Cas Cultural Issues

Regarding CAS training, cultural issues make a clear difference about how to integrate air and land domain. The Army’s relationship to air power is far different from that of the Marine Corps. The Marines train their ground and air units to fight as a combined arms team. Their airmen see their sole mission as assuring the survival and success of Marines on the ground. Their forward air controllers (FACs) are all Marine pilots, who may also be assigned to ground units. In contrast, the Army has no counterpart to the Marine air-ground task force. Air Force A-10 pilots, like Marine airmen, consider their sole mission to be assuring the survival and success of Army troops on the ground, but other Air Force pilots may regard air support to ground
forces as just another form of strike. Except in wartime, Army officers have little exposure to air power and little opportunity to train together with air forces. Their terminal attack controllers (TACs) are Air Force enlisted men, who are usually collocated with the units they support but are not assigned to those units. Besides the cultural issues, JCAS training is expensive and has logistic difficulties.
In order to provide units with training solutions that fully simulate what they might encounter and experience while conducting mission in the operational environment, a considerable amount of time, money, and resources are required. In addition, while this may present the training audience with an ideal experience, it is not feasible to provide all aircrew with this type of training experience every time they train. Since CAS operations require participation of an entire team, if a particular individual is not adequately prepared for a training evolution, the overall training value for all participants involved may be diminished. Moreover, the number of repetitions needed to develop the required level of proficiency for a pilot is significant, and is likely to vary between individuals. For instance, the military’s current exercises conducted with joint US forces have little or no integration with Special Forces on a large, deliberate scale due to the scarce availability of these elite troops.
In order to confront this limitations and enabling more joint training, recent initiatives, like the Joint National Training Capability (JNTC), are integrating the simulation resources of each of the services to provide a new synthetic environment under the concept of training Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC). JNTC enables to interconnect remote locations over secure high-speed networks to share training sessions. This system allows to real actors (Live) to interact with simulators driven by human actors (Virtual) and purely virtual actors generated by computer (Constructive), under a common environment. The LVC concept promise the ability to rapidly compose integrated and demanding environments where warfighters can come together from distributed locations to train and rehearse in realistic joint and coalition operations.
In 2016, a multinational team in the coalition capability demonstration Bold Quest 15.2 developed a LVC environment integrating the French Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controllers in Nancy-Ochey Airbase (France) with a virtual trainer of AC-130 at Hurlburt Field (Florida). In the same demonstration, a Canadian infantry section at Ontario conducted virtual missions with American, Canadian and Danish units at Fort Bliss, Texas and Camp Atterbury, Indiana. In all cases the results were generally a success, allowing to recognize interoperability and doctrinal issues.
- Future trends in CAS training.
The technology in the future will continue affecting the CAS doctrine. One of the main points will be the increasing use of PGMs, and this affects the definition of close proximity. For CAS forces today, close proximity must be defined as the distance where active terminal control from the ground is required to ensure the prevention of fratricidal damage to friendly ground forces because of the weapons being employed.
The increased stand-off and delivery ranges of weapons like the Hellfire missile or Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), require a ground controller to authorize a pilot to deliver the weapon without first seeing his or her aircraft. In some cases, the pilot may not acquire the target prior to weapons release. This requires a higher level of confidence by the ground commander in his or her air controller and the CAS platform.
Another technological trend is the increasing use of remoted piloted aircraft (RPA)s during CAS. RPAs had outpaced the ability to define doctrine and TTPs for these systems during CAS missions. The growing proliferation of these systems has many ramifications for CAS, to include clearance of fires, RPA control authority, airspace deconfliction, and target handoff.
In an increasingly constrained fiscal environment, the opportunities to conduct live CAS in the aircraft will become even more limited.
This will put a greater emphasis on the use of simulators. Since aircrews are expected to conduct a myriad of tasks that are both internal and external to the aircraft while, at the same time, conducting a CAS mission, it is inevitable that training approach will rely on the existence of several part-task trainers. The detailed integration will rely on clear and effective communication between the pilots and JTACs. The importance of being able to communicate quickly and clearly on the battlefield is critical. The reason that the communications and procedures outlined in doctrinal publications are consistent with joint publications is to ensure that all players on the battlefield have a common language with repeatable and predictable procedures. The increased effectiveness in communication leads to an increased effectiveness on the battlefield. It is also commonly understood among the participants of CAS operations that if the players do not adhere to this common language and predictable procedures, the situation may lead to confusion and result in enemy getting away or worse yet, incidents of
fratricide.