"Because CAS to airforce pilots ranks somewhere near garage sales and mowing the neighbor's grass in mission importance."

Uh huh. Right. The USAF HATES CAS. That's they operated the A-1, A-37, A-7, A-10, F-16, F-15E, B-1B, AC-130...

There is a reason the Marine Corps operates their own F-18s and Harriers...

So it's okay…

Yup. The wanted an aircraft that was survivable in a non-permissive environment and wouldn't take a week to arrive on scene if CAS was needed. The USAF said "Well, we've got a bunch of these F-16s. They drop bombs pretty damn well and their pilots are coming from the F-4 and A-7 communities. Will those work?" To which…

Yeah. It's 35 years old, it's airframe ain't getting any younger and there a half dozen other platforms that can - and have - been doing the same job as the A-10 for the past decade or so. A-10s have been responsible for only 15% of CAS missions over the past decade.

"The Warthog's straight wing maneuverability, heavy armor, defensive suite, honeycomb construction and redundant systems allows it to venture down into the MANPADS (shoulder fired head-seeking missile) engagement envelope, an area where no other fixed wing military aircraft was actually built to operate in."

The A-10…

Transferring A-10s to the Army. I LOVE this argument by armchairs

- Where will all these A-10s be based, both here and abroad?

Most of them end up in the Boneyard. They're stripped of anything useful before being scrapped. A few lucky ones end up as gate guards. Others get converted into QF-16 target drones.

Cry havoc and let slip the hogs of war...

The same TR-3 "Black Manta" that's been rumored to have existed since the 1991 Gulf War, where it was supposedly designating targets for the F-117? And in the past 23 years, while we've seen F-22, F-23, X-32, X-35, Boeing's Bird of Prey, Tacit Blue, Polecat, General Atomics Avenger, RQ-170, X-45, X-47, Dassault…

"Is this gonna be a standup fight, sir, or another bug-hunt?"

Thank you for proving the point of the article.

How long has the US Navy been doing this (shading out the markings)?
Since the early 1980s; basically around the time they started dropping the hi-viz gull gray-over-white schemes.

USMC F/A-18A in the original scheme worn by the Hornet, 1985

The first YF-16 flight was January 1974. The FSD jets were built in 1976. The first production model flew August 1978 and the first production jets hit started hitting squadrons in January 1979, so the F-16 was not too old for the original BSG. Viper is very much a BSG reference.

Unintentional?

You're doing god's work.

Yup, the JSF's maneuverability and payload requirements were refined at the request of the Navy and Boeing's delta wing design fell short of the new targets. A delta wing was an odd choice for the Navy in the first place; the last single-engine pure delta operated from a carrier deck being the F4D Skyray, and it…

Pretty early on.

This is where they're stored while they're waiting to be sold for scrap. Some of them are placed into long term storage (the dry, salt-free air doesn't corrode the airframe) to be sold off as surplus to allies. The US Navy bought a handful of zero-time F-16A/Bs that had been in long-term storage here after they were…

Well, the official name of the F-16 is "Fighting Falcon" but nobody calls them by that name. It's either "Viper" or "Lawn Dart" or "Raptor Training Aid."

B-1B's official name is "Lancer" but no one calls it that; it's "Bone."

The "Thunderbolt II" is better known as "Warthog." "Corsair II" was called "SLUF"

You can call…