A-4 / A-7 Question

"Alan Minyard"wrote
"Dudhorse" wrote:


"Grantland" wrote in message
(Harry Andreas) wrote:

In article , Joe Osman
wrote:
snip
While doing CAS from afar doesn't have the dramatic flair of
the good
ol' days, it certainly is just as effective. Won't make very
good
footage for some future war movie though.

That's all well and good if the technology works, but if it
fails the results can be a lot nastier than when the
ordnance was being pointed in the proper direction until the
last second with the pilot there to make the decision to
release or not. And if the enemy defeats or spoofs the
terchnology we should still have the old fashioned
capability around, especially in an expeditionary context
where troops on the ground need "flying artillery".

The technology is a lot harder to defeat than most people
realize.

The alternative is to spend a LOT of time training for dumb bomb
deliveries that you'll probably never do: a waste to resources
when
you could be training for something more useful.
Or not train for dumb bomb deliveries enough, and if you have to
do it,
not be competent enough which is a risk all it's own.

I think you need to bet on the odds, which are strongly in favor
of
the technology, especially since it's been demonstrated in
service.

until someone detonates an EMP nukes(s) in high orbit. No doubt
there's a coupla candidates already up there, waiting. There
goes
your $trillion+ investment.. tsk tsk

Grantland

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur

.... and you can bet your last eggroll that the Red Chinese have
got one of
their top thinktanks devising ways to circumvent/destroy the U.S.
digital
infrastructure - Gulf War I & II have taught them and the world the
way to
defang the U.S. across the board is to take out every one of our
networks/uplinks & downlinks. If they ever go head to head with us
in the
future it will have to be their number one priority if they want to
stand a
chance.

Trust me, that would be extremely difficult. Systems are EMP
hardened,
encoded, and backed up. Not to mention the existence of systems that
are not discussed in public.

The most effective attacks would insert bogus calls for fire into the
network. If the net gets the reputation as being untrustworthy (and it
only takes a few instances for that to happen) then every goes back to
1992 paper ATOs. I don't have your faith in the invulnerability of
military networks since 1. enemy IW people have huge incentives to
penetrate our networks, 2. our networks by their nature are not
exposed to the kinds of constant "test by enemy fire" that open
networks are. Robust encryption and physical security of key sets is
probably our best line of defense.