God bless the Ukraine!

BingChat on the A10 Warthog Jet

Patrick Reany

3/20/2023

What follows is a chat I had with BingChat about the US A10 Warthog airplane that
occurred on 3/18/2023. My interest in the A10 is mere curiosity. I have long found
this particular military plane to be interesting, and because of recent information I
received about it, I find it even more interesting. So, I had a chat with Bing to try
to answer a fundamental question: Why is the A10 in the Air Force (USAF) rather
than in the US Army?

Also, I want to make some personal observations on the impressive performance of
BingChat (BC) in this discussion about the A10. Just the same, in spite of BingChat's
ability to understand what I'm asking and to reply with (mostly) useful, to-the-point
replies, I do not think it is sentient in any sense of the term. I wish people would
stop setting the Turing test as the benchmark to AI. All AI is to me is a source of
accurate information.

I found the BingChat's replies to me to be at times even humorous, though I'm not
sure if that was its intension or not.

Some Background on the A10 Warthog Jet

Let me give some technical background as I understood the facts to be when I first
engaged in this chat. At the end of World War 2, the Western Powers were picking
up the pieces of a shattered Western Europe to get it functional again. At the same
time, the Soviets were launching a Cold War against the West. NATO was formed
[1949] to help Western Europe defend itself against a possible Soviet incursion from
the East.

One military factor that helped the West win World War 2 was the mighty United
States Armed Forces. At the end of the War, it had three major divisions: The Navy,
the Marines (which were under the auspices of the Navy), and the Army, which
contained the Army Air Corps. But when the War ended, the US military decided
that the country needed a separate division of the millitary to deal with the global
issues caused by the hostile intensions of the Soviet Union. The major purpose of
this division of the miltary was 'strategic', that is, it would deal with the big threats
such as full scale invasion of Europe and the delivery of nuclear weapons. This
division would be primarily an airforce that had global reach -- hence the US Air
Force was born [1947]. The other branches of the military -- the Army, Navy, and
Marines -- would each build up its own fleet of airplanes for their more conventional
or tactical responsibilities.

          
                         The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog)

And so begins my chat with Bing:

Patrick: why is the a10 warthog an Air Force airplane rather than an army
airplane. After all, the US Airforce is more about strategic missions, not
tactical ground missions, right?

Bing: The A-10 Warthog is an Air Force airplane because it was designed
to provide close air support for ground troops. The Air Force is responsible for
providing air support to the Army, and the A-10 was designed to do just that.
The A-10 is a ground-attack aircraft that is designed to fly low and slow, making
it ideal for providing close air support to troops on the ground.

The Air Force is responsible for strategic missions, but it also provides tactical
support to ground troops. The Army is responsible for ground operations, but it
also has its own aviation branch that provides air support to ground troops.

[This did not seem to get at the heart of my question. I wanted to know why
-- in the modern USAF -- that tactical airplanes were still in use along with its
strategic assests. The fact that the A10 is a tank killer suggests that it was
originally placed in the Air Force because the USAF would need tank killers as
a part of their first-response mission to protect Europe after a Soviet incursion.
But these days it seems that the purpose of the A10 has shifted from strategic
to tactical (i.e., conventional) usage. ]

Patrick: Perhaps the original intent of the A10 was to support strategic
missions over Europe in case of a Soviet incursion into Europe during the
Cold War period.

[BC is confused about the meaning of 'design' here. I suppose that it is correctly
answering the design question about the plane's technical requirements and how
they were engineered into the plane. But the 'design' I was referring to is the
plane's purpose as it finds its place among the overall strategic and tactical future
missions of the US military. I won't fault BC for that confusion over the word
'purpose/design'. I could have tried to get BC to shift to the latter meaning,
but I chose not to.]

The A-10 was scheduled for retirement--for the first of several times--when the
battle against Soviet T-55, T-62 and T-72 tanks that it had been designed to fight
finally erupted. Only not in the Fulda Gap but in Kuwait and Iraq, and the tanks
belonged to Saddam, not Stalin.

[The A10 seems to have been a long time under the threat of being removed from
the US military inventory for being old, obsolete, and vulnerable to enemy fire.
Perhaps for this reason the Ukranians decided not to receive the A10 for their just
war against Russia. Maybe this was a mistake on their part. In any case, the Gulf
War of 1991 seemed to prove the value of the A10, as Bing alluded to, somewhat
obliquely. I have to admit that BC's subtle reference to the war that was fought by
the US against Iraq (Saddam Hussein) rather than the Third World War which it
did not fight against the Soviet Union. But did it choose Hussein's first name and
Joseph's last name for the sake of alliteration? That's sophisticated, if true. Anyway,
there seems to be quite a history lesson around the A10 Warthog.]

Patrick: I guess my question is, Why doesn't the US Army have its own A10
Warthogs, instead of relying on the US Airforce to supply them?

[Really, BingChat? Is the phrase 'save the venerable Cold War-era aircraft from the
bone yard' your own creation or was it lifted from the Internet? Of course, this phrase
is accurate. But I didn't know that it knew about the airplane boneyards in various
desert places over the US. Bing's sarcastic and casual writing style is somewhat
humorous. (I wonder if it's also 'British'.) So, BC informs me that the Army doesn't
want these old A10 'hand-me-downs' from the Air Force, but the Air Force doesn't
want the Army to get them (apparently due to interservice rivalry)! Ha Ha! Who's
writing these replies, anyway? Jerry Seinfeld?]

Patrick: I suppose that the US Army doesn't want to take on the time and
effort to train its own personnel to fly and maintain the A10, given that the
aircraft if [is] under the constant threat of being declared obsolete at any time.

Bing: That's a possibility. The A-10 is a specialized aircraft that requires a lot of
training and maintenance to operate. It's also a relatively old aircraft, so it's
possible that the Army doesn't want to invest in a platform that could be declared
obsolete at any time. The Air Force has been trying to retire the A-10 for years,
but Congress has repeatedly blocked those efforts.

Patrick: Besides the A10, what other aircraft is in the US Airforce's
inventory that is primarily for tactical support of ground forces?

[Note: The A-10C Thunderbolt II is the modern version of the Warthog. The
AC-130J Ghostrider is also used by the Airforce for close ground support
of personnel.]

          
                         The AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship

My thoughts after my chat with Bing:

So, after I received additional information from BingChat, this is what I conclude
to be the reason that the A10 was accepted by the USAF in the first place.

In the 1970s, The USAF first took posession of the A10, which was designed
to be a tank killer. The reason for this was that if the Soviet Union
attacked Europe with conventional weapons, it would have to lead with tanks.
And therefore tanks would be high on the list of enemy weapons to destroy,
especially in the early days of the invasion. However, the A10 never saw
action in a strategic battle. Instead, it saw action in the Gulf War of 1990--1991,
where it performed very well. The Soviet Union collapsed in December of 1991.

With its strategic importance removed, the decades old A10 was in need of
either upgrades or just to remove it from service. But how could the US remove
it from service when it so clearly demonstrated its tactical value in certain forms
of close-support warfare?

Anyway, for some reason I got interested in watching some YouTube videos
about the A10, when it was announced that the A10 was an Air Force airplane.
At this point, I thought the plane was under the use of the Army for tactical
use. So, I asked BingChat to help me figure it out. And so that's what
motivated my interaction with BC.

Postscript:

I wanted to rescale the graphic for the AC-130J Ghostrider to make it bigger,
so I asked the following question into Bing:

450 is to 235 as 650 is to what number?

However, Bing did not know what to do with that question. But when I turned
the question over to BingChat, it knew how to interpret the question and to get
(almost) the right answer to me. The following is its reply:

We can solve this problem using cross-multiplication.

450 is to 235 as 650 is to x.

We can write this as:

450/235 = 650/x

Cross-multiplying, we get:

450x = 235 * 650

Solving for x, we get:

x = (235 * 650) / 450 = 338.89

Therefore, 650 is to 338.89.

I have to applaud BingChat that it understood that it had been handed a
proportion to solve, and how to go about solving it. Very impressive.