ron allen. i heard you in your list of aircraft we can expect coming into the region, you mentioned the a-10. it has been called by its nickname the wart hog. it is also called a tank killer. is this to indicate any shift in strategy in and of itself? it s usually used against armor. reporter: well, isis has a great deal of armor, frankly. isis as you know about a year ago took over not only large parts of syria, but also took over the city of mosul, the iraqi units that had been trained and equipped at the cost of roughly $25 billion by the united states, many of those units collapsed, handed over their weapons or allowed their weapons to be seized. so isis operates with american armored humvees, with in some cases american made tanks. yes, if you want to take on isis
after the doctors without borders incident, and the a-10, the big hulking not very attractive wart hog tank killer. these are two weapons that have been around a long time. they may not be fast and beautiful and precision guided, but they are fierce combatants on the battlefield and both of them have been targeted for retirement, yet we still keep relying on them and i know in your years of service, you have had a lot of contact with both of these. yeah. no question. look, thank god the united states air force and naval air, they are incredibly effective. if they are in turkey where they don t have to have air-to-air refuelers coming off an aircraft carrier, they will be more effective. both the ac-130 which has a 105 cannon side shooting on it and the a-10 which operates very low to the ground, 30 millimeter
government that will be hit with big budget cuts. that s the impression you get from the media. they plan to shrink army to preworld war ii levels. here s a report from fox news. the ample me would shrink by 80,000 troops. the tank killer would be retired and the u2 spy plain would be replaced with an unmanned vehicle. it is the tuned down vehicle. the secretary of defense just says today s military can fight with fewer people because technology does more. what you are equipped to do how you are led, the equipment that you have, the modernization, the technology verses what army looked like in 1939 and 1940. there s no comparison. former congressman ron paul hosted the ron paul channel says
afghanistan. you do point out too that there is the tension issue when it comes to administrations and their goals that you as a captain who has been in afghanistan twice gets the sense of what it s like on the tkpwroupb. tell me the like on the ground. tell me the difference. if president reagan or president george w. bush proposed cuts like this because while we re $17 trillion in debt and have strategic cuts we have to make you can get that because they want to maintain a robust military. but from this administration they couch a chopping of our military as strategy. you look at this document and there is no coherence. and i ve talked to generals, officers who looked atd at this, there is no coherence. the a-10 being chopped on the ground and others being preserved for political reasons. the a-10, the tank killer, they were constructed to take out
they re going to get weaker. however this seesaw battle goes in the next few days, the impact of training, arms that are coming in, greater familiarity, it s going to tilt the balance in favor of the opposition. so from gadhafi s perspective, i think that time is not on his side and perhaps they understand this, but if they don t, then i hope that we ll do everything we can to encourage them to that effect. you say time is not on their side, on this evening, these two instruments of war are being taken off the table. the a-10, the tank killer can take gadhafi s troops off the ground. it s a very powerful war weapon, the ac-130, again the gatlin guns you see on the side here, this can be an incredibly painful experience that you re the ground forces and this is above you and you re coming in contact with, as of tonight, the