Deadly A-10 warplanes armed with the latest precision-bombing technology are thundering over Baltimore at an accelerating pace as National Guard pilots from Maryland and other states train here to deploy early next year with the Obama administration's expected military buildup in Afghanistan.
Officers said the planes will fly there in stages next winter for a combat tour of three to six months. Joining them will be the Maryland Air Guard's C-130J airlift cargo planes and crews.
The A-10 attack jets of Maryland's Air National Guard were the first in the nation to be fitted with the new digital-linked targeting and fire-control systems.
Maryland Guard pilots, who used the system in combat in Iraq, are now teaching their counterparts from Arkansas and Michigan on the upgraded model of the A-10 "Warthog."
Lacking specific deployment orders, the Maryland Guard does not yet know how many aircraft and pilots, air crews, technicians and others will go.
But tens of thousands more U.S. ground troops are likely to be sent into combat, and that means "more airplanes are needed," said Lt. Col. Dan Marino, commander of the Maryland Guard's 175th Wing operations group.
By this time next year, Maryland's heavily armed A-10s could be escorting the unarmed cargo planes on air drops of ammunition to troops pinned down by enemy fire, Marino said.
"When they have A-10s with them, all of a sudden nobody wants to act up," he said.
The upgraded technology enables the A-10s to use precision munitions such as a 500-pound, satellite-guided bomb that can level a building while leaving adjacent structures unharmed, pilots say. Flying low and slow in support of ground troops, the A-10s usually are guided to a target by a tactical air controller on the ground, sometimes a difficult task in the heat and smoke of battle. The new system passes target coordinates directly to pilots.
"That's all you need to drop it in the bucket," Marino said.
President Barack Obama has promised to send reinforcements into what military and intelligence officers describe as a worsening situation in Afghanistan, which is beset by government corruption, a booming drug trade and a violent Islamist insurgency that has spread across the deserts and mountains of southern, central and eastern Afghanistan.
Since the United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, 626 Americans have been killed in action there and 2,627 wounded, according to the most recent Defense Department accounting.
