I think the real problem here is that land warfare itself is changing too rapidly for anyone to really get on board with developing and scaling a CAS weapons platform.
I read military writers on Quora and the general sense is that it's going to be the Army and Marines that are going to form the backbone of power projection on land. The Marines are shifting their squad composition from 3 teams of four and a leader to four teams of three. One of these squad member's only job is to operate the proliferating tech tools that's becoming available to individuals.
So it's not even certain what capabilities CAS is going to need to have in the near future. Everyone's talking about loiter time, and certainly, that's really helpful, but what about the squad's soon-to-come drones? If that doesn't make the need for loiter obsolete I don't know what will.
A squad with a reconnaissance drone and portable mortars can do a hell of a lot without having to commit an aircraft. What will they need that aircraft for? Carrying weapons that the squad can't. Cue the fighter-bombers.
I can see why the Pentagon isn't chomping at the bit to spend boatloads of money on something they probably won't even need half of by the time they're done.
I read military writers on Quora and the general sense is that it's going to be the Army and Marines that are going to form the backbone of power projection on land. The Marines are shifting their squad composition from 3 teams of four and a leader to four teams of three. One of these squad member's only job is to operate the proliferating tech tools that's becoming available to individuals.
So it's not even certain what capabilities CAS is going to need to have in the near future. Everyone's talking about loiter time, and certainly, that's really helpful, but what about the squad's soon-to-come drones? If that doesn't make the need for loiter obsolete I don't know what will.
A squad with a reconnaissance drone and portable mortars can do a hell of a lot without having to commit an aircraft. What will they need that aircraft for? Carrying weapons that the squad can't. Cue the fighter-bombers.
I can see why the Pentagon isn't chomping at the bit to spend boatloads of money on something they probably won't even need half of by the time they're done.