Addendum to NC PATCON 8 AAR

 

South Vietnamese Air Force A-37B of the VNAF 548th Fighter Squadron

I thought it would be helpful to provide a real-world addendum as background for the 8th NC PATCON AAR, and to illustrate a situation similar to that pointed out by Bill Buppert in a recent article. In this article, he mentions the way one German general on the Eastern front would arrange air support. This general knew the general in charge of air, and would just call the air commander on the telephone and say they were attacking village A at 10 in the morning, and would he like to help.

The air commander would say "of course" and that was it. Very little formal process at that level. Bombs would fall until 10AM while the armored column approached, and then precisely at that time the bombs would stop and the armored column would enter the village. Underneath that simple conversation is an enormous amount of delegation and process.

Similarly, here is a sample of what high-level encrypted USMC command and control nets sound like, or at least did in Desert Storm circa 1991:

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