re: Leaving for Air Force basic in 24 hours

quote:

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.Hopefully the comment was meant more towards "we train differently now, so some of these specialties aren't as needed"

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In a sense yes. Mostly it was about the specialties being redundant. There's zero reason the Army can't produce it's own JTACs and highly qualified medics and, in fact, they do exactly that. The amount of money it takes to train a CCT or PJ whom will never actually operate in his own branch of service but rather support others would be better spent elsewhere. And the army would produce better and more qualified combat controllers as it is.

As it stands now the Air Force spends millions of dollars and years of valuable time to create either a medic or JTAC that also has at least some ground combat skills. Well, we have an entire army(literally) of qualified medics and ground combat soldiers that could easily be taught how to control close air support. It's really not all that difficult.

Two other things...

1. PJ's haven't actually done their stated mission in God know's how long. Pretty sure the Marines are the go to guys for personnel recovery if history is any guide. Just look at Scott O'Grady and the downing of the F-15E in Libya. So we have PJ's acting as an overfunded over supplied support unit who send medics to SOF teams just so they'll have something to do. News flash...All the SOF units already have their own medical personnel.

2. CAS is going to go the way of the dodo bird in the near future with the exception of very rare circumstances. Surface to Surface fires have just become too good. They're just as accurate, far more reliable, far cheaper, the logistics train on them is exponentially smaller and they are more responsive. And it only gets better by the day. Not to mention it's much easier to coordinate surface fires than it is to coordinate and deconflict CAS.