Net-centric micro-management in the anti-ISIS air plan

This has been pushed out on the Internet, so may as well blog it.

Subject: A-10 driver perspective


The squadron is doing fine. Everybody is happy to be here and we are doing
some good work. The A-10s are holding up well and the technology we have
have on the jets now (targeting pods, GPS guided bombs, Laser Guided bombs,
Laser guided missiles, tactical data link, satellite comms), and of course
the gun, make the A-10 ideal for this conflict. We are killing off as many
ISIS as we can, mostly in ones and twos, working with the hand we are dealt.
I've never been more convicted in my career that we facing an enemy that
needs to be eradicated.

With that being said...I've never been more frustrated in my career. After
13 years of the mind-numbing low intensity conflict in Afghanistan, I've
never seen the knife more dull. All the hard lessons learned in Vietnam, and
fixed during the first Gulf War, have been unlearned again. The level of
centralized execution, bureaucracy, and politics is staggering. I basically
do not have any decision making authority in my cockpit. It sucks. In most
cases, unless a general officer can look at a video picture from a UAV, over
a satellite link, I cannot get authority to engage. I've spent many hours,
staring through a targeting pod screen in my own cockpit, watching ISIS
shitheads perpetrate their acts until my eyes bleed, without being able to
do anything about it. The institutional fear of making a mistake, that has
crept into the central mindset of the military leadership, is endemic. We
have not taken the fight to these guys. We haven't targeted their centers
of gravity in Raqqa. All the roads between Syria and Iraq are still intact
with trucks flowing freely. The other night I watched a couple hundred
small tanker trucks lined up at an oilfield in ISIS-held northeast Syria,
presumably filling up with with oil traded on the black market, go
unfettered. It's not uncommon to wait several hours overhead a suspected
target for someone to make a decision to engage or not. It feels like we
are simply using the constructs build up in Afghanistan, which was a very
limited fight, in the same way here against ISIS, which is a much more
sophisticated and numerically greater foe. It's embarrassing.

Root cause? Flag-rank cowardice in the face of the enemy.

.