If a CAS mission can be flown from 20,000 feet then absent a significant threat any bomb truck will do. The question then becomes, for this, whether a long loiter UCAS or a bomber with reasonable loiter and a high weapons load isn't a better platform than a strike fighter?
There are times, however, today when for CAS one does need to go low and slow. In terms of the light COIN aircraft:
according to Capt. Mark Mullins, a naval special warfare officer serving as the deputy director of the Navy Irregular Warfare Office at the Pentagon.
"It's not about flying in from 1,000 miles away, dropping some thousand-pound bombs and leaving," Mullins said. "It's about working with [the ground force], doing the intelligence preparation of the battlespace, doing a [communication] relay, close air support, eyes on target and if there's squirters leaving the target, keeping up with them and tracking them down and doing [bomb damage assessment] at the end." (Defense News)
With the greatest of respect to the NSWO, he is ignoring the reality that the majority of CAS for afghanistan has come from the heavies - as the lights cannot get in and sustain support. - and they are coming from 2000+km away and have been able to sustain support because the mission planners are factoring in overlap as well as sustainment (time/loiter)
and I say that as someone who knows first hand that troops have called in CAS and got persistent help from the heavies - and often at danger close levels.
the argument against JSF doing the job is just as much a canard as arguing that the A-10 is the only suitable aircraft to provide CAS
in fact in a number of events the JTAC has had to call in the heavies when the fighters could only do one pass - and those passes often did not do enough to deter the attacks.
real life experience is challenging a lot of the regular claims made about CAS - and consistently so.
CAS is a capability issue, not a platform issue. and the relevance of the platform is against the environment.
CAS in afghanistan has shown that the pet theories developed against a fulda gap scenario just do not hold true in todays environment. (ie fulda allowed immediacy of available air relative to the environment and had a less urban element to it, on top of which PGM's then were relatively primitive
I'd suggest that the good officer actually speak to people currently in the field about what the current CAS environment typically is. His turn of phrase on what the JTACs should do is exactly what they currently do, except they're calling in heavies as they are on tap - and they are still hitting the targets that previously everyone assumed was the lights and rotors domain.
PGM's on reverse slopes at altitude from on high tax the smalls and can expose them to small anti-air anyway. B-52's and B1's have regularly and repeatedly shown that what happens in the real world is not the same as whats assumed in the open press.
