The first time I heard an A-10 Warthog open up its 30mm cannon, I was in Army Basic Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. We were doing something miserable — push-ups in the dirt, a road march, MRE for lunch in the rain, the specifics blur together — when somewhere off in the distance, across the woods, came that sound. That long, low, ripping, throaty BRRRRT. The kind of noise that makes a drill sergeant pause mid-sentence and a dozen privates instinctively look up at the sky.
I didn’t know it then, but the A-10s we were hearing were almost certainly out of Whiteman Air Force Base, working the live-fire range at Cannon Range on Fort Leonard Wood. They were practicing — strafing runs, bomb passes, pop-ups — the same things they’d one day do for soldiers downrange who needed a problem solved in a hurry. And every soldier on that post stopped, smiled, and listened. Because we already knew, even as brand-new privates, what that sound meant: somebody, somewhere, would not be having a good day.
A four-ship of A-10 Thunderbolt IIs training at the range. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Why the A-10 Sounds Like Nothing Else
If you’ve never heard one in person, the BRRRRT is hard to describe. It’s not a “boom” and it’s not a “rattle.” It’s somewhere between a chainsaw, a zipper, and a freight train — a single, sustained, mechanical roar that lasts a second or two and then stops. There’s no echo of individual rounds. No machine-gun chatter. Just one continuous noise that reaches you a long second after the rounds have already gone downrange.
That sound is the GAU-8/A Avenger — a seven-barrel, 30mm rotary cannon that fires somewhere around 3,900 rounds per minute. The barrels spin. The rounds come out faster than your ear can resolve them as individual cracks. The result is the BRRRRT — and it is, without exaggeration, one of the most distinctive sounds in modern military aviation. It’s the sound of an entire airplane built around a gun.
A close-up of the seven-barrel GAU-8/A Avenger 30mm rotary cannon — the noisemaker behind the BRRRRT. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
An Airplane Built Around a Gun
The A-10 Thunderbolt II — universally known as the Warthog, or just the Hog — is one of the strangest design stories in U.S. Air Force history. Most fighters get a gun bolted into a corner somewhere as an afterthought. The A-10 was built the other way around. The engineers at Fairchild Republic started with the GAU-8 Avenger and wrapped an airframe around it. The cannon is so big it has to be mounted slightly off-center so the recoil doesn’t yaw the entire jet sideways. The nose gear is offset to make room for the barrels.
The whole thing came out of the Vietnam War, when the Air Force realized it didn’t have a real close air support aircraft. Fast jets like the F-4 were too fast and too thirsty to loiter over a fight. The propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider was tough and beloved by ground troops, but it was old. The Army was about to get its own attack helicopter — the AH-56 Cheyenne — and the Air Force suddenly had a reason to care about close air support again.
The A-X program kicked off in 1966. Fairchild’s prototype, the YA-10, beat Northrop’s YA-9 in a fly-off, and the A-10 entered service in 1977. From the start, it was built around a single mission: getting low, slow, and ugly to support troops in contact with the enemy. Twin engines mounted high on the rear fuselage to survive ground fire and ingest less debris. A titanium “bathtub” around the cockpit to protect the pilot from small-arms fire. Redundant flight controls. Self-sealing fuel tanks. Manual reversion so a pilot could fly it home with the hydraulics shot out. The Hog was designed to take hits and keep flying.
An A-10 Thunderbolt II in the low-visibility gray paint scheme worn by the modern Warthog fleet. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Cannon Range and the BRRRRT Over Fort Leonard Wood
Cannon Range sits on the southern end of Fort Leonard Wood, deep in the Missouri Ozarks. It’s a heavy-weapons impact area — meaning the Army runs artillery, mortars, and demolition out there — and it doubles as one of the few live-fire aerial gunnery and bombing ranges in the central United States. For A-10 squadrons stationed within ferry distance, Cannon Range is gold. It’s a real range with real targets where pilots can practice strafing, low-angle bombing, and the kind of pop-up attack profiles they’d actually fly in combat.
The Warthogs that fly Cannon Range come from the 442nd Fighter Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri — an Air Force Reserve Command unit whose 303rd Fighter Squadron has been flying A-10s for decades. Whiteman is about a two-hour flight from Cannon Range as the Hog flies, which makes it a routine training trip. Pilots brief in the morning at Whiteman, fly down to Fort Leonard Wood, work the range, and recover home before dinner. For the soldiers training on the post — basic trainees, AIT students at the Engineer School, MP school students — the BRRRRT is just part of the soundtrack.
And here’s the thing nobody outside the military quite understands: that sound makes soldiers happy. It’s not noise pollution. It’s not an annoyance. When a soldier on the ground hears the BRRRRT — whether it’s at Fort Leonard Wood, Camp Bondsteel, Bagram, or some dusty FOB in Iraq — what they’re hearing is the sound of an enemy disappearing. Maximum damage being done to people who, a moment earlier, were doing their best to kill American soldiers. It is, genuinely, one of the most reassuring sounds in the U.S. military inventory. There’s a reason the unofficial A-10 squadron motto in some units is, “Go ugly early.”
Did You Know?
The GAU-8 Avenger and its ammunition system together weigh more than a Volkswagen Beetle — about 4,000 pounds installed. The cannon is so dominant in the airframe that the A-10 was, in a real sense, designed as the gun’s delivery vehicle.
What the Warthog Actually Carries
The 30mm gun gets all the attention, but the A-10 is a serious weapons truck. Eleven hardpoints — three under the fuselage and four under each wing — can carry up to about 16,000 pounds of ordnance. In a typical close air support load, you’ll see a mix of Mk-82 and Mk-84 general-purpose bombs, GBU-12 and GBU-38 laser- and GPS-guided bombs, AGM-65 Maverick missiles for armor and hardened targets, rocket pods full of 2.75-inch Hydra rockets for area suppression, and AIM-9 Sidewinders for self-defense. Modern A-10C-model jets carry a Litening or Sniper targeting pod that lets the pilot identify and laze targets from a safe stand-off.
What makes the Hog different from any other strike aircraft in the inventory isn’t the weapons list. It’s the way the airplane delivers them. The A-10 can loiter for hours over a target area on relatively little fuel. It can fly slow enough to actually see what’s happening on the ground. It can take ground fire and keep working. And — when the situation calls for it — it can come down to gun range and put 30mm rounds on a target with surgical precision. No other fixed-wing platform in the U.S. inventory does that.
An A-10 Warthog launching an AGM-65 Maverick missile during training. The Maverick is the Hog’s go-to weapon for armored vehicles and hardened targets. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Combat Record: Why Soldiers Trust the Hog
The A-10 was built to kill Soviet armor in the Fulda Gap. The Cold War ended before it ever got the chance, but in 1991, in Operation Desert Storm, the Hog finally went to work. Over six weeks of combat, A-10s flew more than 8,000 sorties and were credited with destroying more than 900 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 military vehicles, and 1,200 artillery pieces. Two Hogs even shot down Iraqi helicopters with the gun. The jet that critics had called too slow and too ugly turned out to be exactly what the war needed.
The Hog has been everywhere since. The Balkans in the late 1990s. Iraq in 2003. Afghanistan, almost continuously, from 2001 onward — where it became the favorite call sign on any troops-in-contact radio net. ISIS-hunting in Iraq and Syria after 2014. If you talk to ground troops who served downrange, you’ll hear the same story over and over: when the call went out and the Hogs showed up, the fight changed. The BRRRRT meant the cavalry had arrived.
The most famous A-10 story from the post-9/11 wars is probably Captain Kim Campbell’s flight out of Baghdad in April 2003. Her Hog took a surface-to-air missile hit that destroyed the hydraulics, riddled the fuselage with shrapnel, and turned one stabilizer into Swiss cheese. She flew home in manual reversion — the mechanical backup the engineers built in for exactly this kind of bad day — and landed safely. The airplane was repaired and went back into the fight. That’s the A-10 in one story.
Battle damage on Captain Kim Campbell’s A-10 after she flew it home in manual reversion from Baghdad in 2003. The Warthog is famously hard to kill. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The Air Force Has Tried to Retire It for Decades
For most of the last twenty years, somebody in the Pentagon has been trying to retire the A-10. The arguments are always the same: it’s slow, it’s old, it can’t survive in a high-end peer fight against modern air defenses, and the close air support mission could be done by F-35s or F-16s or — depending on the year — drones. Every time the Air Force floats the idea, the Army gets loud, Congress gets louder, and the Hog gets a stay of execution.
The Air Force’s current plan is to retire the A-10 fleet over the next several years. Whether that actually happens on schedule depends on the same dynamics that have kept the Hog flying for half a century: ground troops love it, members of Congress with bases in their districts love it, and nothing in the U.S. inventory truly replaces what it does. The F-35 is a stealthy multirole fighter, but it doesn’t loiter like a Hog and it doesn’t carry a 30mm cannon designed to gut a tank. The Hog isn’t immortal — but it’s been buried more times than it’s actually been put in the ground.
Why the BRRRRT Means Something to Soldiers
Coming back to that morning at Fort Leonard Wood, in formation, in the rain, listening to a Hog work the range somewhere across the trees — there’s a reason that sound mattered. Basic training is, by design, a long lesson in being small. You don’t sleep when you want, eat when you want, talk when you want, or know what’s happening next. Hearing the BRRRRT was a reminder that somewhere in the same Army I had just joined, there were people whose entire job was to do extraordinary things to anyone who tried to hurt the rest of us.
That feeling never goes away. Talk to any soldier who has been on the ground when the Hogs came in — Iraq, Afghanistan, anywhere — and they’ll tell you the same thing. The BRRRRT means somebody up there sees you. The BRRRRT means the bad guy stops shooting. The BRRRRT means home is one step closer. It’s not a sound effect. It’s a promise.
That’s why the A-10 has the cult following it does. It’s not the fastest jet, or the prettiest, or the most modern. It is, however, the one that ground troops have personally been saved by — and there is no fan club in the world quite like soldiers who have come home because of an airplane.
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A-10 Warthog FAQ
What does BRRRRT actually mean?
BRRRRT is the onomatopoeic spelling of the sound the A-10’s GAU-8/A Avenger 30mm rotary cannon makes when fired. The gun fires fast enough — roughly 3,900 rounds per minute — that the human ear can’t separate individual rounds. What you hear is one continuous, low, ripping noise. Soldiers, pilots, and military aviation fans have been spelling it some variation of “BRRRRT” for decades.
What Air Force base flies A-10s into Fort Leonard Wood’s Cannon Range?
The A-10s most often heard at Fort Leonard Wood come from the 442nd Fighter Wing — an Air Force Reserve Command unit based at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. Whiteman is best known as the home of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, but the 442nd’s 303rd Fighter Squadron has flown A-10s out of Whiteman for years and uses Cannon Range as a primary live-fire training area.
Why is the A-10 called the Warthog?
The official name is Thunderbolt II — a nod to the WWII P-47 Thunderbolt that was famous for ground attack. But pilots and crews almost immediately started calling it the Warthog because of its blunt, tusk-faced look up front, the way it hugs the ground, and its general “ugly is a feature, not a bug” personality. The nickname stuck. Today even the official Air Force and squadron patches lean into it.
Has the A-10 ever been shot down?
Yes — but the survival record is remarkable for an airplane that flies low and slow over hostile ground. A handful of A-10s have been lost to enemy fire across Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and many more have come home with battle damage that would have killed any other fixed-wing aircraft. The titanium cockpit “bathtub,” redundant flight controls, twin separated engines, and manual reversion system were all designed for exactly this scenario.
Will the A-10 really be retired?
The Air Force has announced plans to retire the fleet in the coming years and divest A-10 squadrons in phases. Whether the schedule actually holds is a question for Congress more than for the Pentagon — the Hog has survived more retirement attempts than any other airplane in the inventory. For now, A-10s are still flying, still training at ranges like Cannon Range at Fort Leonard Wood, and still on call when ground troops need them.
The Bottom Line
The A-10 Warthog is one of the few weapons systems in the U.S. inventory that has a personality. It’s ugly. It’s loud. It’s old. It was supposed to be retired thirty years ago. And it is, by a wide margin, the airplane that ground troops trust more than any other. The BRRRRT isn’t just a sound — it’s a piece of military culture that connects a basic trainee at Fort Leonard Wood listening to a distant gun run, a pilot at Whiteman briefing a Cannon Range mission, and a soldier in Afghanistan calling for help on the radio. It’s all the same airplane, doing the same job, making the same noise.
If you liked this one, we’ve got related deep dives on the F-15E Strike Eagle and how a pure dogfighter became the Air Force’s deadliest bomber, the strange WWII gremlin origin story behind “Lil Bastard” nose art, and a piece on WWII bomber nose art and the Lucky 13 tradition. And if you want to wear the BRRRRT on your chest, our A-10 Warthog tee is over on Etsy.
Read next: F-15E Strike Eagle: How a Pure Dogfighter Became the Air Force’s Deadliest Bomber.
A Note from Ben
The A-10 occupies a unique place in my memory. The first time I heard one fire its 30mm cannon, I was at Fort Leonard Wood for Basic Combat Training, and the sound — that extended BRRRRT that you feel as much as hear — is unlike anything else in aviation. It tells you immediately that the A-10 was designed for a completely different purpose than any other aircraft in the Air Force inventory. That connection between an aircraft and the soldiers it protects, and the institutional fight to keep the A-10 flying, is what this piece is really about.
Sources & Further Reading
This article draws on U.S. Air Force official A-10 Thunderbolt II fact sheets, Fairchild-Republic historical program materials, and Congressional records and testimony related to A-10 retention debates. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force maintains an A-10 Thunderbolt II in its collection. For firsthand accounts of A-10 combat operations, the Air Force’s official historical publications are a good starting point.
For readers who want to explore further, these are reliable starting points:
- U.S. Air Force official website — aircraft fact sheets and news
- National Museum of the U.S. Air Force — aircraft histories and exhibits
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — aviation history resources
More from the shopBrowse the full WWII aviation & nose art collection — tees, prints, glassware and gifts, all original designs.
Ben & Nicole Mathews
We’re based in St. Augustine, Florida, sharing the places we’ve actually been — from our home turf to corners of the U.S. and abroad. Ben is an attorney and a retired Air Force JAG (22 years), and a private pilot, which is why aviation and military history shows up here too.