A-10 Pilots Kim Campbell and Martha McSally Earned Their Places in History
These American female pilots flew one of the fiercest American warplanes ever made, the A-10 Warthog.
In honor of Women’s History Month, The National Interest continues our multi-part series honoring some of history’s most badass female warriors. Thus far, we’ve covered Soviet female warriors of World War II (aka, “The Great Patriotic War”), namely sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, fighter pilots aces Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak and Yekaterina “Kayta” Budanova, and the bomber pilots known as the “Night Witches.”
Now, we’re going to discuss a couple of American female warriors who pulled off their feats of derring-do in the twenty-first century—and both are still alive to tell their tales (much like retired U.S. Air Force Col. Allison Black, aka “The Angel of Death”). We’re talking about two badass American female pilots of one of the fiercest American warplanes ever made, the A-10 Warthog (officially the “Thunderbolt II,” but hardly anybody ever calls it that conversationally): Kim “KC (Killer Chick)” Campbell and Martha McSally. I suppose we could affectionately refer to these Warthog-driving ladies as “Hogettes” (not to be confused with the delightfully comical Redskins superfans of the 1980s and 1990s).
Hogette #1: Col. (USAF, ret.) Kim “KC (Killer Chick)” Campbell
This Kim Campbell is not to be confused with the former Canadian prime minister of the same name (and whose real name is actually Avril Phaedra Douglas Campbell). As I noted in one of my earliest published articles, “The A-10 Warthog Is 50 Years Old (And Is Still A Tank Killing Machine),” published on May 17, 2022:
“To cite just one example [of the A-10’s incredible ability to absorb punishment, that is], then-Captain (now retired USAF Colonel) Kim “K(iller)C(hick)” Campbell, during a mission over downtown Baghdad on 07 April 2003, was hit by enemy ground fire that completely knocked out her airplane’s hydraulics and damaged one engine, in addition to disabling the flight controls, landing gear & breaks, and horizontal stabilizer, not to mention leaving hundreds of holes in the airframe. Amazingly enough, Campbell was able to put the plane into manual reversion and fly the crippled Hog safely back to base an hour away. For her heroic actions, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.”
Born Kim Nichole Reed in June 1975 in Honolulu, Hawaii, she was a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy Class of 1997.
Long story short, after earning her pilot’s wings. “KC” ended up flying nearly 2,000 hours in the A-10, including more than 100 combat missions protecting troops on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, as noted on her LinkedIn bio, “KC” has served as a squadron commander, operations group commander, Air Force senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, military assistant to the under secretary of defense for Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and director for the Center for Character and Leadership Development at the United States Air Force Academy. In 2023, she published her bestselling book Flying in the Face of Fear: A Fighter Pilot’s Lessons on Leading with Courage.
Bravo Zulu and Sierra Hotel, Col. Campbell!
Hogette #2: Col. (USAF, ret.) Martha McSally
Martha Elizabeth McSally, born in 1966, was the first female pilot in the U.S. Department of Defense to fly in combat, making her a figurative and literal groundbreaker. She was also the first female in the Air Force to serve as the commander of any combat aviation squadron to include fighters and bombers. As she told Carl Bergquist of Air University Public Affairs in a December 6, 2006 interview:
“In 1984, I was attending the U.S. Air Force Academy and told my first flight instructor that I was going to be a fighter pilot. He just laughed, but after Congress repealed the prohibition law in 1991, and I was named as one of seven women who would be put through fighter training, he looked me up and said he was amazed I had accomplished my goal.”
Just like Campbell, McSally became a distinguished graduate of her USAF Academy class, in 1988. She completed undergraduate pilot training in 1991, went on to lead-in fighter training in 1994, and deployed to Kuwait in January 1995. It was during this deployment that she flew combat patrol over Iraq in support of Operation Southern Watch and thus attained her historic status:
“I was a young and new fighter pilot and here I was in Kuwait. On my first flight over Iraq, we were enforcing the no-fly zone, and as I crossed the Kuwait/Iraq border, I’ll never forget the feeling I had that I had asked for this and now I was here.”
McSally took command of the 354th Fighter Squadron at Davis-Monthan AFB, Tucson, Arizona, in July 2004. She retired from the USAF in 2010, served as a GOP congresswoman in AZ’s 2nd Congressional District from January 2015 to 2019—during which time she met with then-President Donald Trump and described her beloved former plane to him as “A badass airplane with a big gun on it”—and was a U.S. senator (in the same party and state) from January 2019 to December 2020. Since then, she has been the CEO of Martha McSally LLC. In May 2020, she published her bestselling book Dare to Fly: Simple Lessons in Never Giving Up.
And as she recently posted on her LinkedIn page: “True meritocracy … The jet doesn’t care if you have ovaries, just if you fly well and shoot accurately.”
Bravo Zulu and Sierra Hotel, Col./Sen. McSally!
About the Author: Christian D. Orr
Christian D. Orr was previously a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ) and 19FortyFive. He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch , The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at the Old Virginia Tobacco Company (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.
Image: DVIDS.