Only one plane in the US Air Force wears a pure A for attack
American military aircraft carry letter codes, and A stands for attack. Yet only a single type in the current US Air Force inventory has a plain, unmixed A: the A-10 Thunderbolt II. Meanwhile the F-111 was labelled a fighter despite barely being able to fight other planes. The labels are messier than they look.
An attack aircraft is built to hit targets on land or at sea more precisely than a bomber, while flying low enough to face heavy ground fire. Its main jobs are close support of troops and strikes on ships. US doctrine counts only tactical air-to-ground work as an attack mission, excluding both dogfighting and strategic bombing. The Navy calls the same thing a strike.
The category really came into its own during the Second World War, and each country approached it differently. The Americans and British mostly adapted light and medium bombers, sometimes with heavy forward-firing guns, such as the Mosquito Tsetse. Germany and the Soviet Union built purpose-designed, heavily armoured machines, the Henschel Hs 129 and the Ilyushin Il-2, calling them battle aircraft and storm troopers respectively, though cannon-armed Stukas far outnumbered the Hs 129.
The class then faded. Fighter-bombers took over many attack roles from late in the war onward. Precision-guided weapons let almost any aircraft strike accurately from safe high altitudes, and attack helicopters absorbed most of the low-level work that remained. Since the 1960s only two dedicated attack designs have entered wide service: the American A-10 and the Soviet-built Su-25, nicknamed the rook. Lighter attack planes, often adapted from trainers, have been used against insurgencies.
Naming systems add to the confusion. Until the end of the Second World War, the US Army Air Forces used A for both attack planes and light bombers, while the Navy preferred terms like scout bomber and torpedo bomber; the same Dauntless was an SBD at sea and an A-24 on land. The Navy only adopted the A label in 1946. Britain has used G for ground attack, as in the Harrier GR1, and imperial Japan used B for carrier attack bombers.
Source: Attack aircraft
