When air is hitting targets the Army can hit, you are doing a type of close air support - and that means you have already screwed up
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Not sure how to read this sentence. As an Army ‘grunt’ during TET 68 I was never so glad to see AF F100s circling to make bomb runs in ‘close’ air support when our 1 company of 199th Redcatchers encountered a battalion size NVA unit. I can only highly commend the pilots who dropped 500 pounders just a few hundred feet from our positions. The Army air support gunships tried to provide support but the heavy AA machine guns that an NVA battalion has with them made their support impossible. I surely wish the AF pilots after saving our asses were able to return to an air conditioned hooch and quaff a cold one.
“Not sure how to read this sentence.”
When I was in Afghanistan, I had several soldiers come up to me in the chow hall to talk about their experiences with CAS. One said he had been ambushed, had half a magazine left, and his buddy to the side of him was on empty when the A-10s showed up and obliterated the enemy.
Ideally, you would never reach that level to begin with. I understand it does happen. But when planning, my goal was to prevent things from reaching that point - either by detecting the ambush site in advance, or by having a faster response available so the guys on the ground wouldn’t be almost out of ammo before help arrived.
An example of getting it right was the night the bad guys tried to move in 300 guys to attack a remote firebase. They were still some miles away when the AC-130 paid them a visit. After the visit, no one was moving. When possible, that is a better way of doing business that waiting for close contact.
Also, fast movers can now do a solid job in CAS. A modern targeting pod is nothing like what I used in the F-111, and the guided munitions are far more accurate. I was lucky enough to do some work on the current targeting pods, and their capability is incredible. In many cases, a person at 20,000 feet has a BETTER chance of killing the bad guys in close contact than someone flying at 100 feet.
Stuff happens, and sometimes one has to react to salvage a bad situation. But the goal should always be to have a plan that prevents that from happening.