Slaying the Unicorn: The Army and Fixed-Wing Attack
Mike Pietrucha
December 9, 2019
Consider another day under the hot sun as a four-man team in some distant land goes out on patrol on an “advise and assist†mission. This is hardly unusual — these missions are replicated globally thousands of times a year, in furtherance of building international partnership capacity to counter violent extremist organizations. Unfortunately, their adversaries have their own agenda and opportunities, and this routine patrol escalates to combat operations in the blink of an eye. Now the troops are in a fight for their lives, without air cover, against a numerically superior force. Tragically, a similar scenario resulted in the loss of four American soldiers, killed in Niger in 2017. While the Department of Defense highlighted the many mistakes that led up to this tragic result, the lack of airpower is addressed only in the context of what those forces had available, not what they could have had. With the expectation that the fight against violent extremists will continue for a generation, the United States continues to rely heavily on airpower to provide an asymmetric advantage. With ground forces far more distributed globally than air forces, the Army should clearly provide its own fixed-wing attack aircraft to support far-flung operations. Except that they can’t. Hamstrung by a misinterpretation of agreements dating back to 1948, the Department of Defense believes that the Army agreed not to procure fixed-wing combat aircraft and can’t arm those they do have. It turns out that’s not true — such an agreement was never codified in writing. What they did agree to was to not duplicate a function assigned to the Air Force. It’s long past time to slay this unicorn and erase a completely artificial line that hampers airpower options to the detriment of servicemen and women worldwide. The Army may be the best candidate for a light attack capability that is not an Air Force priority. Let the Army have an airpower capability appropriate to the mission.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/slaying-the-unicorn-the-army-and-fixed-wing-attack/
