The U.S. Air Force is planning to retire its entire fleet of A-10 Warthogs, all 340 of them, but Congress is stepping up to try to stop them (h/t Bob). The plane is safe through the rest of 2014, but the future is uncertain.

Officially known as the “Thunderbolt,” it got the nickname “Warthog” pretty much exactly how you might expect: by being ugly, mean, and largely unstoppable. It has a 30-mm Gatling gun that can fire close to 4,000 rounds per minute. The plane has been in service since 1977, and the newest planes were built in 1984, i.e. thirty dang years ago. You do not want to piss this airplane off. It even got its own entry on the Badass of the Week website.

So why would the Air Force want to ax it? Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said, during an interview with PBS, that the A-10 is a “single-purpose airplane originally designed to kill enemy tanks on a Cold War battlefield.” It is less useful on today’s battlefields.

I’m sure members of Congress have good reasons to want to keep the A-10 fleet around, but allow me to propose what might be an alternate theory: in at least one vision of humanity’s future, the A-10’s very primitivity—having been designed and built in the 1970s and ’80s—makes it resistant to the machine apocalypse, and therefore an excellent weapon we humans can use to fight back. Think of the A-10 as the Battlestar Galactica to Skynet’s Cylon Basestar. Or just watch this video clip (with enjoyably ironic Russian subtitles):

Photo credit: By SRA Greg L. Davis, USAF (defenseimagery.mil) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.