Ok… Couple points to make here because like so many things it’s been destroyed as a term and turned into something perversely not reality because OIF/OEF…. 24 hour ops… That does not mean continuous attack on all axis or more specifically 24 hours of continuous coverage by assets. Yes it is extremely beneficial if we can continue to make things go boom in an enemies support zone without rest, but reality is no force to include the ground force you guys exist to prepare the way for can maintain operation indefinitely. Munitions consumption would be extreme… You’d have aircraft and crews servicing targets of a lower priority vs taking a tactical pause in the cycle to prioritize and build robust packages so you can achieve greater effect against stuff higher up on the HPTL… This idea of “get big gun, go forward, reign hell” = effective CAS is just mind numbing from the perspective of the ground element you’re supposed to be supporting. I’ll say this out loud for the people in the back… We Can Kill Tanks! In fact we really don’t need that done for us because we are pretty damn good at it. And we can straight up murder BTR/BMP… What we can’t do, is set ground conditions favorable to the offense/defense to do that under rounds of artillery and heavy rocket fire. No you killing 3-4 armored vehicles advancing on line in a pass doesn’t make or break for effecting the fight, because by prioritizing assets and dollars to that fight you’ve ceded a point where you could have prevented it and the need to stop and dig in entirely! You guys want to talk about old Cold War tactics and requirements and why we needed Hawg and Apache to stem the armor, it wasn’t because of us it was because of our allies in the Fulda scenario. Penetration was talked about earlier (STS)…. There is the often quoted “855 rounds of artillery” from the Joint Firepower courts… Yeah thanks for reminding us that HE point detonating fuse 155 is the least effective way to engage tanks in the maneuver. We appreciate that….Well when the air delivered tank killing requirement was determined the primary tank gun in NATO armies was the rifled 105 L7. NATO acknowledged that across the board even Chieftain not adequate parity to what the Russians seemed to be developing as far as Armor. With the 105 you can kill plenty and deliver it very accurately. What you can’t do is reliably shoot in the face and kill a T-64/72 unless you use DU from within the effective range of their 125mm… So acknowledging that nobody wants to do that an on top of it most of our allies won’t use DU, that’s gonna be at problem. Enter the Reinmetal 120mm…. Well 73 Easting kind showed what that will do to a tank. Regardless though, Tanks aren’t the big problem for us. Tanks won’t produce the MASCAL event that will shape the battlefield and politics unfavorably for us. The Russians and armies modeled after it have fire support as their center of gravity, not armor. Kill his artillery, get into the support zone and eliminate that threat, and the ground force will deal with the Armor. If you can kill their fire support they lose their most effective enabler to attacking our ground force or resisting counter attack. And considering artillery assets will be further back and staged under more robust defense and ideally in their own revetments requiring more deliberate high angle targeting, suddenly the survivability argument presented earlier changes drastically. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk