Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

William S. Lind • 113frankly, the air-ground relationship both starts and ends there. True, your pilots goback to be FACs [forward air controllers]. But they never command ground units, asour best aviators do. By the time one of our aviators is serving as a wing commanderand assistant division commander, he will have commanded an infantry or light-armorplatoon, company and battalion. His command tours will have been shorter than thoseof his infantry counterparts, but he will have done it, not just seen it.In the Islandian Marine Corps, any fire team or squad leader, platoon, companyor battalion commander can be an FAC. We put the “actuals” in charge, not technicalspecialists. Frankly, we think your FACs, as part of a large, centralized controlsystem, would become impediments in a fluid battle. They would be responding toa set process, not the situation.ME: What is more important in Jaeger Air, the aircrew or the aircraft?COL. ARN: The pilot and the observer are much more important than the platform.Both must have a deep sense of what the ground guys are most concerned with. Theirunderstanding must reach the point where they can take charge and direct the battlefrom the air. Not every pilot or observer can reach this point. It takes years of experienceand a certain talent as well. Those who don’t have it, who cannot conceptualizethe ground situation in their mind, end up flying the transports and helos.We’re currently trying an experiment in this respect. All our squadrons arecomposite squadrons in terms of aircraft type, but we have a new experimentalsquadron that also includes 40 light armored vehicles (LAVs). Normally, they willbe commanded from the air. We want to see how this works in terms of increasingoperational tempo. The early results are promising. The LAV company commandertold me that in the one exercise we’ve done to date, he was able to move twice asfast with greater security because he had a much clearer sense of what was going onbeyond his range of vision. 3ME: How successful do you think you have been in creating aviators who really thinkof themselves as infantrymen?COL. ARN: Our fliers are not candy asses, bombing orphanages from 20,000 feet at550 knots so they don’t get shot down. They think of themselves not as knights onwhite horses but as street fighters. They get down and dirty, down low and slow sothey can see what is going on. We do like to save the aircrew, but the airplane itselfis expendable.ME: I take it your aircraft do not cost upwards of $30 million apiece?