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Woah! Divisions a thing of the past. Brigade level mobile and more lethal is the name of the game.

I'm especially intrigued by the comments on air support. Being an old Air Force guy myself, my ears pricked up when I read that. The helicopters took a beating during the recent festivities and the Air Force has announced the retirement of the A-10 and its replacement will be the F-16. Not viable in my opinion. I smell a turf war brewing and given the Air Force's lack of concern for close air support I'm hoping the General can bloody their noses. Not very loyal I guess but the Army needs air support and the Air Force has announced they're going out of the business.

The F-16 is about as useful at air support as a kite would be. Too high, too fast, too fighter-pilot-oriented.

Close Air Support needs to be delivered near ground level, which is why the Warthogs and all of Marine Aviation are so very deadly (and so very valued) for CAS: they fly low and hit hard. Meanwhile, the cowards that fly F-16's stay in the clouds where they can't be hit and never even get near the battlefield and if all you have is F-16 CAS then you have to watch good men die with no support.

Don't let the warthogs be killed off by the USAF Fighter Pilot Mafia. We don't need fancy fighters in the post-USSR world; we need effective CAS and lots of it.

Being an old Air Force guy myself, my ears pricked up when I read that. The helicopters took a beating during the recent festivities and the Air Force has announced the retirement of the A-10 and its replacement will be the F-16. Not viable in my opinion. I smell a turf war brewing and given the Air Force's lack of concern for close air support I'm hoping the General can bloody their noses. Not very loyal I guess but the Army needs air support and the Air Force has announced they're going out of the business.

When I took a tour group of USAF cadets from Colorado Springs to the St Louis McDonnell-Douglas plant in the mid-1990s, we were told a little story about the time the USAF brass decided to cancel the A-10 while it was still under development. Unofficially, or maybe not, depending on how sneaky some Army senior brass at DCSOPS were, the Army sent a handfull of Army aviators to transition from rotary wing aviators to fly the fixed-wing Marine AV-8B Harrier, which of course the Army doesn't operate. The Air Force got wind of the thought of the Army developing its own fixed-wing CAS assets, and the 1000 or so Warthogs got built as planned instead.

Well, I guess the Army could always reopen the former rotary wing basic pilot's school at Ft. Wolters Texas, now the *Ft Wolters Industrial Park* as a Harrier driver's school....