The A10 is amazing. It's a bunch of aeronautical engineers going "your military doctrine is obsolete" while sitting there and defying the entire fighter core to prove it wrong for 40 years. It made sense when it was designed - we were losing Vietnam, the USSR rolled tanks into Prague and we had just figured out that these things were the most effective weapon we had on an asymmetrical battlefield:

But you can shoot those things down. You can make a helicopter tough, but a tough helicopter is still a relatively fragile beast. You wanna see why the Columbians wanted tank killers?

But FARC rebels had access to heavy weapons, including large caliber machine guns, and were finding ways to obtain man-portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles.

One of the things that makes the A-10 so effective is it has a number of bravery aids. That titanium tub you sit in, for example. The fact that it can lose half a wing or an engine or half a tail and fly home. It's a highly survivable aircraft. Venezuela has something like 5,000 SA24s (although the fact that they haven't made it to the FARC confuses everyone) and an A-10 is going to limp away from an encounter with a vintage 2004 Russian MANPADS while an OV-10 is going to be a smokin' hole.

No, the big problem was that in 2001, State had asked the Pentagon for 11 A-10s to support its own counter-narcotics programs in Latin America, including Colombia. Faced with many of the same dangers as the Colombian Air Force, the Department had similarly come to the conclusion that it needed more rugged planes to spray herbicides on illicit drug crops. The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, better known by its acronym INL, had already bought armored crop dusters and modified OV-10 Broncos that offered better protection against enemy fire. They had even considered purchasing armed versions to escort the spray aircraft. But the A-10 would have dramatically increased the capability of the Bureau’s Air Wing.

Yeah. 30mm cannon, AGM-65s and paraquat.