Pournelle CAS Fail

Surprise! Old Army Vet and SF writer thinks like a 'Grunt'. 

Jerry Pournelle's 'abolish the AF crap' is bad enough (based upon some 'conversations' he once had and a selective picking over of Carl Builder's [1] Masks of War), but the uncritical regurgitation of the standard 'Army' A-10 fanboi theme was too much.

If you've read much of Pournelle's work, you'll often find a lot of brute force military action up close and personal (very 'Army'). So in a way this is kind of to be expected. But one would think an accomplished SF writer would have a little more imagination than having the AF keep flying low and slow in an obsolete aircraft, Pournelle strikes me now as just another old cynic without a clue.

I know where he could find one or two, but if he got this far (he's in his 80s fer cryin' out loud) without being able to conceptualize a near term future with a better way to perform CAS or understand the reasons for the different services, given how the recent advances in the application of force provide evidence that we can become more precise, lethal, while lowering attrition on the good guys, then there's little hope of little old me making the geezer see the error of his ways. I won't even go into his throwaway lines about unmanned vehicles, except to observe he hasn't a clue about where they are in their evolution and where they need to be to replace most manned combat aircraft.

I read all of Robert Heinlein's work that I could get my hands on until he had his near stroke and wrote that POS titled 'The Number of the Beast'. I waited for and picked up a copy the first day it was out. I was enjoying it until right in the middle it took a hairpin turn from soft Science Fiction right into pure effin' fantasy. Sorry, parallel universes are one thing--parallel universes with an Oz (literally) is another. I now suddenly find myself not interested in ever picking up another Pournelle work after this demonstrated lack of thoughtfulness much less imagination.


[Note 1] I'm a huge fan of Builder. His writings and analytical methods as well as his insight into many things was awesome--like a Glenn A. Kent without the military experience and extra insight, But he had blind spots like everyone else, especially when it came to the 1960s-70s Army.  I learned much about the blind spots (among many good things) from one of my mentors who worked with and was a friend of Builder pre-RAND: the late great Gene Ostermann (whom most have never heard of, but probably should have).