The American way

In an article for the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, summarized on-line, Max Boot provides a summary of the main combat phase of the operation in Iraq in order to demonstrate that America no longer fights wars of attrition.

It’s a long and interesting article in which Boot describes the new “American way of war” and considers how this change in doctrine is affecting military planning and procurement in the information age.

Here's something I found interesting.

U.S. forces used 30 times more bandwidth in Operation Iraqi Freedom than in Desert Storm

But it was what Boot had to say about the A-10 Warthog that really caught my attention and seems to me to make a lot of sense.

Congress should repeal the absurd law that prevents the army, with some minor exceptions, from fielding any fixed-wing aviation of its own. If the air force does not want the A-10, let the army take it over to supplement its helicopters, the vulnerability of which to ground fire and plain old mechanical malfunctions was once again demonstrated in Iraq.

The A-10's role is to provide close ground support. Consequently, the ground-pounders love it and the flyboys hate it. To the Air Force the Warthog is an ugly duckling, it’s slow and it flies too close to the dirt. There’s not enough of that “wide blue yonder” feel about it for most pilots and, as the United States Air Force is run by pilots, they'd like to scrap it.

Why my interest in the A-10?

Well, next to the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, the story of the war that said the most for me about the modern American military was an A-10 sortie over Baghdad and the experiences of the pilot who flew it.

Mercury News ran a story on her.