Interesting!
The Army and Marines... using common sense, again.
Interesting. I forwarded the story on to my wonderful DH.
personally I like the idea of officer mission commanders, at least, because I don't want enlisted guys getting in trouble trying to meet the ROE criteria for remote weapons employment. It isn't a superiority thing, it is a looking out for the kids thing. You know if they screw up they are going to get hammered.
The USN is not plannng on using officers as UAV drivers and are going with senior enlisted as well. For a while the USAF wanted 1000hr pilots to drive UAVs, but seems to have backed off a bit from that.
Just let the Gunney Sarges and other NCO’s free & loose to defend our nation (& indeed the Western world) and there is little about which to worry.
CAP? AF all the way. Own the airspace so the low and slow can support the ground pounders. Bombs don't win wars. Bombs enable ground forces to more quickly shoot, move and communicate. But bombs by themselves don't win wars.
Boots on the ground taking and holding territory, and imposing our will wins wars.
/johnny
The AF doesn’t like to get it’s hands dirty or roughed up for that matter.They are a force whose members are decidedly tilted toward the more cerebral among us.
Did you know there is even a hand cream dispenser in the cockpits of the aircraft?
The third member of the Predator family is the MQ-9 Reaper. This is a 4.7 ton, 11 meter/36 foot long aircraft with a 20 meter/66 foot wingspan that looks like the MQ-1. It has six hard points, and can carry about a ton (2,400 pounds) of weapons. These include Hellfire missiles (up to eight), two Sidewinder or two AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, two Maverick missiles, or two 227 kg/500 pound smart bombs (laser or GPS guided.) Max speed is 400 kilometers an hour, and max endurance is 15 hours. The Reaper is considered a combat aircraft, to replace F-16s or A-10s in ground support missions.
Once again our Air Force is showing its apparent distain for ground support. Replace the A-10 with this thing? The UAV doesn’t even have a gun!
In Viet Nam we loved the old A-1 Skyraider. It could hang around for hours and carried a good bomb load along with four 20 mm cannons. If the fast flyers were sent to help us they’d fly in, drop their load and fly back to rearm/refuel.
Our Air Force is in love with high and fast. Low and slow works much better for ground support. It also wants everything that flys under its control. Back in the early 60s all Army fixed wing aircraft were turned over to the Air Force. It’s the same with our Navy – now they want to take over all Army ships and boats.
Yep, we just laugh at all CAS requests from those ground pukes.
Total bullshit.
Hey, how's that airspace gonna be divided up for control?
IIRC, the Army wants non-ATO aircraft to be free to operate up to 15K with ground-pounders flying them. Yeah, no hazards there. I've seen where a single aircraft in the wrong altitude blocks can cause all hell to break loose. The airspace over a combat zone can be quite crowded.
Is the solution to just have a ROZ over every ground unit engaged in combat operations? If so, it would be like every separate ground unit was fighting its own little war. No unity of effort. We've been down this road before, and it sucks.