the
07:49unit dug in next to theirs. According to accounts from pilots who flew those missions, Iraqi prisoners
07:56repeatedly said they feared the warthog's gun more than conventional artillery, because artillery was
08:03something you could survive with a little luck and a deep enough hole. The Avenger cannon left nothing to
08:10luck. When it found you, the outcome wasn't in question. But the fear didn't stop at the men dug into
08:18trenches. It reached into the cockpits of enemy pilots too. And that's the part of this story that gets
08:25skipped over most often. The A-10 was never built to dogfight, not even close. It's slow by fighter
08:33standards. It doesn't have anywhere near the thrust-to-weight ratio to out-turn a dedicated
08:38interceptor. And nobody who designed it ever expected it to win an aerial engagement against a
08:45MiG. And yet, during the Gulf War, A-10s recorded confirmed air-to-air kills against Iraqi helicopters,
08:54using that same 30mm cannon to shoot enemy aircraft directly out of the sky, instead of tanks on the
09:02ground. For a helicopter pilot flying reconnaissance or troop support, that single fact changed the
09:09entire calculation of what airspace was safe. You weren't only avoiding a threat to the soldiers
09:15underneath you anymore. You were now the target yourself, hunted by an aircraft nobody had trained
09:21you to fight, one that most air forces had written off as too slow to be dangerous in the air.
09:28That reputation hardened into something close to psychological warfare, whether the Air Force
09:34ever planned it that way or not. Iraqi commanders reportedly began routing helicopter movements
09:41and troop convoys specifically to avoid airspace where A-10s were known to be operating. The same
09:48way you'd reroute a supply line around a minefield you couldn't clear. The aircraft didn't even need
09:54to be present in the sky at a given moment to have that effect. Its reputation alone was already
10:01reshaping how the other side moved, planned and made decisions on the ground hours before a single
10:08warthog ever showed up. Which raises the obvious question, if this aircraft was this effective,
10:14this feared by the people fighting against it, why has the Air Force spent the better part of three
10:19decades trying to retire it? The answer says almost as much about institutional politics as it does about
10:27the airplane itself. The A-10 was built for one mission and one mission only, killing tanks and
10:34protecting troops on the ground. And that single purpose mission has never fit neatly into an Air
10:40Force built around fighters, bombers and increasingly stealth technology and multi-role platforms that can
10:47do a dozen jobs adequately instead of one job perfectly. Every few years, budget planners have proposed
10:55retiring the fleet in favour of newer aircraft that can technically perform close air support, among other
11:01missions, faster with a much smaller radar signature. And every few years, soldiers and marines who've
11:09actually called in warthog support during a firefight have pushed back hard. Because there's a real
11:16difference between an aircraft that can theoretically handle close air support as one job among many,
11:23and one built from the ground up to survive doing it low and slow, exactly where the mission needs it
11:31to be,
11:31absorbing hits a faster jet would never walk away from. That tension between what the aircraft actually
11:39is and what the institution that owns it would rather be flying instead, has followed the A-10 through
11:46nearly its entire service life. But on the ground, among the troops who've needed it circling overhead
11:53during the worst moments of a deployment, that debate has never really existed in the first place.
12:00Ask an infantryman who's had a warthog show up during a firefight what he thinks about retiring the
12:06aircraft, and you'll get a very different answer than the one coming out of a Pentagon budget hearing.
12:12Because that's really what this whole story comes down to. The A-10 was never meant to be elegant. It
12:18was
12:19never meant to be fast or quiet or easy to admire from a distance the way a stealth fighter is.
12:25It was built to absorb damage that would kill nearly any other aircraft in the inventory,
12:30and to keep delivering that gun onto target anyway, mission after mission, hit after hit.
12:37Enemy soldiers learned to fear the sound of it before they ever laid eyes on the plane itself.
12:43Enemy pilots learned to fear the airspace it controlled, whether or not a warthog happened to be there that
12:49particular day. Almost 50 years after its first flight, an aircraft the Air Force once treated as
12:56an unwanted afterthought is still flying combat missions, still absorbing hits that should ground it,
13:02and still carrying a reputation that no amount of budget paperwork has managed to retire alongside it.
13:09So the question worth sitting with isn't really whether some newer aircraft could technically replace
13:16it on paper. It's whether anything built for elegance could ever earn the same fear on both sides of a
13:23conflict that an ugly flying gun with a titanium bathtub bolted into it managed to earn simply by refusing to
13:32go down.
13:32The Concert is the only one flying gun.
13:33The The End
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