Nearly seventy airmen lined the flight line at Nellis Air Force Base on Tuesday morning and saluted an aeroplane. The A-10 Thunderbolt II lifted off into a cloudless Nevada sky, turned out over Las Vegas, and did not come back.

That was the last Warthog assigned to Nellis. The base that taught the American Air Force how to fly close air support no longer has the aircraft that defined it.

The first A-10 arrived at Nellis in 1977. For forty-nine years the base was where the tactics came from — where the software was written, the avionics upgraded, the precision weapons integrated, and where the US Air Force Weapons School’s 66th Weapons Squadron turned out more than 300 A-10 weapons officers across roughly a hundred classes. Almost everything in the Warthog playbook was written on that ramp.

The Base That Wrote the Playbook

Nellis is not a sentimental posting. It is Red Flag, it is the Weapons School, it is where the Air Force works out how to actually use the aircraft it buys. Losing a type there is different from losing it at an operational base.

What leaves with the aeroplane is the institutional machinery around it: the instructors who knew the low-altitude gun pass cold, the test community that argued with engineers about targeting pods, the squadron culture that treated troops-in-contact as the only metric that mattered. You cannot post that to another base in a C-17.

The men in charge on Tuesday were clear about what they are trying to preserve.

Bittersweet, From the People Who Fixed It

The maintainers are the ones who actually lose a job on a day like this. The 757th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron kept the Nellis Warthogs flying; its people are now being reassigned to F-35s and F-16s.

That is about as generous a reading as the day allows. The A-10 has spent more than a decade on the Air Force’s chopping block, saved repeatedly by Congress and by the uncomfortable fact that nothing else does what it does in quite the same way.

What Is Left, and What Replaces It

The fleet is now nearly gone. Davis-Monthan, the Warthog’s spiritual home, inactivated its last A-10 units in a ceremony on 18 September. Moody Air Force Base in Georgia is the only base left with active-duty A-10s, and Whiteman in Missouri holds a reserve squadron.

The replacement is not an aircraft. It is a redistribution: the F-15E, the F-16 and the F-35 are all supposed to absorb pieces of the mission. On paper this works. Modern targeting pods, datalinks and precision weapons mean a fast jet at 20,000 feet can put a bomb through a window with a level of accuracy the A-10’s designers never imagined.

Congress is not convinced. In October 2025 the Air Force said it still had 162 Warthogs and intended to cut the fleet to 54. In July this year a bipartisan bill with the finest acronym in American legislative history — the BRRRRT Act, H.R. 9780 — was introduced to force the service to keep at least 126 A-10s flying through 2033. It is still before the House Armed Services Committee.

The argument against retirement is the one A-10 crews have made for thirty years: a fast jet at 20,000 feet is not loitering over a firefight with a full magazine and eyes on the target, and the day the datalink fails or the weather sits at 1,500 feet, the difference stops being academic.

Task & Purpose on why the Air Force has spent so long trying to get rid of an aircraft so many people want to keep.

Nobody at Nellis on Tuesday was arguing the point. They were standing in a line with their hands at their brows, watching an ugly, slow, beloved aeroplane climb away over the Strip for the last time.

Sources: The War Zone; Stars and Stripes; DVIDS and US Air Force releases; Air & Space Forces Magazine.