Respected Sunday Times journalist and former Intelligence Corps analyst Mick Smith raises some interesting questions in this article yesterdayhttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5734089.ece
Air Command have made significant investment in the training facilities to make sure that this platform reaches IOC with the right number of IAs to do the job. This has including sacrificing mission duration, giving away the AAR / long-loiter capability.
Against that commitment from the RAF it seems that we are still short of key rear crew. Given close to 10 years advance notice we still seem to be heading for a long-predicted train crash. There is a view that part of one service has not been able to keep its side of the bargain. Clearly it has important commitments elsewhere, and , when you are getting shot at, green suited one and two stars have a louder voice than the light blue ones.
How do we resolve this situation? Early discussions have indicated that the Royal Artillery may have some available manpower, albeit tactical imagery analysts, the Sentinel would gain the advantage of having som FOO capability on board, possible even JTAC. There are clear advantages here for the delivery of deep fires.
The ISTAR and Counter-ISTAR community are becomingly increasingly joint. With the current tempo of land operations, the RAF is stepping up to the mark filling an increasing number of undermanned or gapped posts across the J2 community. Answers are at hand, it only needs for the respective stakeholders to find the bandwidth to get to the table to close this matter out.
As ever A2 Branch stands ready to engage.
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