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To: Chainmail
Aviators at a forward deployed airfield are the recipients of force protection provided by experts in airfield protection. Do you think the aviators should dictate what equipment and tactics the force protection units employ? And as a Marine FAC, how many CAS missions did you coordinate with slow moving, fixed wing, Marine assets?

And JDAMS have almost no CAS application. LGBs...loads.

55 posted on 12/22/2016 2:08:31 PM PST by Rokke
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To: Rokke

What you miss in your cloistered view is that ground combat is the focus of effort in war: the air fight is a supporting arm. The young people in the ground fight need air support, surgically applied, to overcome enemy strongpoints, assembly areas, routes of reinforcement and retreat. It isn’t the same as airfield defense and nowhere as simple.

The Air Force has stubbornly resisted the “air-delivered artillery” perspective for more than three quarters of a century, insisting that “battlefield interdiction” is the proper use of air power - there is even an excellent color film that was put out in 1944 that described that tactic in lieu of close air support in the Italian theater.

Those of us on the ground know how effective a good air strike can be and how many of our lives will be at risk without that magnificent asset. I very likely owe my life and many of the lives around me to a low-flying F-4 with a load of Snake and Nape with a crew with brass balls. He was flying very low Indeed and he did not miss.

Merely guiding a munition to a given grid doesn’t do enough. Close Air requires knowing who you are supporting, what you are engaging, and that you can react very, very quickly - including munition flight time to the target and the configuration of the target array. Close Air Support makes the aircraft and crew an integral part of the ground combat element, not just a visiting bomb delivery system.


70 posted on 12/22/2016 4:41:38 PM PST by Chainmail (A simple rule of life: if you can be blamed, you're responsible.)
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