A-4 / A-7 Question

"Doug "Woody" and Erin Beal" wrote
"Grantland" wrote:

(Harry Andreas) wrote:

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


Right because terrorists can drive U-Haul trucks into space.

Since GPS Sats are thoroughly radiation hardened, it don't matter
much. It's impossible to take out GPS service with a single weapon of
any kind, any where. You_might_degrade system accuracy some places,
some times but that's about it. The Air Force is active in increasing
the hardness of the GPS system through increased coding gain, radiated
power and AJ antennas for the weapons. I don't see much payoff and do
see a lot of costs is maintaining the ability to deliver CAS fires
with dumb munitions. Better to proliferate the ways of guiding smart
munitions (mm-wave seekers for instance). The most fruitful avenue to
interfering with the New Age CAS is in network communications attacks
to slow down, corrupt or block those automated 9-line messages.