Why Is America Still Flying the A-10 Warthog, a Cold War Relic?
Lawmakers protecting jobs and commerce for their districts block the military from retiring outdated equipment, impairing effort to counter rapidly modernizing Chinese forces.
Every day, teams of technicians at a vast Air Force base in Tucson, Ariz., tend to a fleet of attack jets the Pentagon has been trying to retire for more than a decade. They have picked replacement parts from the base’s famous “Boneyard,” where old military planes go for scrap, which stretches far into the surrounding desert.
The Air Force has said for years that the A-10 jets, nicknamed Warthogs for their bulky silhouette and toughness in a fight, have passed their prime and will be vulnerable in the wars of the future. The production line where they were made fell silent in the mid-1980s, and the average A-10 here is four decades old. Its job can be done by newer, more advanced planes, the Air Force says.
“The A-10, while it has served us well, is simply not a part of the battlefield of the future,” said Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for plans and programs. Congress has other ideas. Bowing to members whose constituencies are dependent on the jet for jobs and the flow of federal tax dollars, it has instead insisted nearly all the planes keep flying at a cost of more than $4 billion over the past 10 years.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-10-warthog-why-is-america-still-flying-cold-war-relic-f34f607f
I hate reading articles like this. We make fun of the Russian military and its bureaucracy but we have severe problems ourselves. How to solve the problem of Congress interfering in military decisions about needed battle equipment I don't know.
This is a timed image of a A-10 at work in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2002.
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They'll make good use of them. 
But I was a tanker *cough* thirty years ago *cough*, and we loved the A-10 Warthog. Long may it live. 
