CAS Fratricide Blamed on Budget Cuts

[enlUSMC]

By retiring the A-10 has the miltary bureaucracy demonstrated that CAS has a lowered priority, even while the U.S. continues to fight a ground war in Afghanistan?
I'm also reading SECDEF Gates' autobiography where he describes a constant battle between the need for troop support equipment (eg MRAPs) and the Pentagon's preference for newer, "future war" R&D projects (think F-22). Does this friendly fire incident support his ideas that the defense budget is skewed too far towards developments that do not support current wars?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/29/defense-spending-cuts-blamed-in-friendly-fire-us-a/

 

[Flash]

By retiring the A-10 has the miltary bureaucracy demonstrated that CAS has a lowered priority, even while the U.S. continues to fight a ground war in Afghanistan?

The A-10 is not the be all to end all when it comes to CAS, there are a whole lot of platforms out there from the different services that have done a pretty good job of it over the past few years. In this case the mistakes and shortcomings outlined in the article seem to have a lot more to do with training or a lack thereof than the aircraft utilized.

In an era of shrinking budgets some hard choices have to be made and I think in this case the USAF made the right one with trying retire the A-10. The USAF Chief of Staff pointed out that in order to get the same savings from retiring the entire A-10 fleet he would have to retire 3 times the number of F-16s. Why such a stark difference? If you retire an aircraft type you can get rid of everything that is need to keep it operational from parts to training to depot maintenance along with the associated personnel and infrastructure. It is why the USAF thought of even retiring the KC-10 even though it is far more capable than the KC-135, getting rid of those 59 aircraft gets rid of all the supporting structure as well where retiring 50, 100 or even more KC-135's doesn't give you the same savings.

 

[jmcquate]

That article is mis-leading. Bones have been flying CAS for over a decade and A-10s aren't gone yet. Sounds like someone on the ground didn't no where they were or kicked a number.

 

[busdriver]

CAS is not just a platform issue, the vast majority is about training and the pink body in control of the aircraft providing support.

 

[enlUSMC]

Yeah, I was surprised by the A-10 thing. It was part of the course of CAS instruction at EWTGPAC when I was there.

 

[enlUSMC]

That article is mis-leading. Bones have been flying CAS for over a decade and A-10s aren't gone yet. Sounds like someone on the ground didn't no where they were or kicked a number.

Right. They said the bombers fly too high to ID the friendly positions at night.

 

[armada1651]

My opinion would be that you're heading down an unproductive and potentially very dangerous path when your correlation focuses on identifying the friendly position. For 5 Line or other friendly-centric means there is obviously a need to identify the friendlies, but utilizing those generally assumes that the supporting assets are already familiar with their positions. Those are also the only situations I can think of in which using an IR strobe for friendly ID would be useful. Even if the B-1 crew had been physically able to see the strobe, it would be useless given the Line 8 in this situation.