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Offensive Air Support

The Marine Corps is a unique organization. It’s infantry is very light, compared to US Army mechanized formations, yet its supporting arms are a huge slice of its manpower and budget. By design, because shipping space is so tight, the Marine units of a landing force don’t have a lot of organic firepower. They make…

The Marine Corps is a unique organization. It’s infantry is very light, compared to US Army mechanized formations, yet its supporting arms are a huge slice of its manpower and budget. By design, because shipping space is so tight, the Marine units of a landing force don’t have a lot of organic firepower. They make up that shortfall by having a lot of dedicate fire support. A key component of that, dating all the way back to the 1920s, is Marine aviation. Where doctrinally an Army unit looks to its artillery for fire support, a Marine unit looks to its aviation. Close air support as we know it today was a Marine invention, and they are past masters at it.

Oh, and for all the love of the A-10, the Marines are quite happy to perform CAS without it.

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Responses to “Offensive Air Support”

  1. Esli

    Maybe the USMC is only happy to not have the A10 because they don’t know the full power…. I’d love to see some beefed up landing gear and a tailhook on that thing.
    I believe that I’ve mentioned it before but as the current ops officer in Ramadi in 2007, the USMC rifle battalions attached to the army brigade combat team were doing their level best to eat up all of the allocated hours of AH64 Apache coverage, despite the availability of Cobras, and they absolutely loved the ease of control afforded by army aviation (i.e. the Apache pilot will talk to whatever ground guy keys the radio while the USMC aviators will not, unless in extremis).

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  2. Quartermaster

    The Marines are rather parochial. They offer lots of excuses for this attribute, but none of them hold water.

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