Get Ready, China: Lethal A-10 Warthogs are Patrolling the South China Sea

David Axe

Security, Asia

And perhaps even bigger news: Would Manila be interested in buying any of the planes if Washington decides to retire it? 

The U.S. Air Force’s venerable A-10 Warthog has been a lot of things. A Cold-War Soviet tank-killer. A slow-flying escort for rescue helicopters. A heavily-armed counter-insurgency plane. Even a specialized hunter of rotorcraft.

Now add “maritime patrol plane” to the twin-engine attacker’s resume. That’s because the Pentagon has sent four A-10s and their crews and maintainers to fly sea patrols west of The Philippines, in a mineral-rich region of the South China Seas that Manila and Beijing both claim.

The four Warthogs from the 51st Fighter Wing, home-based in South Korea, were actually part of a larger contingent of U.S. warplanes that visited The Philippines for the 2016 edition of the Balikatan war game. When the exercise ended on April 15, most of the Americans and their planes departed. But four A-10s and two HH-60G rescue copters remained behind at Clark Air Base.

Their mission — “air- and maritime-domain awareness, personnel recovery, combating piracy and [the] assurance [that] all nations have access to the regional air and maritime domains in accordance with international law,” according to the U.S. Defense Department.

And on April 19, the six-aircraft “Air Contingent” flew its first patrols over the South China Sea west of Luzon, The Philippines’ largest and most densely-populated island. In mid-April, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis had sailed through the same waters as part of a so-called “freedom-of-navigation” patrol that the Pentagon meant to assert America’s — and other countries’ — legal right to sail in international waters.

U.S. Secretary Ashton Carter and Philippine defense secretary Voltaire Gazmin flew to Stennis together on April 15. Carter took the opportunity to announced joint U.S.-Philippine patrols, of which the A-10s’ April 19 flights were presumably just the beginning.