The U.S. Air Force has formally dubbed its forthcoming OA-1K light attack aircraft as the Skyraider II. The name is a callback to the famed A-1 Skyraider, which Air Force units flew during the Vietnam War. The new moniker comes as questions are swirling around how the OA-1K will actually be employed as the U.S. military shifts away from counter-insurgency and other low-intensity missions to preparing for high-end fights.
Air Force Special Operations Command’s (AFSOC) leadership officially announced the OA-1K’s new name at the Global SOF Foundation’s Special Air Warfare Symposium today. The Skyraider II name had already leaked out in various places, but had not been formally confirmed. The OA-1K designation, which is non-standard and out-of-sequence within the U.S. military’s joint service aircraft and missile designation system, is itself a clear reference to the original Skyraider. The A-1J was the last variant of that aircraft in U.S. service. The OA-1K’s prime contractor, L3Harris, had previously marketed the aircraft as the Sky Warden, a name the company also said was meant to hearken back in part to the A-1.
“I am excited about the Skyraider II,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, commander of AFSOC, said in a statement. “I think we have a capability that’s only ours, and we are going to have the ability to shape that into something that the rest of the nation might not even know they need right now.”
The two-seat OA-1K can carry up to 6,000 pounds of munitions and other stores, including precision-guided missiles and bombs and podded sensor systems, on up to eight underwing pylons. L3Harris has previously said the aircraft can fly out to an area up to 200 miles away and loiter there for up to six hours with a typical combat load. They also have a “robust suite of radios and datalinks providing multiple means for line-of-sight (LOS) and beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) communications,” according to the company.
AFSOC currently plans to acquire 75 Skyraider IIs, with the first example to be delivered this spring. The turboprop-powered OA-1K, a militarized derivative of the popular Air Tractor AT-802 crop duster, is a tail-dragging design like the much larger piston-engined Skyraider. The Skyraider II is set to be the first tail-dragging tactical combat aircraft anywhere in U.S. military inventory in decades.
Douglas Aircraft Company started development of the OA-1K’s namesake, which was originally designated the AD Skyraider, as a carrier-based attack aircraft at the tail end of World War II. U.S. Navy and Marine Corps units used variants of the type extensively during the Korean War.
The Skyraider notably offered significantly greater endurance and ordnance capacity – upwards of 10,000 pounds of munitions spread across up to 15 hardpoints under the wings and fuselage, along with four wing-mounted 20mm cannons – compared to jet aircraft coming into service at the same time. The Skyraider’s increasingly anachronistic look among the rest of the U.S. military combat aircraft fleets led to it gaining the additional nickname “Spad,” a reference to French-made SPAD biplanes that the U.S. Army Air Service, among others, flew during World War I.
The Skyraider’s large size and impressive maximum takeoff weight also led to the creation of specialized airborne early warning, electronic countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare variants. Substantially redesigned versions with side-by-side seating for crew members in greatly expanded cockpits were also produced. With the U.S.-military-wide adoption of a standardized designation system for aircraft and missiles in 1962, the various Skyraider types became variants and subvariants of the A-1.
The Navy and Marines continued to fly A-1s into the Vietnam War. The Air Force also acquired and flew hundreds of single and multi-seat Skyraider variants second-hand during the conflict in Southeast Asia. Air Force A-1s were heavily employed as escorts for helicopters during search and rescue missions, commonly referred to as the “Sandy” mission, and in support of special operations forces. The Skyraider’s ability to fly low and slow, as well as loiter for extended periods over a particular area, along with its large and diverse ordnance capacity, made it especially attractive for these roles.
Skyraiders also served with a number of foreign air arms over the years and remained in limited service into the 1980s in certain countries in Africa.
What the future might hold now for the Skyraider II is somewhat murky. The OA-1K follows some two decades of largely abortive light attack aircraft projects and experiments conducted across the U.S. military largely in the context of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), particularly operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those lower-intensity operations prompted persistent interest in exponentially cheaper alternatives to tactical combat jets, bombers, and other aircraft to provide close air support, armed overwatch, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) support, in permissive airspace. Light attack aircraft could also operate with smaller footprints and from sites closer to operating areas, even more far-flung ones, reducing the need for aerial refueling tanker and other support. This all, in turn, would also help free up other aircraft for more demanding and/or higher-priority missions, as well as just reduce costly wear and tear, especially on fast jets, from constant short-endurance sorties.
The final decision to acquire the OA-1K in 2022 notably came after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the general end of the GWOT-era. The expected roles and missions of the Skyraider II have now come under new scrutiny amid the more recent pivot toward preparing for future high-end fights, especially one in the Pacific against China. This includes a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, that noted U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had “not reevaluated its needs [for the OA-1K] despite changes to operational missions (such as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) and force structure reductions under consideration.”
GAO has also called into question the logic of using resources freed up from the divestment of special operations U-28A Draco and Beechcraft King Air-based ISR aircraft to support the OA-1K’s fielding. AFSOC and SOCOM have repeatedly insisted that what is now called the Skyraider II is not a direct replacement for either of those aircraft, and that additional platforms are being explored to meet future aerial intelligence-gathering needs.
Interestingly, as part of the announcement of the Skyraider II name today, Air Force Brig. Gen. Craig Prather, AFSOC’s director of Strategic Plans, Programs and Requirements, highlighted the OA-1K’s potential to “take on missions” along “the southwest border” with Mexico. The use of U.S. military ISR aircraft, including highly capable strategic-focused Air Force RC-135V/W Rivet Joints and Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol planes, to surveil parts of Mexico from U.S. and international airspace has surged under President Donald Trump.
Prather also highlighted operations across Africa as potentially being in the OA-1K’s future. There has also been talk in the past about whether the Skyraider II could be used in more novel ways for crisis response and other missions.
“From when OA-1K was conceptualized and decided on until now, the world’s changed a little bit,” Conley told TWZ and others at a media roundtable on the sidelines of the Air & Space Forces Association’s main annual conference last September. “But as we move forward, I think there’s opportunity to look at, again, some novel mission sets. … how quick can we get the wings on and off it so we could use it in some sort of crisis response, if we needed to? Where does the role of SIGINT [signals intelligence], or ELINT [electronic intelligence] or … some sort of ISR collect [factor in] there. I think there’s opportunity for that. Again, not anything we’ve committed to yet.”
“I tell my team every day [that] the Pacific is incredibly important to us for all the reasons – you know, Secretary [of the Air Force Frank Kendall has put emphasis on] China, China, China – we get it,” he added at that time. “But we’ve also got a rest of [the] world mission that I’m responsible for, as well.”
“We still have a global mission. … I don’t think we’re done in CENTCOM,” he continued, referring to U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations across the Middle East. “And I think there’s probably some disconnects in how we analyze what the future fight will look like.”
There are additional questions now about the OA-1K’s future amid significant expected cuts to existing programs across the U.S. military as part of a shift in resources to new priorities, including Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has initiated a review of spending plans for the 2026 Fiscal Year with a goal of freeing up eight percent, or approximately $50 billion, for reallocation.
If nothing else, time will tell whether or not the OA-1K lives up to the storied heritage behind its new name.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com