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Subject: Friendly fire, CAS, etc.
Pete S    4/24/2002 9:21:06 AM
According to a Canadian news link, the pilot was ordered repeatedly
NOT to engage. Any more info?

As a pilot, I can tell you that ID'ing objects from the air is not
easy. In the Civil Air Patrol, we train to perform SAR at 1,000 ft
and 100 mph. Even that low and slow, vehicles and personnel are
hard to see. Add nightime, several thousand feet and several hundred
mph, and it REALLY becomes a challenge. That's no excuse for the
pilot; he was in communication and should have been keeping track
of his location.

In combat, low and slow is vulnerable in any environment. In
Vietnam, WWII B-26s were used over the Ho Chi Minh Trail early on,
with AC-119s and early AC-130s coming in later. As the NVA began
bringing down heavier guns and missiles, though, the slow-movers
had to be withdrawn. The A-10 designers recognized this vulnerability and tried to counter it by making the plane as hard
as possible. Attack helicopters and PGMs are attempts to keep the
"close" in close air support.
The new, more mobile SAM systems are keeping CAS platforms further
and further away, increasing reliance on PGMs and artillery. In fact, with new developments in laser and directed energy systems,
TACAIR may soon eventually obsolete, giving the field back to the
redlegs.
 
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Canadain Grunt    RE:Friendly fire, CAS, etc.   4/24/2002 1:15:51 PM
Hey these guys pick out a particalar building in a city, and drop bombs on it, and have been doing so i might add with pin piont accuracy for a long time, so yes it might be hard to see things at night but that target screen show a clear picture of a LAV III and ground troops when he dropped that bomb, this tells me 2 things 1) he is in capable of identifing armour vehs "there for should not be attacking said targets" ground pounders have to be able to identify most armour vehs friendly and enemy plus most aircraft regardless of what speed they are travaling ...2) he can not follow orders" twice he was told not to engage and he was to place his wpns on hold.... If you were his commander what would you do....
 
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Pete S    RE:Friendly fire, CAS, etc.   4/24/2002 2:37:04 PM
CG, you are exactly right. Even with all the assistance he had, the pilot apparently was not keeping track of his sitaution. As a result, he was surprised and possibly panicked; neither of which is good for a pilot. Unless the evidence, presented in a duly constituted court of inqiry shows beyond ANY doubt that he had ample reason to fear for his life, his career would be toast, at the very least. I don't think anybody beleives it was pre- meditated, but was a horrible mistake. That is no comfort to the soldier's relatives (I can't find anything noble about being killed by friendly fire), nor to the pilot, but it happened, and the pilot must be held accountable.
 
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macawman    RE:Friendly fire, CAS, etc.   9/8/2002 6:34:47 AM
Your conclusion needs to be modified. The Air Force fast and low altitude TAC Air may be a coming to an end. The reason the Army has more pilots than the Air Force is because in normal Army field operations (where tanks are operating) CAS is provided by Apache gunships. In Kosovo and Afganistan these gunships were not near as effective as they could have been at sea level. In Afganistan the Special Operations CAS mission fell mostly on the B-52 and their precision smart bombs. The B-52s bomb load and loiter time over the AO was the critical factor over other aircraft. The future, I think, for CAS is armed UAVs controlled by Army pilots.
 
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Ehran    RE:Friendly fire, CAS, etc.   2/28/2004 7:47:24 PM
there was a pretty clear layout of what happened in my newspaper a while back and it showed the pilot's altitude and speed at various points along with a time line. his actions were at best indefensible and breached sop for dealing with that kind of situation. at no time was he low enough to be in reasonable danger from ground fire for instance. it also mentioned he was within a couple weeks of ending his tour and had yet to drop a bomb on anything.
 
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EKG    RE:Friendly fire, CAS, etc.   5/19/2006 2:05:47 AM
I like how magically all fixed wing air assets have been rendered obsolete for close CAS, but helicopters are suddenly going to be so much more effective. Umm... why again? Helicopters are generally much more fragile, slower, etc. Look at the Chechnya war and you will see that fixed wing CAS using PGM's are far more effective for urban CAS. Once the Fulda Gap style theoretical scenarios end and real life (LIC/COIN which is 95 percent or more of modern warfare) situations begin, you will see that we still need low flying (2,000 feet and lower) fixed wing planes with guns and sub-250 pound dumb bombs (of course in addition to fighter jocks with PGMs). The pilots need to be trained for CAS, IE flying parallel to friendly forces, they need to be comfortable with strafing sub-danger close distances. If we had had this at Takur Gar it would have been a wholly different outcome. The only marginally effective CAS there were Tomcats with 500 pound bombs, even then its theoretical that they actually killed anybody. F-15E strafing runs were conducted but were innefective for a variety of reasons. Were the pilots even able to fly under 10,000 feet AGL? Air Force says they can't. We need slow moving, manueverable and survivable planes armed with potent guns and pilots trained for CAS. Oh, you mean we had those but got rid of them? A-10's, and a combination of trainer jet sized CAS aircraft similar to the Dragonfly, would save so many lives on the ground... Former Commander of the OPFOR at NTC, Colonel John D. Rosenberger, U.S. Army presented the following report; The Inherent Vulnerabilities of Technology: Insights from the National Training Center's Opposing Force: "To the 2,500 troopers of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Opposing Force (OPFOR) at the U.S. Army's National Training Center (NTC), it came as no surprise to watch the 3rd Serbian Army march back into Serbia virtually unscathed by the relentless attacks of NATO air power during the Kosovo conflict this past year. Moreover, it came as no surprise to see the Serbian Army employ a wide variety of physical and electronic deception techniques, remain tactically well-dispersed, and hide their combat systems in the infrastructure of cities and villages to preserve their combat power. This is old news to the combined-arms team of the NTC's Opposing Force. These same Serbian adaptations have been learned and employed successfully by the OPFOR at the NTC since 1994-adaptive countermeasures critical to preserving combat capability at the tactical level of war against the impressive array of intelligence collection and attack technologies employed by America's joint team. Moreover, this is only one of several insights the OPFOR can provide into the limitations and vulnerabilities of the current warfighting technology that underpins America's style of warfare in the 21st Century. In the past six years, the NTC OPFOR has exposed many limitations and vulnerabilities inherent to the warfighting technologies our joint services are currently pursuing. Moreover, they've learned to defeat them just like any adaptive and savvy opponent will do-just as the Serbian Army did this past year. In my view, these vulnerabilities that we have exposed are compelling, not simply to make smarter technological investments in the years ahead, but equally important, ensure we do not forfeit combat effectiveness, the ability to deter, or the ability to quickly defeat our enemies at both the operational and tactical levels of war in the years ahead. To begin with, we have learned that active and passive force protection measures are vital to preserving combat power against asymmetric technologies, asymmetric in this case meaning some technological capability that provides a decisive advantage over an opponent in combat. For example, cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, satellite reconnaissance systems, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles have provided us an asymmetric combat advantage over all our opponents this past decade. In response to these capabilities, we have learned that thermal deception, vehicle and unit dispersion, decoys of all types, camouflage, concealment, and electronic deception are vital means and ways to protect and preserve our ground combat power. Furthermore, the OPFOR has learned that air power and overhead intelligence acquisition systems have significant limitations and are inherently vulnerable to deception-even in desert and mountainous terrain. And by extension, even more so in densely forested areas and jungles, not to mention complex and urban terrain. Take fixed-wing attack aircraft. It is not difficult to survive against the existing suite of joint close air support aircraft (F-16, F-18, A-10, and equivalents), attacking at altitudes above 15,000 feet, even in the desert. Given the target acquisition capability and the speed in which these aircraft fly, target acquisition and target recognition at these altitudes is difficult at best. We have learned that if we limit our movement, don't create dust clouds, remain tactically dispersed, use camouflage, and employ decoy equipment, we will absorb few losses to fixed wing attack above 15,000 feet-the same methodology of force protection the Serbian Army and para-military forces employed in the dense forests, cities, and villages in Kosovo. By using a combination of these force protection techniques, the effectiveness of high-altitude, fixed-wing attack against ground forces can be limited and thereby endured. Moreover, this ability to eliminate the effectiveness of high-altitude fixed-wing attack, in turn, places an even higher value on overhead target acquisition platforms like satellites, JSTARS, and unmanned aerial vehicles. And as we have learned, these overhead intelligence collection systems-the operators and analysts-are inherently easy to deceive. Take reconnaissance satellites in low earth orbit. Given our experience, it takes about 18 hours to complete the targeting process using these sensors-from acquisition, to imagery analysis, to integration into the ATO, to effective attack. Consequently, we've learned to move critical combat systems every 10-12 hours to protect them and keep them in the fight. Frequent survivability moves, in small packets of vehicles are an essential technique to employ to preserve combat power."
 
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