But in all sincerity, almost all of the problems you bring up are no longer problems.
I'm not sure that I agree. Even if all of the past concerns have been addressed, that doesn't address all of the concerns. As a reminder, I see problems on the Army side as well...I don't think we're asking the AF to get good at all the right things. More later.
. For example, as of 1 December 1995, there is only one definition of CAS.
Having the same language is important, and all the forces have done a pretty good job of synchronizing the words they use. But there is a difference between words and the concepts they represent. Without looking it up, CAS could be defined as any aircraft ordinance delivered under the control of ground forces on the ground forces side of the FSCL. It is all good that the word means the same thing, but we have lost the concept difference between the planned targets and the 'standby until we know what we'll need' type of missions. Now, I am a little out of date, but I think the problem is that the Army isn't even asking the AF for this enough.
Now it gets really philosophical as I explain my take on why the Army is not doing the right things to prepare for all the CAS support they need. We may be doing all the things we do very well, but are we doing all the right things?
This is another example of words and concepts not quite matching. The words I use are that there is a difference between 'warrior' and 'soldier' armies. Let me try to explain the difference I see. 'Warrior' armies may be well equipped, and very brave in combat, but they don't necessarily work together well and fight smart. 'Soldier' armies are disciplined, trained, smart, well coordinated and well led. The most obvious examples come from the ancient world, but the conceptual difference is still valid today. Numerically inferior (as well as physically smaller) Roman legions hacked apart what they called barbarians with near immunity. The Romans were soldiers, the barbarians were warriors. The same could be said of the Athenians vs. Persians on the plain of Marathon. Or Xenophon. In the later years of the empire, the Romans lost that professional edge. They had bigger armies..but were overwhelmed by forces smaller than what they previously swept aside with ease.
Skipping a lot of time, we see the same thing in the modern age. In WWI the Tsar's professional large standing army was squashed with ease by the Kaisers smaller forces. Same front a couple of decades later and Hitler's numerically inferior army in four months devastated Stalin's forces. But at the end of that four months the Germans had a significant numerical superiority but their best troops were spent. The few Russians that survived were hard and good. The attack stalled and stayed stalled. The Russian army (up until the end) that pushed the Germans out of Russia was smaller than the one that the Germans swept aside on the way in. The American Army at Kasserine Pass was fundamentally different than the one in Operation Cobra and the race across France. Technological differences do not come close to explaining the Arab-Israeli wars...that was a 'soldier' army fighting 'warrior' armies.
Now that I've rambled on a bit, let me explain why. The US military has become very proficient at slicing through warm butter. And we are very confident. We have fought 'warrior' enemies for several decades now. The Iraqis were revealed as unworthy opponents in conventional battle. Grenada and Panama weren't any better. But there is a serious risk that somewhere along the line, we're going to face a 'soldier' army. And I don't want to bring a butter knife to that knife fight.
Maybe the AF doesn't think about this as much because it is such a technologically dominated force. The tactics used are controlled to a very great extent by the technology you bring to the fight...a fighter can only do what it can do. I'm not dismissing AF tactics, but that the bounds of its effects are much smaller.
And while the air fight may never have been competitive for numerical and technological reasons, the ground fight could have been. The Iraqi army could have performed much better than it did. I know the Israelis could have done much more with the assets the Iraqis had. I know I and my men could have. And we have to prepare for beating the best. That wasn't the Iraqis.
The Romans had been squashing opponents for quite some time when they got a rude shock...they faced another soldier army in the form of the Carthaginians. And it was ugly. They got too comfortable fighting Aeduii, and were literally shocked when they faced forces as capable as themselves. I'm worried that we as a military are getting too comfortable fighting Iraqis and aren't preparing to fight a military as capable as ours. And that capability goes very far beyond technology.
Both the Army and AF have gotten very good at shaping the battlefield and forcing the enemy to fight our fight. But we have been fighting opponents willing to just get shaped. What happens when fight an opponent that is just as actively shaping us? We as a military fight to get inside and stay inside the enemies OODA loop. Recently we have been successful. Are we next time?
That getting back to our original conversation and the use of CAS. We have gotten good at using it to shape. That is the planned targets both on the AF and Army side of the FSCL. But we aren't practicing how to use it to stop the enemy from shaping us. CAS is, or could be, one of the most versatile and fast forces to respond to that. But we don't practice that much. Indeed, that concept may even have dropped out of our now unified dictionary.
Your perspective is highly colored by our success in Iraq. And a big part of that is the total air dominance of the whole theater and the ability to use huge amounts of AF assets to shape the ground fight. That may not always be the case. That is what I was talking about when I was addressing allocation of aircraft for CAS. In Iraq we may have had CAS coming our of our ears, but that will not always be the case. Huge amounts of those multi-role platforms may be dedicated to trying to maintain air superiority over critical areas, or extending air superiority over additional parts of the battle space. Or dedicated to moving areas from superiority to supremacy to dominance. Aircraft have a lot of good uses against a tough opponent, which ones will it be? Where will CAS be on that list?
I don't mean to sound panic stricken. We are very good. And we will stay very good. We can handle almost anything anyone could through at us. For now.
Think about the difference between 1931 German military potential and 1939 German military potential. Things can change fast. I think an argument could made that PRC is going through something similar. Their military (at least their army) is shrinking rapidly. But becoming much more effective. They are acquiring large numbers of technologically modern fighting systems. They are putting much much more effort on training and developing how they will fight. They recognize the differences between our military and theirs, and are actively trying to figure out how they could beat us. Because if they can beat us, they can beat anyone. They may not be able to beat us now, but they are actively trying to be able to beat us in the near future. That includes not only their military development but also their economic development. There is a reason they are demanding construction facilities in China from both Boeing and Airbus in order to get plane contracts. They want to learn how to build modern planes the best way. And I can guarantee that they have plans bigger than jetliners for that knowledge. They are trying to modernize their forces, but also trying to figure out how to fight from a technological deficit but numerical superiority effectively. Don't think it can't be done...look at the Sherman tanks in France.
And I am not blameless. I know much more about how the Soviets would have fought than I do about how the Chinese will fight. But a big part of that is that we don't know how they will fight. That is a big problem. If you were in the PLAAF, how would you fight the US? I can't answer that, and whatever answer you come up with can probably be improved by the literally hundreds of thousands of Chinese thinking about the problem.
I don't mean to indicate that this is all about China. It is about us being as good as we can be...staying razor sharp and not a butter knife. It might be China in 10 years. It might be India in 20. By 2050 Yemen will have a bigger population than Russia. The world is changing, and we have to keep getting better. Our greatest enemy is complacency. That is what I fear most.
And I am sorry to say that is what I see not only in a lot of the military (I won't say AF, because it is a problem in other branches as well most definitely including the Army). I see it in your posts. I see it in the pressure to cut the F22. I see it in killing the Crusader. I see it in making the FCS lighter and more strategically mobile....and less capable than it could be. I see it in 'Stryker' brigades.
I support the development of 'medium' forces (including the necessary airlift) because that is what we are told we need. But it is no where near all that we need. I have to say that perhaps it would be appropriate for the Army to stay focused on being the absolute best at the tactical and operational levels and let the Marines take on the strategic mobility challenge. That may include expanding the Marines at the expense of the Army. But what I am afraid of is that we are so focused on the wars we are fighting that we are not preparing for the wars we may have to fight.
"Both the Army and AF have gotten very good at shaping the battlefield and forcing the enemy to fight our fight. But we have been fighting opponents willing to just get shaped."
I would argue that no opponent is "willing to just get shaped". Instead, we are incredibly good and finding and exploiting their weaknesses in order to make them "shapeable". Our most recent opponents do not have a history of being willing to be shaped. The Afghani Mujahideen defeated a Cold War Superpower that shared a common border with Afghanistan. The Iraqi Army fought an 8 year war against the Iranians that resulted in a draw despite the use on both sides of massive human wave assaults, chemical weapons, and modern (for that time period) conventional weapons. The methods with which we executed our operations in Afghanistan were very different from how we executed in Iraq. Our flexibility (and success) indicates we are very much capable of finding a way of working inside the OODA loop of a verity of foes. And I think you underestimate the enemies we've faced since 2001 (and before), and our ability to adapt our traditional strengths to counter an enemy, when you say our success has more to do with the enemy's willingness to be shaped rather than our ability to find a way to shape them.
"Your perspective is highly colored by our success in Iraq."
Let me offer you a little better insight into my perspective. In the last month and a half I have flown almost nothing but air to air training sorties against a quantitatively superior air threat simulating SU-27 fighters armed with their latest beyond visual range weapons. They are allowed to use Western tactics to counter our weapons and tactics. On some sorties we have been outnumbered by as much as 3 to 1. When I'm not flying those sorties, I am in the midst planning an exercise with the Canadian Navy in which we will fight against numerically superior forces in a littoral environment with full electronic jamming and an Aegis quality surface to air missile threat. Between now and then we will continue our training with tactical air control parties and special forces units spinning up to deploy to places that are both in and not in the news. Those scenarios range in scope from taking out a single vehicle or command post, to attacking an armored convoy maneuvering to engage within 1km of the men controlling us. Finally, we are already developing a training plan to ensure we are ready for our next deployment to OIF which will happen in less than a year. The idea that the Air Force is sitting around stroking itself over the success of its most recent operations is just as flawed as the suggestion that the Air Force is somehow stuck in a Cold War mindset. We have written, absorbed and filed the lessons learned from OIF, and are in the midst of prepping for the next fight. Our assumption is that fight will be somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Beyond that, our assumptions are wide open.
"If you were in the PLAAF, how would you fight the US?"
Economically. China has nothing to gain from a military conflict with the West, and it knows it. But lets say we end up at war anyway. Let me ask you this...do you see any way we could defeat the Chinese military in a conventional conflict? Do you think our best course of action would be to go toe to toe with the PLA and duke it out like two traditional armies? Or would we be better served by finding an alternative course to defeat them before we meet them on the battlefield. I am getting the impression that the Army is envisioning massive troop movements as we engage the Chinese. I think that would be suicide. We are no longer an agrarian or an industrial society. We cannot fight like we are. We are a technology driven society, and that is our greatest strength. We need to use that strength to defeat an enemy with Chinese strengths.
"Our greatest enemy is complacency."
I can't vouch for the Army, but the assumption of the Air Force is that the enemy is good and getting better.
"I see it in your posts."
Than I am misleading you. When I say I am not a big supporter of the F-22, it is because I recognize that we need to move to the next level of aerial warfare. The assumption of the Navy prior to Pearl Harbor was that the Navy with the most powerful battleships would win. Then the Japanese destroyed our Pacific fleet using aircraft carriers. The assumption during the Cold War was mutually assured destruction was an inevitable stalemate that would end only when one side made a mistake and triggered a global thermonuclear war. And then Reagan defeated the Soviets by outspending them, and they crumbled without firing a shot. The assumption before 2001 was that we needed to be prepared to battle our worst threat with superior military hardware. Then a whackjob in a turban proved that with just 19 men, he could bring the world's only superpower temporarily to its knees and we never even fired a pistol. If a country like the one we live in, with the resources we have and the technology we've mastered, looks at a country like China and envisions fighting a conventional military battle we deserve our inevitable fate. Buy the Air Force 1000 F-22's, but when the Chinese launch an invasion of Taiwan, where are we going to base them. Buy the Air Force 1000 C-17's, but when the North Korean hoard streams into Seoul, and decimates the southern half of the Korean peninsula with biological agents, where are we going to land them? If the Army's game plan is to counter the Chinese, or Koreans, or Indians, or Yemenis with its current force structure (or with its current force structure times 2, or 3), then it is the Army that is mired in a Cold War mentality and is incapable of moving on. Fortunately, I don't believe that is the case.