Pierre Sprey, Warts and All
The man who helped design the A-10 Warthog remains a polarizing figure
In a military-industrial complex that overwhelmingly advocates for the most exquisite, most expensive technology, Pierre Sprey was, if nothing else, an important counterbalance to an Air Force and Department of Defense that have often chosen technology at the expense of mass. Given our industrial base’s manufacturing challenges and dependency on China to produce every critical weapon, reorienting towards simpler, affordable designs we can produce at home sounds like a logical hedge. The Air Force’s recent decision to pause and re-evaluate the 6th generation fighter certainly seems like a nod in Sprey’s direction.
Sprey is most closely associated with the A-10, an aircraft he helped design and test as a young Pentagon bureaucrat who had affection for neither the Pentagon nor bureaucracy.
But in the early 1960s, when Sprey was just a Yale undergraduate working at Roy Grumman’s company during the summers, his dream of designing an airplane seemed far out of reach. While he enjoyed the work, he didn’t enjoy staring down the decades of experience he’d need to accrue before he’d be granted the autonomy to — hopefully, maybe — design an airplane. Before he had a chance to quit, the Pentagon’s Whiz Kids poached Sprey in 1965 after meeting him at a Hudson Institute conference.
And so Sprey stepped on the first of many hornet’s nests in his career. By 1965, Robert McNamara had been the Secretary of Defense for four years, which was more than enough time for most of the Department of Defense to resent him and anyone who worked for him. McNamara’s Whiz Kids gained a reputation as smug elitists who believed their data analysis skills and theoretical modeling always trumped the operational experience of the dumb uniformed personnel. If the Whiz Kids thought they’d found a kindred spirit in Sprey — the young, ascot-wearing francophone with a perfect educational pedigree — they were sorely mistaken. While Sprey was a talented analytical mind, he reserved the utmost respect for soldiers and their combat experience.
Sprey would last just nine months before he was fired from his first Whiz Kids assignment to a group responsible for modeling how the C-5A transport would deploy. Sprey mercilessly poked holes in the assumptions — and egos — underpinning the analysis. He was promptly reassigned to the NATO group and tasked with figuring out how much money the Air Force was spending and if it was spending it on the right stuff. There was one Cold War possibility that preoccupied planners: the Soviet Union rolling their tanks through the Fulda Gap into Western Europe. Sprey didn’t think this was the world-ending scenario most others did, stating years later, “The nightmare scenario was that they would sweep to the Atlantic, which was like, utter horse shit.”
But Sprey humored his bosses. If they wanted to stop the Fulda Gap crossing, they wouldn’t do it with long-range bombers and nukes, he wrote in an inflammatory memo. Rather, you would need both a small, maneuverable fighter for dogfighting and a rugged, tank-killing airplane that would protect ground troops while flying low and slow. The former would become the F-16, an effort led by fellow heretic and eventual friend John Boyd. The latter would become the A-10 Thunderbolt II for close air support (CAS). Sprey didn’t realize it, but in proposing a plane specifically for the mission of CAS, he’d kicked another hornet’s nest.
Close Air Support: A Quick Sidebar
CAS was mired in controversy because, essentially, it forced the Air Force to hold a mirror up to itself. Technically, CAS was the Air Force’s mission, but the Air Force didn’t have an aircraft capable of performing CAS well — a fact illustrated by the Vietnam War’s growing casualty list. Heroic F-100 pilots used smoke bombs to mark targets for other aircraft to bomb, but these missions were incredibly dangerous and inaccurate. The F-105 and F-4 were ill-suited to CAS, zipping by targets far too quickly to drop bombs with precision.
Providing timely support to Army troops was harder than it seemed because the aircraft needed to arrive in time for the conflict to still be ongoing, but it also had to fly slow enough to be able to take out the enemy. All while not killing the very troops it needed to protect. The Air Force ended up adopting the Navy’s World War II era A-1 Skyraider for CAS. The rugged, low and slow flying plane would serve as inspiration for the A-10.
Why didn’t the Air Force just invest in a purpose-built CAS platform? A requirement to provide extensive support to ground troops drew the Air Force away from its core mission of air superiority and perhaps represented a tacit admission that air power alone could not win wars. The final word in the phrase, “close air support,” hints at a related reason. The Air Force had fought long and hard to win independence from the Army. It didn’t want to be put back in a box where it was merely “supporting” the other services. Further, the Air Force identified the real possibility of moral hazard: CAS could enable the Army to engage in more risky or unconventional ground operations because the Army didn’t have to pay the full cost of the risk. And so CAS became a red-headed stepchild.
The Army decided to take matters into its own hands and announced the development of the high-speed Cheyenne helicopter. Here was a rival worthy of the Air Force’s attention. Not wanting to abdicate CAS and the associated budget, the Air Force begrudgingly set to work on a CAS aircraft and put Colonel Avery Kay at the helm.
A Warthog is Born
When Kay read Sprey’s widely circulated memo, he offered Sprey the job of designing the very aircraft he’d proposed. But the offer wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded. Kay couldn’t pay him, and the job would confer no status. In fact, joining up with Kay would likely jeopardize Sprey’s career. To his immense credit, Sprey didn’t care. He was a purist. “The reason I came to Washington was because I believed the country needed a much better defense than it had and that we were paying too much for what we had.” So he stayed a Whiz Kid by day, and got to work designing the A-X by the cover of night.
By 1972, Northrop and Fairchild Republic were competing in unusually realistic live-fire tests of the A-X. There would be no gameable computer-model simulations on Sprey’s watch. Instead, the two companies flew their A-X prototypes in makeshift outdoor wind tunnels and were shot at by Russian weapons acquired on the black market.
CAS wasn’t a sexy mission, and Fairchild’s winning A-10 aircraft reflected that. Nicknamed the “Warthog” or, simply, the “Hog,” the A-10 is a beast. The plane is built around a custom, tank-killing weapon called the GAU-8. The Gatling-style gun, built by General Electric, fires 30mm rounds, producing the signature and terrifying A-10 “brrrt.” The A-10 flies low and slow, enabling it to spot targets but avoid friendlies. The large wingspan of 57 feet, 6 inches provides excellent maneuverability as it loiters overhead for hours. When Sprey first saw the massive plane, he unhappily exclaimed, “Oh my god, it’s a fucking bomber.”
Because the A-10 is a juicy target, survivability was an essential characteristic. The two engines are mounted high on either side of the tail, and self-sealing fuel tanks mitigate the chance of fire. The pilot is sealed in a titanium bathtub. Other fail-safes abound. If the hydraulic controls (or the backup hydraulic controls) fail, the pilot can fly the plane manually. The landing gear never fully retracts, removing the need for a dangerous belly landing.
And the price was right. At about ~$3 million per airplane in 1973, the A-10 offered a way for the Air Force to grow its force structure via a “high-low” mix. The expensive F-15s and B-1s could be purchased alongside the A-10 and the F-16. Sprey’s disciplined, first-principles approach to aircraft design produced a plane that integrated existing technology and left no room for R&D rabbit holes. The Air Force would have a CAS airplane in production, after all.
The A-10’s standout performance came during the Gulf War, its first combat deployment. Though not initially included in the plans for Operation Desert Storm, 144 A-10s ended up flying 8,000 combat sorties. Ironically, the A-10 didn’t do much CAS because of limited U.S. ground operations. It would have to settle for a hunter-killer role, destroying thousands of Iraqi tanks, artillery pieces, and combat vehicles. In doing so, the Hog would earn yet another moniker, this one bestowed by its enemies: the “Black Death” imposed psychological terror on Iraqi ground troops for its ability to loiter and perform extended gun runs. Rinse and repeat. That stood in contrast to one-and-done lightning strikes by fighters like the F-16.
Five Hogs were shot down during the Gulf War. But the A-10 flew so many missions that its loss rate translated to just 0.0625%. While this proved Sprey’s A-10 was survivable, its continued existence in the Air Force fleet would prove far more fragile.
Ongoing Controversy
CAS generally and the A-10 specifically remain a topic of contentious debate. The Air Force has been trying to rid itself of the turbulent A-10 for about as long as it has been flying. Right after the Gulf War, the Air Force sent many to The Boneyard. In 2015, it tried in earnest to retire all A-10s, but the plan was foiled by Congressional opposition — opposition Sprey helped generate behind the scenes. Last year, the Air Force finally succeeded in retiring some A-10s for the first time in the 21st century. They are all set to be phased out by 2028 or 2029.
Retiring the A-10 without plans to replace it with a purpose-built CAS aircraft amounts to retiring the mission of CAS, goes one argument. There is important CAS-specific, tribal knowledge that will soon be gone, and the Air Force has not credibly demonstrated how multirole fighters like the F-35 will perform CAS to the same effect. What’s more, the A-10 is a low-cost alternative for the CAS mission and provides optionality for an Air Force with a declining number of wings.
But where Sprey touted the A-10’s simplicity as a feature, critics view it as a weakness for the enemy to exploit. The A-10 lacks speed and stealth in a world where future conflicts will not have permissive environments. Some point to the performance of drones in Ukraine as a further reason to sideline the A-10. The loudest argument is to use the F-35 for CAS: the U.S. has invested in a multirole fighter with a lifetime cost of $2 trillion, this argument goes, so we should put it to work.
Sprey might be the most controversial of our Heretics and Heroes. He’s frequently derided as a misinformed Luddite unable to appreciate technological advancements. And he hardly went out of his way to make friends. As his career progressed, he eagerly kicked every hornet’s nest in his path. Sprey, like Boyd, opposed the F-15. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Sprey expressed skepticism that the F-117 had performed as advertised and called for more testing for stealth (William Perry countered that the need for more testing was “absurd”). Sprey continued to doubt the accuracy of beyond-visual-range and publicly and loudly critiqued the F-35 as a “lemon” during the final decade of his life.
A heretic to the bitter end, Sprey rankled at what he considered illogical and authoritarian government overreach during the COVID lockdowns. He attended monthly dinner parties hosted by an A-10 pilot, writing to her, “The bigger the group, the more satisfying the revolt against stay-at-home...I look forward to an evening well-spent outside the bounds of the law.”
Sprey didn’t believe in sacred cows. That’s one area where even his most vocal critics might find common ground.
Further Reading
Warplane: How the Military Reformers Birthed the A-10 Warthog by Hal Sundt (2013)
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram (2004)