Despite all of the newest technologies, a USAF Bone crew managed to kill several Special Forces guys and the Afghan battalion commander due to "failures of tactics, techniques and procedures" and an over dependence on the SNIPER pod.
I would love to believe that the Air Force is past the bad old days of bombing us instead of them but new technologies or not, it's still happening.
What's missing is cultural. Since the days of Mitchell, the Air Force has accepted as Gospel that their mission is strategic, not tactical and that the ground forces will benefit more from interdiction fires than being employed as "airborne artillery". Implicit with that concept is an implication that the ground forces are inferior and some Air Force guiding lights still suggest that air power can win the wars all by themselves without us humble crunchies.
I was stuck with being the Assistant G-3 for a Bright Star exercise in Egypt years ago, with the US Army 3rd Infantry Division staff acting as Army Theater Command. We had an Air Force staff in a large camouflage-netted tent alongside us throughout that exercise but they had nothing to do with us. I gained entry to the Air Force planning cell (despite some opposition) and found out that they were completely unconnected from the Army play of the problem and refused to provide CAS for the live fire portion of the exercise which the division and the Egyptian Army and the Marine MEU were taking part in near Wadi Natrun. I ended up using Egyptian MiG-21s for live fire CAS instead.
I believe that technology will eventually give us safe and dependable CAS. Unmanned CAS. I do not believe that any iteration of the Air Force's mentality or culture will ever provide what the ground-pounder needs because the Air Force will never give a damn about us.
“Since the days of Mitchell, the Air Force has accepted as Gospel that their mission is strategic, not tactical and that the ground forces will benefit more from interdiction fires than being employed as “airborne artillery”.
The idea that the USAF rejects tactical level flying is as insane as the rest of your ideas.
And no, airplanes should not normally be used at flying artillery. It should be a force multiplier, not a force additive. That often includes CAS.
The Army agrees with me. I made that point at an NTC rotation years ago, and the ARMY asked me to meet with other units at Fort Hood and explain what we did and why we did it.
You’re obviously deranged. You know nothing about the US Air Force, modern equipment or tactics or how CAS is done and why. All you want to do is bitch about the US Air Force and wish the Marines were there to scrape their bombs off of their jets instead of someone using PGMs from up high.
Happily, the people who make decisions, including the US Army, disagree with you. I’m strongly in favor of keeping A-10s, just as I once supported the A-10C program (although my part was fleeting and microscopic) - but I also know why a lot of CAS is done with fast moving aircraft and targeting pods.
It works. It works extremely well - much BETTER than it did in Vietnam. But it fails if someone provides the wrong target coordinates and tells the aircraft to attack that location - just as bad ground control always causes problems.