By the late 1950s a small group of US Marine and Army officers argued that the wars America was actually fighting were small, dirty and close to the ground — and that supersonic jets were the wrong tool for them. Their thinking hardened into the tri-service LARA specification of the early 1960s: a cheap, rugged, two-seat aircraft able to take off and land in a few hundred metres from rough ground, loiter for hours, carry light ordnance, and be maintained in the field. North American Aviation’s NA-300 design won the competition in 1964, and seven YOV-10A prototypes were ordered.

Early testing forced real changes — the wing was widened and more powerful engines fitted before the production OV-10A flew in 1967 — but the concept held. The Bronco became one of the very few Western combat aircraft conceived specifically for counter-insurgency rather than adapted from a trainer or a fast jet, and that clarity of purpose is why the design kept proving relevant long after its contemporaries were scrapped.

Short takeoff and landing was a hard LARA requirement, not a bonus. The Bronco’s big high-lift wing, light wing loading and twin turboprops let it get airborne and stop again in a few hundred metres of rough, unprepared ground — and in trials it operated from roads and even carrier decks. The point was basing: instead of flying from a distant paved airfield, a Bronco could work from a strip scraped out beside the troops it supported, cutting response time to minutes. That rough-field toughness, combined with hours of loiter, is exactly why counter-insurgency planners kept rediscovering the type across six decades.

In 2015 the US ran an experiment called Combat Dragon II. Two ex-Marine Broncos — airframes that had passed through civilian agency hands — were rebuilt as OV-10G+, fitted with a stabilised L3 WESCAM MX-15 electro-optical sensor turret, laser-guided APKWS 70 mm rockets and secure datalinks, at a reported cost near $20 million for the pair. A tiny detachment deployed them to Iraq, where over roughly 120 sorties they reportedly acted as precise “flying snipers” against ISIS at a fraction of a jet’s operating cost. The trial fed directly into later US light-attack programmes.

The Bronco’s whole rationale was economy. A pair of small turboprops, a simple airframe and field maintenance meant it cost a small fraction of a jet fighter to buy and to fly — the argument that made LARA attractive in the first place and that resurfaced in the 2010s light-attack debate. No authoritative modern flyaway unit price or cost-per-flight-hour figure exists in the open record for the OV-10A, and the frequently quoted numbers are estimates rather than sourced accounting. What is well documented is the comparison the 2015 Combat Dragon II trial drew: a modernised Bronco could deliver precise strikes for a tiny fraction of the hourly cost of a fast jet — the enduring economic case for the type.