[Hoplite]

Air Force civil engineers replacing Army construction engineers

<ARMY>We've apparently reached the "Bowling Alley" phase of reconstruction.</ARMY>

= )

[razorback-bert]

Give the Army the A-10’s and their drivers, the Air Force doesn’t want them anyway.

[clee1]

The Air Farce is doing everything the can to make themselves irrelevant in the 21st century.

[Mr Rogers]

“In contrast to Predators, which are assigned by the top headquarters for missions all across Iraq, Task Force Odin is on call for commanders at the level of brigade and below...”

What they fail to point out is that the air is apportioned out IAW the direction of ARMY COMMANDERS! I worked for a BDE/CC who was upset that I wasn’t ‘giving him air’. He was even more upset when I told him he wasn’t getting it because he was on the bottom of the totem pole - IAW his DIV/CC.

I think he was even more upset when the General told him the same thing I said - that he was only going to get left overs because the priority was elsewhere.

[Per-Ling]

There’s plenty of blame to spread around amongst the services. The air force finds themselves in the middle of a war in which 90% of its pre-war TTPs were counterproductive to COIN warfare. The US Army is just now learning lessons it SHOULD have learned in Vietnam or sooner. The Navy finds themselves mostly out of the fight but are gearing up for the strongest navy in the Middle East in Iran. The Marines really seem to be the shinning jewel in the crown. They’re an organization that does extremely well at institutional learning, have a bottom-up initiative flow and do well in small groups.

Reading through the new Army/Marine Corps COIN Field Manual, co-authored by General Petraeus, an unbelievably brilliant man, gives me hope that we may just get this insurgency thing right one day, as each day in Iraq shows we’re starting to get the hang of it.

[PapaBear3625]

The Air Force responds that it has only a limited number of those remotely piloted Predators and other advanced surveillance aircraft, so priorities for assigning them must be set by senior commanders at the headquarters in Baghdad working with counterparts at the Air Force’s regional command in Qatar.

And the reason why the AF does not have enough UAVs is because they prefer to spend their budget money on other things

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks neverdem. The Air Force as it exists today has been constituted to dogfight, perform close air support, and strategic bombing suited to really large convention (and nuclear) war. Those are needed capabilities, but given the expense of manned craft, the future of close air support (and counter-insurgency fighting) lies with UAVs.