I googled "israeli f16 close air support" and found a few articles on the subject. The Israelis definitely have mastered that aircraft in the CAS role. Their Pillar of Fire operation in Gaza showed some impressive accuracy and air/ground coordination. Some other articles on CAS in general pretty much mimiced a lot of the usual discussions for and against each of the aircraft. "Yeah, it (F16, F15E, A10, etc) can do
this but it can't do
that". Lots of outright prejudice for favorite platforms seems to be floating around among the experts as well - gee, who'da thunk?
What I got from those articles was that ordnance developments could be as much of a factor in CAS as the platform delivering them. One commenter on an article wrote, "The best close air support may be artillery, targeted by UAVs and supplied by unmanned helicopters."
Another thing I got and that was mentioned as a criteria for retiring the "beloved A10" was that we haven't had to face a "contested environment" in the life of the aircraft. An F35 might not be a dog fighter but a squadron of A10's would not fare well against a flight of high performance air superiority fighters either.
And not trying to be sarcastic, but it looks like
any of our fighters armed with precision weapons can do very well in CAS against a low tech enemy armed only with AK's or light machine guns.
My worry quite blatantly is China with a secondary eye on Russia. The US military has not faced a technologically and logistically equal foe since WWII. Our ground and naval forces have not had to contend with a serious air attack threat since 1945 as well. I can predict the sneers already against the quality of their tech, particularly Russian. But the Chinese aren't stupid and their ability to mass produce goods is increasing while ours is decreasing. The Germans may have sneered at the build quality of a T34 and joked about our Ronsonols, right up until they faced thousands and thousands of them.
Right now our high tech is an excellent force multiplier. It would be a fool who doesn't think the Chinese are developing every way they can think of to counter that high tech. They launch how many cyber attacks against us each day? Thousands is the number I've heard. all it would take is one or two getting through to the right place.
I'm all for advanced weapons but like you, I want to see us maintain the ability to field large numbers of weapons to counter inevitable losses instead of a few that could conceivably be countered by one technological breakthrough.
Anyway, this is all really interesting to talk about. I learn new things all the time here.
