Close Air Support -- CAS -- is one of those interesting things that you rarely read or think about when you think of air power, but is absolutely critical to mission success in anything that looks like conventional warfare.

Someone already linked John Boyd below in the comments. He's worth reading much more about --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)...

http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter-Pilot-Changed-ebook/d...

He's often credited with his later-life grand strategy, but his Aerial Attack Study in the early 1960's is actually more impressive to me. He developed a working mathematical model of how fighters (and other aircraft) can gain or lose speed, velocity, turning, etc at different speeds/altitudes/etc based on their specs.

A lot of "sexy-looking" fighters performed pretty poorly, and the Air Force command were aghast at many aspects of the study.

At the time, the "state of the art" was building multi-purpose aircraft that could do reconnaissance, establish air superiority (dogfighting), bomb enemy targets, etc. But these multi-purpose aircraft didn't excel on any parameter: they weren't large enough to carry the fuel and payload to be exceptional bombers, and they weren't fast and light enough to out-dogfight the leading Soviet aircraft.

The book on Boyd I linked talks about the back-and-forth nature of defense contracting and the armed forces in that era, which was a problem. Likewise, it describes the various jockeying for power and budget between the various branches of the armed services: Navy, Air Force, and Army all had aircraft and certain missions assigned to them, and fought to preserve and expand their territory.

Close Air Support (CAS) is a mission the Air Force was never so crazy about and was somewhat de-prioritizing compared to air superiority and strategic bombing missions... yet, at the same time, they didn't want to lose the mission to the Army for political reasons.

Meanwhile, Boyd and the people he worked with, notably aircraft designer Pierre Sprey who led the A-10's build -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Sprey -- they didn't see their roles as just related to being a technician or soldier, but were very deep historians and scientists.

They noted that a lot of Nazi Germany's early success was the mix of maneuver warfare mixed with close-air support from Stuka Bombers. The Nazi advantage was erased when the Western Allies eventually achieved air superiority, but Luftwaffe CAS was absolutely devastating in the early stages of WWII.

Sprey, Boyd, and the rest built around the theory of CAS and seeing the potential of it for turning a ground war, and then sat to work out an aircraft that was about as un-sexy as it gets, but was incredibly safe for the pilot, could stay involved in the battle for a very long time, and could have devastating impact on enemy ground forces.

The A-10 thus isn't flashy, can't do multi-mission roles (at the time, it was the only pure CAS airplane in the U.S. armed forces; it only did close air support and nothing else), it's not particularly fast, it doesn't look good at an air show, it's not particularly prestigious.

It is, however, devastatingly effective as a tank killer, artillery killer, convoy killer. Rather effective against infantry too.

The lessons from Boyd, aircraft design, etc, are probably worth reading for anyone who deals with technology or organizational development, since they seem timeless -- eventually prestige and politics come to dominate true mission, and how do you navigate around that?

The book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the World" is worth reading; so are the remnants of various briefings Boyd and colleagues gave with commentary. A useful insight into lots of things, not the least of them how to actually get things done with ingenuity and how to really be service-oriented in a world that often doesn't reward that. Marvelous book, amazing men, great stories, lots of lessons. Highly highly recommended.