The Air Force A-10 close air support jet is what goes in when soldiers on the ground call for air support. But most of the 356 jets in service have radios that have trouble communicating securely with ground troops, while a $60 million radio upgrade has been put off due to budget constraints.

The Air Force only has 63 newer radios for the jets which can communicate securely without a three-to-five second delay that could result in a friendly fire incident, Air Combat Command officials said.

The new AN/ARC-210 radios do not have a delay in secure communication, and the Air Force has been rotating them in and out of jets as they enter and leave the Iraq and Afghanistan areas.

“This rotatable pool of radios we have now is okay, but with all the wear and tear due to frequently moving them from jet to jet, their lives are shortened,” said Maj. Don Henry, ACC A-10 Program Element Monitor at Langley Air Force Base. “In a few years, we’ll need more radios to replace the 63 we already have, or we can just go ahead and buy enough for all 356 jets and reduce the wear and tear of what we have now.”

Otherwise, with the old radios, something like this could happen:

How’s this for a hair-raising wartime moment?

A soldier under siege in Iraq radios for help from above, summoning aid from an A-10 attack jet. But the pilot can’t hear the first three to five seconds of what the soldier is saying.

“The soldier could be saying ‘hold your fire,’ but all the pilot hears is ‘fire,’” said 1st Lt. Natasha Waggoner, a spokeswoman at Air Combat Command. . . .

Target identification already is tricky in places like Iraq, where insurgents blend in with the local population and “good guys are right next to the bad guys,” Henry said.

“It’s a risk we’ve had to deal with up to this point, but it’s not an acceptable risk anymore,” he said. “The A-10s need this new radio desperately.”

So far, no known fatalities have resulted from the radio glitch, but the situation is a tragedy waiting to happen, Henry said. — Arizona Daily Star

No organization, least of all the military, likes to release bad news. But Air Combat Command staffers said that their hope was that Congress would find the money for the new radios somewhere, before the tragedy waiting to happen actually happened.

Maybe if Congress quit spending money on bridges to nowhere and other pork-barrel crap, our military would have the equipment they need.