An Open Letter to Ed Driscoll: Power of CAS Myths

Guest 'Pundit' at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll, links to a craptastic "Save the A-10" editorial (unattributed) at Investors Business Daily.... SIX MONTHS after it was published?

I thought the editorial at the link was so bad at the time it came out (along with a bunch of similar A-10 puff pieces), I don't remember paying it much heed.  But Driscoll's resurrection of this poorly 'informed' op-ed illustrates--- once again-- the power of the CAS Mythology and "narrative". Just look at the comment thread at Instapundit. Yikes!

Normally, I like what Ed Driscoll writes, and writes about, but he's waaay out of his area of expertise this time.

Dear Ed: That IBD Op Ed could have been written by one or more squirrels.  

No, the A-10 wasn’t designed to stop Soviet Tanks. This is a common misconception I've heard General Officers utter. We are so ahistorical.

The A-10 was conceived as a weapon that could attack “hard targets” and cooperate with Army Airmobile forces in SEA. After Vietnam, the Air Force HOPED it could be survivable in the NATO order of battle and did all kinds of things to make/keep it relevant. In Europe, its main advantage was the ability to get below typical rotten Euro-weather that would keep fast-movers off the target. We have sensors and communications now that remove the weather restriction for fast movers. the F-35's The weapons the A-10 was designed to survive against predated MANPADs, Integrated Air Defense Systems and even radar controlled AAA that even the NVA were pushing into the South at the end of the Vietnam War. (Google Lam Son 719).

The A-10 wasn't fielded in 1972. It first flew, in a fly-off, in 1972. (I was there) It didn’t hit IOC until 1976 or FOC until 1978.  Core operational concepts for Europe weren't developed until 1979 (I was there too).

The A-10 HAS to fly low and slow because it doesn’t have the kinds of sensors (SNIPER pods are an improvement, but not enough) and communications capabilities to sort out the battlefield well prior to the attack. It often HAS to loiter longer just because it takes longer to set up an attack.

The cockpit armor and other design features make it harder to shoot down that it would be otherwise, but having bits and pieces shot off you is not a long term survival strategy. A-10s in Desert Storm saw the most intense air defense environment they have seen before or since. They did not do well. A-10s were pulled off the Iraqi Republican Guard units and tasked against weaker units as a consequence.

Yes “A supersonic fighter pilot flying miles above the battlefield will not see enemy forces the way a Warthog pilot can” – They will see it better. I’m always fascinated by people who cite 'low and slow" as an advantage: as if flying there gives one more time to view the ground. That maybe true at Piper Cub speeds. But I’ve 'done' low and 'A-10 slow' a the same time and the scenery is whizzing by pretty fast. It ain't that great for picking up and following specific specs out of all the other specs.

A fast mover may cost more $ up front, but if the attrition rate is even a few percentage points lower, the savings, not to mention the ability to sustain operations, far outweighs the operating costs—even if you don’t factor in the fewer 'dead aircrew' part. THAT is the proper context for framing a statement like “Force requirements should be dictated by battlefield requirements, not budget restraints.”

The F-35 will provide CAS in its own way and not in the manner the A-10 provides it, so the open question is not whether or not the F-35 “can take the punishment the A-10 can”. The open question is:

Why do people think you have to take punishment like an A-10 to fly CAS?

The Warthog is still a low-intensity-conflict “hammer”: A Completely appropriate design (ignoring they are worn out) solution if ALL you are going to do is flatten insects. It is NOT so appropriate if you have to also be ready to face  Thor who is swinging his own hammer. Unless you have the extra dollars to buy and support both kinds of weapons systems to deal with bugs and Old Norse deities, you want the one that can beat the gods without getting beat yourself.

May I Suggest Some Remedial Reading?
Start at Part 1 (Links for Part 2 through 8 at bottom of Part 1).

Just found out where and how Driscoll got suckered in.
~Sigh~

The Air Force Reaffirmed "A-10 retirement decision" in a "Week"

Anyone with reasonable exposure to the 'issue' could have done the same thing. 

If I thought anyone was interested, I could lead a little online systems engineering exercise. Except we'd have to endure the "Because Big Gun!" argumentation. You already know where I stand on that 'point'.

And Ohohohohohohoho the A-10 fanboys of the U.S. Nostalgia Force are going to go ape-you-know-what over this one.

After a week of concentrated study of its close air support (CAS) role, the US Air Force essentially has decided to stick with plans to gradually retire the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II and hand the CAS mission to the Lockheed Martin F-35.

It really just took a week to run everyone involved at the top through the relevant information already in hand.

The CAS "controversy" has been studied to freakin' death leading up to this moment, and it's not exactly like ANYONE who has paid attention doesn't already know the USAF has been looking at A-10 obsolescence growing......... like, forever. 

The article at FlightGlobal lays out pretty much what one would expect.

1. Phase out A-10 and phase in F-35 (as planned all along) 

2. Look at alternatives to fill any gaps during the transition (as F-35 capabilities mature). 

That's not 'too complicated' is it? 

Some good details at the link, such as still having dedicated CAS units (Which I note did no good to appease the 'A-10 forever!' crowd the first, last, any time.

If I were to open a group SE exercise to derive requirements for a CAS aircraft, I would start by asking "What capabilities are necessary in a CAS plane?

After the dumb*sses with the 'big gun!' ,'fly slow!', derived qualities spouted off, and if we even cared, we would probably employ the 'Five Whys' approach to backing out the top-level requirements. Example: Why do we need a big gun?, and then based upon the answer, ask why that answer was valid, and etc back to the truly top-level requirements. In doing so, we would arrive at a list of characteristics: effective targeting, responsiveness, lethality, survivability, persistence, etc.

F-35 optimal attack profile with GAU-22 vs. 

A-10 Optimal Attack Profile. F-35 rounds per

square meter density is approximately double 

A-10's even at a much longer, safer range.    

There would be multiple paths that could be followed to meet a desired top-level requirement: a 'Big Gun with lots of ammo' is but one technical solution to 'lethality'.  But we also have 'effective targeting' which does not just support overall lethality objectives -- it also includes "safe to employ" as one of many sub-elements of "effectiveness". So once we got into looking at the optional material solutions we could select for 'lethality' we would then perform tradeoffs among the many desired attributes, and many of them will be contrary to each other. A balance among all of the attributes would have to be achieved. 

Done to Death

But we don't have to do this study. It's been done to death. And it wouldn't have to have been done very well at all to produce an argument that beats PFC Short Stroke's anecdotal recollections of 'that day in the 'Stan', UNLESS we can count on CAS not ever/likely needing a 'better' (as in 'survivable in a medium-high threat arena') weapon system than the A-10. If you can't guarantee a low-threat battlefield future, you have NO basis for preserving an asset that is only survivable in a low-threat environment. That's not the only reason the A-10 needs replacing, but it ought to be the easiest one to grasp.        

    

 

Pournelle CAS Fail

Surprise! Old Army Vet and SF writer thinks like a 'Grunt'. 

Jerry Pournelle's 'abolish the AF crap' is bad enough (based upon some 'conversations' he once had and a selective picking over of Carl Builder's [1] Masks of War), but the uncritical regurgitation of the standard 'Army' A-10 fanboi theme was too much.

If you've read much of Pournelle's work, you'll often find a lot of brute force military action up close and personal (very 'Army'). So in a way this is kind of to be expected. But one would think an accomplished SF writer would have a little more imagination than having the AF keep flying low and slow in an obsolete aircraft, Pournelle strikes me now as just another old cynic without a clue.

I know where he could find one or two, but if he got this far (he's in his 80s fer cryin' out loud) without being able to conceptualize a near term future with a better way to perform CAS or understand the reasons for the different services, given how the recent advances in the application of force provide evidence that we can become more precise, lethal, while lowering attrition on the good guys, then there's little hope of little old me making the geezer see the error of his ways. I won't even go into his throwaway lines about unmanned vehicles, except to observe he hasn't a clue about where they are in their evolution and where they need to be to replace most manned combat aircraft.

I read all of Robert Heinlein's work that I could get my hands on until he had his near stroke and wrote that POS titled 'The Number of the Beast'. I waited for and picked up a copy the first day it was out. I was enjoying it until right in the middle it took a hairpin turn from soft Science Fiction right into pure effin' fantasy. Sorry, parallel universes are one thing--parallel universes with an Oz (literally) is another. I now suddenly find myself not interested in ever picking up another Pournelle work after this demonstrated lack of thoughtfulness much less imagination.


[Note 1] I'm a huge fan of Builder. His writings and analytical methods as well as his insight into many things was awesome--like a Glenn A. Kent without the military experience and extra insight, But he had blind spots like everyone else, especially when it came to the 1960s-70s Army.  I learned much about the blind spots (among many good things) from one of my mentors who worked with and was a friend of Builder pre-RAND: the late great Gene Ostermann (whom most have never heard of, but probably should have).

Moronic Jackjawing on B-1 CAS Friendly Fire Incident

Way to Stay 'Classy'...NOT!

Hat Tip: 'Count_to_10' over at F-16.net

The results of the investigation into the June 2014 ‘friendly fire’ B-1 incident is out.  Read the summary here. I’ll wait until you get back…..

Welcome back!

If you bothered to read the comments, you saw it sure didn’t take long for the morons to start twisting the results to mesh with their own stupid little beliefs held in the vast emptiness of what outwardly appears (to the unsuspecting) to be human heads sitting on their shoulders. 

In the first FIVE comments, on this article reporting on the findings, only one, made by a person named ‘Joe Hardy’, managed to make a cogent, if terse observation as the second commenter:

The JTAC may not have been up to date on the latest B-1 capabilities, in part because its relatively newness and the experienced JTAC might not have worked with a B-1 with this capability before or with any frequency, but Mr. Hardy's statement at least looks towards where the problem in this chain of events was: on the ground.

The guy with ‘firsties! Honors’, one Chris Smith, managed to conflate who did what out of the gate:

 

Yes Chris, you do need to “get this straight”…. and fast. Re-read what you wrote and see if it makes any sense to you the second time.

The B-1 crew told the JTAC and Ground Commander they could not see the IR strobes. The guys on the ground did not process that information correctly. This wasn’t about what they did or didn’t know, this is about confusion in the heat of battle leading to someone on the ground giving direction to the B-1 to bomb the wrong spot.

The on-scene Commander makes the call, the JTAC is supposed to make sure the on-scene Commander and CAS assets get the information they need to make the call and deliver the ordnance. No doubt the splintering of the commander’s forces without his or the JTAC’s knowledge was a serious compounding factor in the confusion. It could have even been the key link in the chain of events that created the confusion, but in any case it had to have contributed to the tragedy.

The B-1 put the bombs right where it was told to put them. It wasn't the choice of aircraft, or the aircrew's fault. Got it straight now? Well if not, read on.

The third commenter was the delightfully named 'Jerry Barker':

 

Jerry makes unsupported assertions and allusions, implying what he apparently perceives to be a deficiency in the B-1 or any aircraft that depend on “pods”. He also apparently operates under the mistaken belief that the A-10 would not have had ANY comparable problems in performing the same mission under those same conditions.

He assumes too much.

We cannot positively state that an A-10 would have been able to even DO the job under the conditions at the time. All we can say is that perhaps an A-10 driver might have been able to see the ‘IR beacons’ once he got within the range of his NVGs, but that would only be IF he could have discerned the general battlefield.

If an A-10 wasn’t carrying a Sniper pod, he would have had more difficulty using those same NVGs (and/or other targeting pod that are nowhere near as proficient at that task as the B-1’s Sniper pod), to even get into the position to where he might have seen the IR strobes, AND be able to figure out where most of everyone else was (remember, not even the ground commander knew his guys had split up).

The sun had set just before the B-1 arrived on the scene, and over an hour before the B-1 made its pass. This can be a bad time of day for visible and IR light contrasts. Was it on this night? What was the weather like? Was there haze? Dust? Clouds?

The waxing moon was a little more than half-moon, and would have been approximately half-way to apogee. This could have meant deep shadows (mountains remember?) were present that would have created contrasts that might play more hell with NVGs or any targeting pod with less capability than a Sniper Pod. Even if the A-10 had a Sniper Pod, unless he was at the same altitudes as the B-1, the scene would have been more difficult to assess.  Since there is only one set of eyeballs in an  A-10, the pilot would have had to spit his time between flying the plane, talking to the ground, and looking at his sensors.

The B-1 crew can use the sensors more effectively and manage the workload better. All they need is for someone to give them the right coordinates.

The fourth commenter was a ‘Michael Murphy’:

Less ardent and more succinct in his stupidity than Jerry, but every bit as thoughtless.

The fifth and final dipsh*t is one ‘Mister’ Curtis Conway:

Says the guy with no CAS aircraft design, development, or employment experience. His comment is more ‘Murphy’ than ‘Barker’….he’s just more self-assured in his stupidity.

I’ve not bothered to make much effort to slap him around in response to the usual tripe he manages to post with regularity (and with that same ‘qualifier-free' declarative style seen above) at sites I frequent.

I may have to change that.

 

In Closing

If anyone who reads this is on Facebook, feel free to share this far and wide. Point out that these D-bags made their stupid little statements without consideration for the well-being of the survivors (those who were involved in the mistake and those who weren’t) AND without consideration for the family and loved ones of those that were lost to this tragedy within a tragedy we call ‘war’.  Tell these sad losers to go vent their misplaced ‘outrage’ on the back of something less sacrosanct than the deaths of good men in a hard war.

Just in case some of this stupidity tries to get flushed down the memory hole, here's a screen cap of the thread at the time I excised the comments presented:

     

Debunking Close Air Support Myths, 2nd Edition: Part 8a,8b,8c…

The AF "had to" buy a CAS plane?

I confess. I wanted to do this post first in this “2nd Edition” series to keep things in chronological order, but I believed at the time that this myth required some significant off-site research of Government and other documents; it required deeper investigation of the original sources than the myth we exploded in Part 7. Part of the delay in completing my research also came from the Government Shutdown Theater last year, and an off-line 40K word writing project I completed on New Year’s Eve. Today, we go back to the roots of the modern CAS mythology to examine what drove the ‘birth’ of the A-10.

Myth: 'The Air Force only started/proceeded with the A-X/A-10 because they 'had to' due to external pressure. “Insidious” I find this myth insidious because it contains perversions of truth, and those perversions in turn have been:
1. Used to mask or obscure the greater truths that lay behind it and…
2. Employed both by the incompetent and the malevolent to create ‘cartoons’ of history.

There is no doubt that the Air Force factored in the ‘external’ pressures into its decision-making. There are always many forces when shaping major decisions, and we will be covering only a few of them. But external pressure was hardly the only or even primary reason. Nor does the mere existence of the ‘external pressures’ mean those pressures were legitimate, honest, or well-founded. I believe we can show that many, if not most of them, can be filed under ‘none of the above’.
I’ve seen variations on the ‘had to’ claim go so to such extreme wording as to actually read that the Air Force was “shamed” into fielding the A-10. I’ve purposely phrased the myth definition in this discussion as the broadly stated “due to external pressure” to allow readers to discriminate between, and discuss the nature and sources of pressure individually as well as explore their interrelationship along with some common roots as we proceed.

The myth is also tough to nail down and debunk because it is so poorly defined: there is a level of abstraction that could mean different things to different people. To deal with this complication, we will break this myth down into what I have found to be the two commonly intended meanings behind the myth. Thus, we will be exploding two myths instead of one to make sure we address the multiple wrong-headed ideas behind the statement above. If there are other meanings, I do know what they might be. But if they exist, I’m certain somebody will let me know.
The two most commonly intended meanings that I’ve encountered can be stated as something to the effect of:

'The Air Force never wanted the A-10 specifically. They 'had to' buy it.
And...
'The Air Force only procured a dedicated (generic) attack aircraft because they were ‘made’ to do so.

The first myth can be considered a specific example of the second, but we will deal with each as a separate point, because they both have been repeated often enough for each to have taken on a provenance all their own. They appear to me to exist independently in some people’s minds: one, the other, or perhaps sometimes both. By addressing both versions, we can avoid the ‘yes but’ argumentation from those who would first argue one point, then upon being shown where they are either completely wrong or oversimplifying, try to avoid facing up to the facts by simply running to the other meaning.

There is a large set of undefined “or else” implications behind both these assertions. No doubt some of those consequences factored into the Air Force’s decision-making process (no defense decisions are ever made in a vacuum), but in both cases we can show that in every step of the evolution in Air Force close air support ‘thought’ from 1960 onward the Air Force decision-makers were always focused on providing the best possible ‘Close Air Support’ to the Army within the externally imposed limits of available technology, defense policy direction and budget-limited force structure, and show that CAS capability was pursued according to the rapidly evolving criteria by which ‘best possible’ was defined.

I could have made this a very short post, if I just wanted to focus on the Air Force’s decision to specifically buy, and then defend the A-10. But this would explode only the superficial aspects of the myth. So I choose to provide the short and easy response for the typical ‘drive-by’ complainants, and then go into a more detailed follow-on discussion of the history to describe how the Air Force came to seek fielding the A-10 to satisfy the CAS mission given the following:
1. The then-current state of the necessary technologies and threats
2. The imposed presumption of a relatively permissive combat environment

Approach

I’m going to cover this myth using a different approach than Part 7. Instead of starting at the present and following the thread backwards in time, for this installment we’ll start with the moment the A-X program was initiated, covering who, what and why. Then we’ll ‘flash back’ in time to look at the activities of key actors, first picking a convenient starting point in the past and then look at their activities running up to the decision. This approach is warranted because there were many threads of concern and action, including those involving the A-7 as the ‘interim’ CAS plane acquisition program. These threads converged to create the whole history. ‘Convergence’ for our purposes is the point where the AF leadership decided to undertake development of what would become the A-10. We’ll also go a bit further to show how the AF defended the A-10 program after it was underway to further remove any reasonable doubt.


After exhaustive investigation, at the root of all the decision-making I found that the three most important players in this story were the Army ‘Airmobile’ Advocates (of course), their enablers in the Kennedy/Johnson Administrations, and a noisemaker or two in Congress. There were even deeper roots to what was happening at that time-- Roots going back to even before the Korean War. But we will spare ourselves from running down the rabbit hole it took me over two months of research to navigate just to get back to this point. The time I consider as well spent, but on top of all the other research I’ve done and experience I’ve gained on in this topic over decades, I’m pretty sick of CAS ‘hardware’ issues right now . We’ll save discussion of that earlier time for perhaps a later installment… or twelve.


Myth Meaning A: 'The Air Force never wanted the A-10 specifically. They 'had to' buy it.

The A-10 Decision: Who, When and Why

Loooooooog post after the fold. Ye be Warned.

Debunking Close Air Support Myths, 2nd Edition: Part 7

Sourcing ‘AF Hates A-10’ Nonsense

We tackled the ‘big’ myths in a while back Parts 1-6. This post, at the root of things, is about the little myth that if the Air Force retires the A-10, that somehow means the Air Force doesn’t care about the mission, the Army, or both. I believe it is based upon other little myths that are sometimes based upon big lies and/or uniformed opinions more than anything else. The lies and opinions get planted as ‘fact’ in places where they line up neatly with already well-entrenched points of view. Then over time, if they get repeated often enough, they become ‘facts’… that aren’t.

The Current Sequester ‘Crisis’ and Close Air Support

At last week’s Air Force Association convention Air Force Leadership statements, acknowledging the reality of how Defense Sequestration was making the military a hollow force. As reported by Defense News:

With the F-35 coming online to take over the close-air support role, the venerable Thunderbolt II will be a likely target, Gen. Mike Hostage told reporters at the Air Force Association's Air and Space Conference.
“This is not something I want to do,” Hostage said, explaining that no decisions had been made.
Hostage said he had already talked to Army officials about losing the A-10 and using other jets to take over the close-air support role. The Army was “not happy” about the possibility, Hostage said.
“I will not lose what we have gained in how we learned to support the Army,” Hostage said. “I had to make sure the Army understood that I am not backing away from the mission.”
Hostage said the service can do the close-air support role with the F-35, but it would be more expensive and “not as impressive” without the famous GAU-8 Avenger 30 millimeter gun.
“In a perfect world, I would have 1,000 A-10s,” Hostage said. “I can’t afford it. I can’t afford the fleet I have now. If I cut the fleet in half, do I save enough to get through this problem?
“My view is, while I don’t want to do it, I would rather lose the entire fleet and save everything I do in the infrastructure.” 

Hostage’s comments follow similar statements from both acting Secretary of the Air Force Eric Fanning and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh that single-mission aircraft would need to be cut if budgets continue to decrease.

“If we go into [fiscal year 2014] with sequestration still in effect, and we need to achieve those savings, you have to look at cuts,” Fanning said Monday…

What is facing the Air Force right now is same for all the services: they must plan on doing ‘less with less’ because of the current ‘budget reality’ [Though it is arguable that is really about a lack of defense-as-a-national-priority ‘reality’]. Within the framework of the ‘budget reality’, the services have to figure out how can they fulfill as many of their responsibilities, and to what extent, with the ‘less’ budget they will be left to work with going forward.

The Lesser of Evils?

It now appears that part of the best way (or least ‘worst way’) forward, involves the possibility of retiring the entire (such as it remains) A-10 fleet

Aside from the sentimentality of General Hostage’s statement, I have no problem with it, and there is one part that sums things up perfectly:

“My view is, while I don’t want to do it, I would rather lose the entire fleet and save everything I do in the infrastructure.”

Got that? Retire selected weapon systems and save all the capability (“everything I do”).

The A-10 is Going Away Anyway

This is certain to cause a groundswell of emotion and irrational fear in some quarters if the A-10 fleet is forcibly retired. I would say ‘retired early’ but that would be less correct than stating ‘earlier than planned’, as we have kept the A-10 past it’s freshness date. the A-10 was considered as rapidly obsolescing AND rapidly aging when the Air Force first proposed replacing it with A-7Fs and A-16's the first time in the late 1980's. All but the last A-10s built (~1983-84) were manufactured with known deficiency in structural strength to begin with.

A-10s in AMARG: The Largest Supply Source for Keeping Operational A-10s Flying.  

"...fourteen airplanes sitting on the ramp having battle damage repaired, and I lost two A-10s in one day..."

Desert Storm Air Boss Made the Call: Pulled A-10s Off the
Iraqi Republican Guard Due to High Attrition

Tales of  the A-10's effectiveness in Desert Storm overshadowed it's shortcomings, which no one wanted to talk about (see Gen Horner's observations in Part 6 of this Debunking CAS Myths Series ) . Between Desert Storm and Congressional dabbling in matters they did not understand, the A-10 got a reprieve. The reprieve has lasted this long because we have not had to fight a war like Desert Storm again (Yes, there were significant differences between then and Operations Allied Force, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom).

Once again, there will be the ubiquitous ‘some’ who will complain that the AF is abandoning the needs of the Army by abandoning the Close Air Support (CAS) mission. In reality, the complaint will/would be over little more than a ‘hardware’ and ‘tactics’ change in the mission, NOT a retreat from the mission itself. Let us note here, that such complaints ignore the fact that the current plan already has the F-35 replacing the A-10 in the CAS role. If the A-10 fleet is retired due to sequestration, then sequestration is only causing a change in schedule for something that was going to happen anyway and NOT changing an inevitable end-state (not that changes themselves are good things, they usually cause chaos and added costs themselves).

Here We Go Again

With this emerging probability that the A-10s will finally be retired, we can expect a repeat of past experience: someone (or rather, many someones) will, in their ignorance, decry such a move as yet another example of the Air Force trying to get rid of the A-10 ‘they never wanted’ in the first place. Never mind that the reason for retiring the A-10 is clearly articulated in the present time: In the future the mythology will be that it was just another exhibit of ‘proof’ that the Air Force has ‘never wanted the A-10’ or never ‘took CAS seriously’. One in a laundry list of other examples. The problem is that laundry list, is a list of myths as well: a compendium of untruths, perversions of the truth, and biased opinions promoting a theme masquerading as the truth.

And I can back up my claims with hard evidence.

Taking Down the Myths, One Myth at a Time

To me, one of the most annoying myths about the Air Force and the A-10 is the one that asserts that when the AH-56 Cheyenne program was cancelled, the Air Force “tried to back out of the A-10 commitment” but it was “made” to keep it by some greater outside force, See "Close Air Support: Why all the Fuss?"  (Garrett, P.10) .

 I’ve picked the ‘Garrett’ (Thomas W. Garrett) reference to use as a starting point for a few reasons. First, when he stays away from the politics involved and deals strictly with the whys and wherefores of the logical division of responsibilities and missions between the Army and the Air Force, the paper is quite admirable. (His snarky delivery however, which no doubt raises a chuckle or two in Army quarters, comes across as snide and mean-spirited in its essence when experienced by this Airman.) Second, He reprised his War College paper in the Army War College quarterly Parameters under a different title (Close Air Support: Which Way Do We Go) . Over a dozen papers written later directly cite these two Garrett papers, and even more papers spring from these.
Third, the paper was written shortly before Desert Storm when Garrett was a Lt. Colonel. Later in Desert Storm “he commanded, trained and led the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Aviation Brigade, the largest Army Aviation rotary wing task force in conventional land warfare history”. Garrett also served in Vietnam, retired as a Major General, and has been inducted into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame, so he has sufficient ‘street cred’ to be a reliable reference on this topic.

Myth: The Air Force Tried to Kill the A-10 After the AH-56 Cheyenne Program was Cancelled.

When you go to the bibliography to find the source of the claim as quoted in Garrett above, you are taken to a reference:

Horton and David Halperin, "The Key West Key," Foreign Relations. Winter 1983-1981, pp. 117.

This source took me longer to find than I thought it would, because the citation is wrong (It should read “Foreign Policy” ). I initially thought it was some State Department trade publication, but instead find it was in a magazine we’ve all probably seen many time at Barnes & Noble. A magazine that describes itself thusly:

“Since its founding in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been the leading forum for serious discussion of American foreign policy and global affairs. It is now a multiplatform media organization with a print magazine, a website, a mobile site, various apps and social media feeds, an event business, and more. Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a non-profit and nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas.”

References to the web, mobile, apps and social media aside, I suspect their self-perception hasn’t changed much since the Halperin & Halperin ‘article’. Put succinctly: Foreign Policy is a magazine for self-identified ‘movers and shakers’. In the referenced article we find multiple complaints and examples of “interservice rivalry” causing ‘problems’. Close Air Support was but one example:

The Army next tried to build the Cheyenne, a large antitank helicopter priced at $8 million. This time the Air Force feared that the Army, with its new weapon, might be able to acquire officially the close-support function. While the Air Force still had no interest in providing close support, it wanted to protect its bureaucratic territory. Thus it developed the Fairchild A-10, which Easterbrook notes, "many aircraft observers believe is one of the best planes ever built." And priced at $3 million, the A-10 could do a far better job than the Cheyenne at less than one-half the cost. 

The Cheyenne was canceled. But having headed off the Army, the Air Force saw no further use for the A-10 and attempted to cut the plane from its budget. Congress has insisted that the A-10s be built. But Air Force reluctance has sent the Army back to the drawing board, once again in the no-win realm of the helicopter.

There’s A LOT wrong with the above besides the claim the Air Force tried to ‘back out’ of the A-10, such as tying what would become development of the AH-64 Apache to some sort of Air Force ‘reluctance’ ‘Halperin x 2’ were apparently unaware the Army began pursuing what would become the AH-64 the day after the Cheyenne was cancelled. The Air Force was fast in those days, but it wasn’t that fast. The Army simply went back to the drawing board trying to replace perhaps the longest-lived interim system ever: the AH-1 Huey Cobra. But we’ll let the niggling things slide and keep our focus on the task at hand.

First, who were the authors of this ‘article’ and who was this ‘Easterbrook’ they were citing?

The Halperins

Around that time including before and after, Morton Halperin was the Director of the Center for National Security Studies, on the board of the ALCU, and a Brookings Institute ‘scholar’. He was nominated to be THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR DEMOCRACY AND PEACEKEEPING under Les Aspin (Spit!). When nominated in 1993, he was a very well known ‘quantity’. It did not go well.

The other ‘Halperin’ was his son David, then a senior at Yale, and he has not fallen very far from the tree. By the way, Nowadays ole’ Morton is running George Soros’ Open Society Institute. So one might file this data away for future consideration: Perhaps this Father-Son duo were/are not that keen on defense in the first place?

 

We Keep Pulling the Thread: What is The Halperins’ ‘Source’

The ‘Easterbrook’ above was one Gregg Easterbrook writing for the Washington Monthly. The current WM website describes the publication thusly:

The Washington Monthly was founded in 1969 on the notion that a handful of plucky young writers and editors, armed with an honest desire to make government work and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions, could tell the story of what really matters in Washington better than a roomful of Beltway insiders at a Georgetown dinner party. In our cluttered little downtown DC office, we’re still doing what we have done for over forty years, and what fewer and fewer publications do today: telling fascinating, deeply reported stories about the ideas and characters that animate America’s government.

When you get right down to it, the Washington Monthly is a political ‘alternative’ news outlet. It has been largely run, and overrun, by people like James Fallows whose merits I briefly noted in a sidebar here. So file that away for future consideration as well.

Easterbrook’s ‘article’ was called “All Aboard Air Oblivion” in which he rambles through a no-holds-barred screed: 

• Decrying the wastefulness of hugely-vulnerable helicopters, 
• Asserting the Air Force with a penchant for technology was requiring an expensive unnecessary “smart bomb” called the AGM-65 be carried on top of the internal 30mm gun.
• Laughably describing the Maverick as having only a “15%” probability of kill per “pass” and being impossible to operate effectively in combat.
• Making baseless claims that the Air Force Chief of Staff only pursued the A-10 because of the Army's Cheyenne.
• Citing James Fallows’ writings criticizing the TOW missile, and mocking the idea that the next missile in the works, the Hellfire in combination with the “Son of Cheyenne” (AH-64 Apache) will be any better.

 Among many, many other transgressions against logic and truth. 

And buried inside Easterbrook’s nonsensical diatribe is this little gem of our real interest:

With the Army challenge deflected, anti-close-support generals once again ascended within the Air Force. They wanted to stop wasting money on an Army-oriented project and reserve all Air Force funds for superplanes like the F-15 and B-1. So each year, the Air Force tried to cut the A-10 from its budget. Fortunately, each year politicians put the funds back in. (This year, for, example, the Air Force cut 60 A-10s, but Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger reinstated them.) Next, the Air force shunted 72 of the first 400 A-10s straight to the National Guard, the only front-line aircraft ever assigned directly to the Air National Guard

ALL the above is patently, and demonstrably untrue. All of it.
Beside there being no evidence of ‘anti-close-support’ generals in the Air Force (names?), the ‘tried to cut the A-10 from its budget’ isn’t supported by the history either. I know from a personal friend that briefed the AF budget to Members of Congress (Circa 78-79) that there was constant pressure to increase the original objective of 600 planes to something greater. The numbers WERE increased, because they had to be: just to get the budget past a Committee Chairman or two. Three years after this article was published, at the end of production there were 715 A-10s. So yeah, after the Air Force got all they originally wanted, MAYBE then they stopped asking for more. So what?

Here’s another little factor to consider. Since we don’t know the number from which Easterbrook is subtracting that 60 A-10 figure, perhaps at least some of the 60 aircraft that the Easterbrook alleges the Air Force tried to have taken out (in 1980-81) was related to the 1979 GAO report that ‘came down’ on the Air Force for buying too many total A-10s? From the GAO Report:

… We believe that our current work on reducing Defense aircraft time in maintenance further demonstrates the necessity to reevaluate aircraft needs for depot maintenance float. We focused on the potential procurement of 61 A-10 aircraft as substitutes for aircraft undergoing depot maintenance--currently called backup aircraft inventory for maintenance. Specifically, we found that: 

--Even though the A-10 is being procured under a concept designed to eliminate the need for depot overhaul, the Air Force is still using a 10-percent factor to justify the purchase of 61 A-10 aircraft for maintenance float purposes.
--While Air Force criteria also allows substitutes for aircraft undergoing modifications, the full extent of the modification program for the A-10 is not known.
--In developing the lo-percent maintenance float factor Defense has not systematically determined how quickly aircraft In the depot could be "buttoned up" and returned to their units under a wartime compressed work schedule and the influence of this rapid return on the requirements for maintenance float aircraft. 

The A-10, as well as other newer weapon systems, are being procured under a concept designed to eliminate the need for depot overhaul. New design features and reliability-centered maintenance concepts have improved maintainability and reliability so that work which used to be performed in depot facilities can now be performed in the field and at intermediate facilities. In spite of this change, we find that the planned procurement for the 61 A-10 maintenance float aircraft is still being justified using a 10-percent factor. Historical experience has been used in the past to justify the procurement of float aircraft as substitutes for those aircraft undergoing periodic overhaul. Since the A-10 is not scheduled to undergo periodic overhaul, the justification for 61 A-10s is questionable…


Funny how we never hear about this little development, eh? Congress' "watchdog" complains about too many A-10s one year, and a drive-by journalist hammers you the next. Such is life.

 

Finally, everyone and anyone who has ever played the 'budget game' knows that if someone up the chain is going to support buying system X, whether you want it or not, you can let that someone spend political capital getting more of system X, so you can spend it on system Y. Congress makes the rules, everyone else just plays the game. If the Air Force ever chose to reduce numbers of the A-10 to be bought in an annual budget, it was part of a larger strategy.

As to the characterization the Air Force “shunted” A-10’s to reserve units, and doing so was 'without precedent', the A-10 WAS the first ‘front-line’ system to go directly to reserve units, but hardly the ‘last’. The year after this article was printed, it was announced that the first F-16s would be going to reserve units beginning in 1984. I presume it would be Easterbrook’s argument that the F-16 was ‘shunted’ as well? My damning counterargument to any accusations that anybody in the Air Force was ‘shunting’ anything would be to point to a little thing we (the Air Force) had going on with a full head of steam at the time: Making Total Force a viable force.

So we’ve now pulled this thread, whereby it is claimed the Air Force “tried to back out of the A-10 commitment” all the way to it's frazzled, unattributed end. We've found NO substance to the claim at all, only B.S. 'hearsay'

 

Do I Have Suspicions? Feh. Its 'The Usual Suspects'

I don’t think you have to be much of a detective to read between the lines for Easterbrook’s sources. Aside from referencing Fallows, I see some of the same verbiage that’s been thrown around by Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler for years. I also don’t find it much of a coincidence that this article found it’s way into a particular compendium of lunacy, a copy of which I own. A little book of perversions produced by the predecessor to Project on Government Oversight (POGO) in 1983; the much more verbose “Fund for Constitutional Government”, under their so-called “Project on Military Procurement”.

The title? “More Bucks: Less Bang: How the Pentagon Buys Ineffective Weapons” (If you buy a copy for goodness sake buy a used copy will you?). In this little (in more ways than one) book many weapon systems come under fire. I would say there were only 3 ‘reports’ (out of 30+) that I would call 'materially accurate'. One of those was written post facto: about the tribulations of the by-then long-fielded M-16 so it doesn't count as 'prophetic'.
The rest? Among all the other tall tales, written by a who's who of muckrakers, activists, and 'reformers', we learn that the Trident submarine and Aegis Cruisers won’t work, the Stealth Bomber is a ‘joke’, Low Probability of Intercept Radar is a ‘homing beacon’, the Abrams and Bradley are failures, and the Maverick, Pershing and Tomahawk missiles will be useless.

I marvel at the 'expertise' on display within.(/sarc)

I suspect Easterbrook was spoon-fed his article’s scary parts from the so called ‘reformer’ camp. His output then later gets rolled into the Reformer Noise Machine which then echoes down the years.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That is how these myths are born.

I further suspect the next thread I pull will lead me right to the same noisemakers as I found this time.

The Next Myth? (Part 8)

'The Air Force only started/proceeded with the A-X/A-10 because they 'had to' due to external pressure.

Note: I'm having formatting (font and case mostly, with some copy/paste gaps) issues with Blogger on this post for some reasons. Please bear with me as I find problems and make adjustments.

    

DoDBuzz Debuzzed, With A 'Major' Tool Running Amok in the Threads

I'm going hammer and tong (see comments to this article) with a poser (On Airpower & CAS in this case) going by the handle 'major.rod' over 'CAS Myths' and after I came back to the thread today I find he dropped another steaming 'pile' a  day or two ago. Suddenly DODBuzz isn't letting me respond to this guy's idiotic comments. DOD Buzz won't even let me post the following as a 'Reply' to one of my own comments:

Debunking The Close Air Support Myths: Part 6

CAS, the Air Force, and the A-10
Part 6: A-10s 'Forever' ?
(scroll down for links to Parts 1-5 and 'Sidebars)

As noted previously, the A-10 design was from the very start designed to be operated in a ‘permissive environment’. This limitation had been a concern of AF planners since the A-10’s inception, and its vulnerability to weapons larger than those it was designed to encounter became more of a concern with the advent and proliferation of Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADs) such as the SA-7 (and successors) as well as increases in numbers and types of larger mobile systems that filled the gap between short range low-altitude MANPADs and longer-range high-altitude fixed site systems (SA-2/3s and successors). Before the A-10 was even out of flight test, evidence that the battlefield was getting a lot nastier was seen in the 1973 Arab-Israeli ‘October War’:

Egyptian SAMs (SA-2s, SA-3s, and SA-6s) along with 23-mm ZSU23-4 antiaircraft cannons destroyed some 40 Israeli aircraft in the first 48 hours of the war, or 14 percent of the frontline strength of the IAF.3 In contrast, only five Israeli aircraft were destroyed in air-to-air combat during the entire conflict. Coupled with the high number of aircraft lost to ground-based air defenses in Vietnam, the results of the October War prompted some analysts to ask whether tactical aircraft had outlived their usefulness on the modern battlefield.(link)

Air planners saw the world’s Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADs) evolving at an alarming rate and anticipated that flying low-and-slow would soon be a poor survival strategy. 
Other developments were also occurring that would influence AF attitudes and decisions concerning future CAS capabilities:

1. Israeli successes with the F-16 in the Osirak Reactor Strike (air-to-ground) and the Bekaa Valley (air-to-air) “reenergized proponents of fast multi-role fighters”.

2. The emergence of the Army’s Air-Land Battle doctrine which “envisioned a faster and freer-flowing battlespace without a traditional battle line”. This was a doctrine that clearly favored use of a faster aircraft and operations that were less reliant on air-ground coordination.

3. The discovery that the A-10’s structural design life was significantly less-than-specified, and that would require remedy either via an extensive and expensive modification program and/or replacement of much of the A-10’s structure or the development of a replacement aircraft far earlier than anticipated.

All these factors contributed to the Air Force considering an A-10 replacement that was a ‘fast mover’ and viewing an F-16 variant as a good candidate for that replacement. Making aspersions that the Air Force ‘doesn’t want to do Close Air Support’ because it has sought (and seeks) to perform the mission using resources more survivable than a relatively ‘low and slow’ platform such as the A-10 says more about the ignorance of what is necessary in performing the CAS mission by those making such accusations than anything else. 
If one were to make a list of all the things that the A-10 brings to the battlefield that make it a good CAS platform, none of them are directly dependent upon the ability to fly ‘low and slow’ : its ability to fly low and slow enables it to provide timely and effective CAS in  many cases...in a highly permissive environment, but timely and effective CAS can be provided in any number of different combinations of weapon systems and tactics See here and here for examples. 

General Chuck Horner, the 'Air Boss' in Desert Storm, gets to have the last word on whether the A-10 or an A-10 'like' platform qualifies as the 'best' CAS tool in the future (LINK):

Q: Did the war have any effect on the Air Force's view of the A-10?
A: No. People misread that. People were saying that airplanes are too sophisticated and that they wouldn't work in the desert, that you didn't need all this high technology, that simple and reliable was better, and all that.
Well, first of all, complex does not mean unreliable. We're finding that out. For example, you have a watch that uses transistors rather than a spring. It's infinitely more reliable than the windup watch that you had years ago. That's what we're finding in the airplanes.
Those people . . . were always championing the A-10. As the A-10 reaches the end of its life cycle-- and it's approaching that now--it's time to replace it, just like we replace every airplane, including, right now, some early versions of the F-16.
Since the line was discontinued, [the A-10's champions] want to build another A-10 of some kind. The point we were making was that we have F-16s that do the same job.
Then you come to people who have their own reasons-good reasons to them, but they don't necessarily compute to me-who want to hang onto the A-10 because of the gun. Well, the gun's an excellent weapon, but you'll find that most of the tank kills by the A-10 were done with Mavericks and bombs. So the idea that the gun is the absolute wonder of the world is not true.

Q: This conflict has shown that?
A: It shows that the gun has a lot of utility, which we always knew, but it isn't the principal tank-killer on the A-10. The [Imaging Infrared] Maverick is the big hero there. That was used by the A-10s and the F-16s very, very effectively in places like Khafji.
The other problem is that the A-10 is vulnerable to hits because its speed is limited. It's a function of thrust, it's not a function of anything else. We had a lot of A-10s take a lot of ground fire hits. Quite frankly, we pulled the A-10s back from going up around the Republican Guard and kept them on Iraq's [less formidable] front-line units. That's line [sic] if you have a force that allows you to do that. In this case, we had F-16s to go after the Republican Guard.

Q: At what point did you do that?

A: I think I had fourteen airplanes sitting on the ramp having battle damage repaired, and I lost two A- 10s in one day [February 15], and I said, "I've had enough of this." ....

The Air Force Tried to Give the A-10 to the Army?
One of the most recent episodes fueling the “Air Force Doesn’t like CAS” myth often pops up in real and virtual discussions on the subject as a form of 'proof' or evidence is the simplistic claim that “the AF tried to give the A-10 to the Army”. This argument has its roots in a singular event after Desert Storm, when General Merrill McPeak, shortly before his retirement as Air Force Chief of Staff, proposed a radical change in DoD and Service responsibilities based upon his particular view of “roles and missions”. The A-10 ramifications were collateral damage in the scheme of things. It was McPeak's view that such a restructuring would reduce redundancy and exploit each Service’s strengths to the most effective level.

Per 'Learning Large Lessons' (p.197), McPeak asserted:

In my view, modern land warfare can be seen as containing four “battles”—the rear battle, which includes all the base and supporting elements; the close battle, in which the main opposing ground forces engage one another; the deep battle, which includes hostile territory well beyond the line of contact; and the high battle, the arena of air and space combat. . . . The rear and close battles should be the responsibility of a ground forces commander, an Army or a Marine Corps officer. His forces should be capable of relatively autonomous operations—they should be capable of engaging the enemy in the friendly rear and immediately in front of them, without a lot of outside help. True, the ground commander has a deep and abiding interest in what goes on overhead in the high battle or over the horizon in the deep battle and he may even have some capability to get into these fights. But, his forces are not the most effective for the high or deep battle. Air assets provide the best, most often the only capability to operate in these parts of the battlefield. . . . [T]his approach to dividing battle space provides a logical starting point for identifying unnecessary overlap and duplication. If you accept the scheme I just laid out, it follows that the commander with responsibility for the close battle does not require systems or capabilities that reach across the boundaries into the deep and high battles. If there are such systems in the field or on the drawing board, they might be good candidates for retirement or transfer to another service. Alternatively, the commander with responsibility for the deep battle does not need forces that are configured for direct support of close combat operations. If there are any, they too could be transferred out. 

McPeak called for the Army to give up the ‘deep battle’, the Air Force to give up ‘close battle’, and called for, among other things, the other services to get out of ‘space’ operations. His proposal (thankfully) went nowhere with the other services nor anyone else in the Air Force. Thus, the ‘give CAS to the Army’ was the idea of one man – now long gone and most definitely ‘not missed’, as part of a complete realignment of service roles and missions, essentially dictated by geography of the battlespace.

There were very large problems with inter-service cooperation and conflict that McPeak saw and was trying to solve. The challenge was real, but his solution would have created as many problems as it would have solved, even without entrenched interests subverting such an effort (and there would be). Desert Storm experience, if it did nothing else, clearly exposed the Army’s parochial and incorrect view that Airpower is nothing more than a support element. When in reality it should be viewed as a maneuver element.
Updated and expanded references 7/28: Some excellent papers on differing Airpower-as-manever-or-support views (large .pdf files at links):

Thunder and Lightning: Desert Storm and the Airpower Debates (1995)
Airpower and Maneuver Warfare (1994)
Integrating Joint Operations Beyond the FSCL (1997) (Army POV with AF POV Intro)
Unity of Effort: Crisis Beyond the FSCL (1999) (Army POV on resolving ambiguities in Joint Doctrine)

Conclusions

Thus we have found:
 
1. The Air Force supports the CAS mission better now than when it was part of the Army.

2. The Army was the primary antagonist in creating inter-service friction over CAS post-WWII and in it's Army-Centric way of war it continues to generate friction to this day.

3. CAS is a mission NOT a platform.

Post Script: 
There were a lot of sub-topics we could have pursued and I was/am tempted to further explore the effects of organizational culture and tendencies of the services on the CAS debate, but I fear that will drive the discussion down a ‘rabbit hole’ from which there may be no return. There are also some interesting dynamics now changing the Army’s way of fighting that could lessen the perceived friction between the services, but I am content to simply monitor them for the present time. I could have also expanded greatly on what makes up 'Effectiveness' for a CAS mission. Finally, the Marines insistence on being the primary provider of CAS as an organic USMC function is another topic for another time.

Update 7/27/11@~19:45hrs: Added part of a response that Gen Horner made in the Q&A above that had been dropped in copying the file from a word document to Blogger.(Now the answer makes sense.)

Part 1: The “Big Two” Close Air Support (CAS) Myths
Part 2: Those "not so good old days”
Part 3: Vietnam and the Rise of the “No-CAS Air Force” Myth
Part 4: Origins of the A-X Program
Part 5: Defining a New CAS Platform: the Evolution of the A-10
CAS Myths Sidebar: The A-10 and the 'Cult of the Gun'
CAS Myths Sidebar: Army-Air Force Views on CAS and Airpower
Second Edition: 
Part 7: Sourcing AF Hates A-10 Nonsense
Part 8: The AF 'Had To" Buy a CAS Plane?

CAS Myths Sidebar: Army-Air Force Views on CAS and Airpower

(scroll down for links to Parts 1-6 of CAS Myths and another 'Sidebar')

The current (IMHO myopic) Army view of airpower persists in relegating the AF to a permanent supporting force, and is highlighted by an incident just before the Desert Storm ground campaign kicked off (boldface emphasis mine):

A few days before the ground war commenced in February 1991. . . he [General Schwarzkopf] met with his subordinate commanders to discuss the land offensive. General Horner explained his Push CAS modus of flowing airplanes to the battlefield twenty-four hours a day (rather than keeping them idle while sitting alert). When General [Frederick] Franks ignored what Horner had said and demanded that VII Corps be allotted hundreds of CAS sorties per day (whether needed or not), the airman angrily disputed the allocation of air power in that manner and reiterated his Push CAS procedures. Horner believed it important for unity of command to let his anger show as he vehemently rejected Franks’s claim for so much unfocused air power. He remembered his outburst having no effect: “Everyone looked at me and said, ‘Well, he fell on his sword; isn’t that quaint.’” General [Walt] Boomer jumped in and requested as many dedicated sorties for his Marines, and General [Gary] Luck joined the “run on the bank” and demanded as many CAS flights for his XVIII Corps. The ground commanders argued for their sorties, but after a while Schwarzkopf called a halt to the debate, reminding all present, “You people don’t understand. It’s all my air, and I’ll use it any way I please.” “That ended the argument,” Horner recalled, “and we maintained centralized command.” The CINCCENT [commander in chief of Central Command] depended upon his JFACC to ensure that all the ground commanders received adequate air support.  

But having failed to divide Airpower into subordinated chunks prior to the ground war, after the ground offensive kicked off Army ground commanders insisted on placing their Fire Support Control Lines so far ahead of their forces that it hindered the Air Force’s ability to engage interdiction targets once the ground war started (source: Revolution in Warfare: Airpower in the Persian Gulf, Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen (1995), pp. 133–134 and partially cited in “Learning Large Lessons”):  

FSCL, Coalition aircraft could attack only under direction from ground or airborne controllers. This procedure could cost time to coordinate the actions and required suitable weather conditions and the presence of a controller to execute the attacks: far less weight of fixed-wing air power could be brought to bear under such circumstances. . . .

Because the FSCL definition said little about coordination of weapons employment beyond the FSCL the corps commanders considered supporting fires beyond the line as “permissive,” requiring no further coordination. That is, they resisted any restrictions on employing missiles or helicopters beyond the line and saw attempts to include such strikes in the ATO as efforts to put their organic firepower under JFACC control. To avoid JFACC control, XVIII Airborne Corps advanced the FSCL well north of the Euphtates River on 27 February and thus reserved an area for attack helicopter operations unconstrained by any requirement to coordinate with the JFACC. The effect of this was to hamper air power’s ability to destroy escaping Iraqi ground forces until the FSCL was finally pulled back after several hours.
Corps commanders at times set the FSCLs for their respective corps at different distances. which sowed confusion and complicated air-ground coordination. This practice continued until Gen Horner established a Desert Storm operation-wide FSCL that approximated the distance that corps commanders could effectively engage the enemy with their indirect fires including the MLRSs.       

The Army POV of the FSCL and its placement was of course quite different and focused on the limitations imposed on them prior to the kickoff of the ground war:   

....[b]ecause the Air Force absolutely would not fly short of the FSCL before G-Day, we kept the FSCL in close to facilitate air attack of division and corps high priority targets. This caused two problems. Every [artillery] fire mission or AH-64 [attack helicopter] attack beyond the FSCL had to be carefully and painstakingly cleared with the Air Force. Even counterfire required this lengthy  process. Equally bad, air sorties beyond the FSCL were completely the domain of the Air Force. VII Corps could nominate targets beyond the FSCL, but could never be sure they would be attacked.

Two points of view. One takes into account the entire battlespace and the other is centered on the individual corps forces. The corps commander's focus on their responsibilities is perfectly understandable..to a point. I leave it to the reader to decide which POV holds the greater effectiveness and potential for victory.
Part 1: The “Big Two” Close Air Support (CAS) Myths
Part 2: Those "not so good old days”
Part 3: Vietnam and the Rise of the “No-CAS Air Force” Myth
Part 4: Origins of the A-X Program
Part 5: Defining a New CAS Platform: the Evolution of the A-10
Part 6: A-10s 'Forever' ?
CAS Myths Sidebar: The A-10 and the 'Cult of the Gun'

CAS Myths Sidebar: The A-10 and the 'Cult of the Gun'

The A-10 and the 'Cult of the Gun'
(scroll down for links to Parts 1-6 of CAS Myths and another 'Sidebar')

The AGM-65 Maverick missiles launched by A-10s were one of the most effective weapon combinations in Desert Storm.  This point should come as no surprise within the A-10 community, but again we are fighting against human notions and human emotions. During TASVAL 79, where the A-10's fundamental operational concepts and tactics were born, 57TFW (Tactical Fighter Weapon Center)  pilots initially tended to prefer attacking with the GAU-8 gun over the AGM-65 Mavericks. The short story is: They DIED...alot. TASVAL scenarios were very intense: realistic fluid battlefronts, and real and simulated threat systems that drove nap-of-the-dirt maneuvering, usually pop-up engagements, and coordinated attacks either with a four-ship A-10 flight, or a similar force working with Army attack helos. Towards the end of the deployment, experienced pilots would advise the replacement pilots to press with the Mavericks against the Air Defense first, use their missiles up THEN press with the gun. When they followed the old hands advice they lived. When they followed the 'Cult of the Gun' they were the only A-10 drivers 'killed'.

I never knew for certain if the 'lessons learned' from TASVAL had been carried forward until Douglas Campbell wrote about it in his (~9575%) definitive book [10/28/13: Just finished dissecting Campbell's thesis the book is based upon and now have serious reservations concerning the quality and selectivity of his sources] on the history of the A-10 "The Warthog and the Close Air Support Debate". His book has the first references I've ever read of  TASVAL (other than an Army Mental Health paper on the extraordinary divorce rates among Army participants at Fort Hunter Liggett) and confirms the lessons DID go forward.

But though the lessons went forward, so did the Cult of the Gun. Using the 'Gun' is visceral. I had conversations on this topic with my late Father-in-Law who flew the first F-4Es in SEA out of DaNang. He flew with the 4th TFS 'Fuujins' , then with the 366th TFW "Gunfighters". His favorite air to mud configuration was 20mm centerline and 2 more 20mms on the wings on top of his 20mm cannon in the nose. He likened the satisfaction of attacking with the gun to reaching out and touching the target.

I believe some of the same feeling he conveyed can be found in this C-Span Video interviewing Eric 'Fish' Salomonson and his wingman John 'Karl' Marks (Segment starts about 1:30 into the clip). These pilots 'killed' 23 tanks (and 10 damaged) flying three missions in one day. I remember watching this video the first time it aired. The 'pool' reporter asks some hilariously stupid questions at times so the whole video is pretty entertaining. At first I thought that the kill mix was 12 'gun' and 11 'missiles' because Salmonson mentions he had a 'bad Maverick' (~7:41) on the last sortie, but less than 10 seconds later he's asked about the mix and Salomonson tells the reporter the ratio was 17 kills with the Maverick and 6 kills with the gun. Keep that in mind as you watch the pilot's reaction at the ~11:20 mark when the reporter asks what it looks like when 'a Maverick hits one of the tanks' and listen to their comments: "huge explosion", "turret blew completely off", "spinning through air" etc. Then about the reporters ask (about the ~21:17 mark) about the effect of 'the cannon' and get in response: "not quite as big a boom", just "see flashes", "usually a little bit of a delay if it does light off"... etc ,,and then about 30 seconds of commentary on how it's harder to use (takes more skill).  But when they get asked (~21:54) about "of all the weapons" which weapon do they they prefer?

Lt Marks closes his eyes, smiles and then Salomonson says: "The Gun".

 Salomonson elaborates further including closing his eyes for a moment as if to relive the feeling in his head as he says....

"There's nothing like it."

There's no better example of the visceral power of 'the gun' than this interview. 16 (oops) 17 certain nearly instantaneous kills with missiles vs. 6 'slow cookers' and 10 'possibles' with the GAU-8...and they prefer the gun.

We're such irrational beings aren't we?

Part 1: The “Big Two” Close Air Support (CAS) Myths
Part 2: Those "not so good old days”
Part 3: Vietnam and the Rise of the “No-CAS Air Force” Myth
Part 4: Origins of the A-X Program
Part 5: Defining a New CAS Platform: the Evolution of the A-10
Part 6: A-10s 'Forever' ?
CAS Myths Sidebar: Army-Air Force Views on CAS and Airpower