AF, sister services rally at Pentagon to put focus on Close Air Support

by Benjamin Newell,Air Combat Command Public Affairs

3/6/2015

Marine Maj. Dustin Byrum (left), Air Officer Department Head, Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, Yuma, Ariz. , and Air Force Maj. Scott Mills, 66th Weapons Squadron commander, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., share their thoughts before the morning briefing as part of the Future Close Air Support Focus Week March 4, at the Pentagon. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Anthony Nelson Jr.) 

3/6/2015 - JOINT BASE LANGLEY-EUSTIS, Va. -- Representatives of each military service, joint warfighters, and civilian experts came together to discuss the future of Close Air Support at an Air Combat Command-command hosted summit at the Pentagon, March 2-6.

Dubbed "Future CAS Focus Week", the event served as a joint forum for more than 60 participants and senior leaders to discuss the current state of the CAS mission and existing and potential challenges, future requirements and capability gaps. CAS is an attack by military aircraft against enemy ground forces who are in close proximity to friendly forces.

"We gathered the best minds in the joint arena to take a deep look at close air support," said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command. "Our objective is to establish a way ahead that ensures close air support capabilities meet warfighter demands today and are sustainable into the future."

The Chief of Staff of the Air Force directed the Focus Week, a tacit recognition that budget and operational concerns are forcing the services to reassess how they organize, train and equip and that it is more important than ever to take the time to assess the current state of the critical CAS mission. As the lead command for the Combat Air Forces, with a role of ensuring the right platforms and CAS experts in their cockpits, ACC was the natural choice to execute the event.

"We have flown CAS missions since World War I," said Col James Meger, Commander of ACC's 355th Fighter Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz. "It's part of our DNA and commitment to our joint teammates and it will be part of our mission for another 100. We have built a strong CAS culture with our pilots and our Joint Terminal Air Controllers. CAS entails a highly trained force to protect our friendly forces and hunt down and kill our Nation's enemies."

In addition to representatives from each of the services, attendees included members of the Joint Staff, U.S. Special Operations Command, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Rand Corporation. Most important, attendees included representatives of the ground forces that benefit from CAS and the air crew and JTACs who ensure its application on the battlefield.

"Inter-service collaboration is essential in order to determine the way forward for effective CAS in the future," said Marine Corps Major Dustin Byrum, Air Officer Department Head, Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, Yuma, Ariz. "As a Marine pilot and Forward Air Controller I have supported Air Force and Coalition JTACs as well as been supported by Air Force aircraft. We have to be able to operate in a joint environment. Having all of our joint partners together to talk about fire support allows us to incorporate the views and capabilities of each service."

That point was echoed by Col. Jeffrey Burdett, ACC's Assistant Deputy Director of Requirements here, who noted that collaboration was critical in the face of changing threats.

"The enemy changes and we change," Burdett said. "While the joint community conducts close air support better than ever before, the current experience [i.e. operating in relatively uncontested airspace] has degraded our ability to operate in more demanding environments. In concert with our joint service partners, we developed an understanding of where the Air Force should focus its future resources to best support the CAS mission."

Focus Week participants were divided into three groups. One group included experts in past CAS operations, who provided details on what the services have learned during more than a decade of continuous combat operations. A second studied the current state of CAS capabilities. The final group looked at emerging threats and how the services could factor those threats into training, tactics, procedures, and doctrine. Collectively, the groups approached their discussions from the perspective that CAS is broader than any particular platform.

"It's critical for those who follow our current operations to understand that CAS is not a mission defined by a single aircraft," said Rollin Dixon, ACC's Deputy Chief of Flight Operations. "We want to pull in all the experts to really look at how we will continue performing this mission, regardless of the platform we're using."

That point was echoed by the Honorable John McHugh, Secretary of the Army, who at a Defense Writers Group breakfast last month said that added that "...from the Army side, we view it [the CAS mission] as absolutely critical. What a Soldier wants to see, and what the command structure of the United States Army wants to have happen, is when circumstances on the battlefield require, we have explosive ordnances on the enemy position. What platform the Air Force chooses to utilize in that is a matter for their discussions and decisions."

Due to the classified nature of the discussions, recommendations won't likely be made public. However, the fruits of these discussions may be changes that will impact the course of CAS training and execution for years.

"We sat down with all our joint partners, our customers, to ask them what they wanted and what they thought about the future of CAS. From there we melded recommendations to ensure all aspects of the Air Force's CAS mission continue to develop and are improved by technology and joint interoperability," said Meger. "Most important we provided recommendations to ensure the appropriate weight of effort was placed on the mission and that the Air Force CAS culture is not just preserved but that it advances."