I suspect that the only legitimate bitch from the army major is the effectiveness of CAS when he gets it. In that respect it is not surprising that he perceives a difference between the RAF and the USAF. You just have to look at the equipment procured for this role by the different schools of thought to understand how hard they found it to choose the right solution. The RAF chose a V/STOVL with high wing loading, bombs or rockets and slow rate of fire cannon (since abandoned), the USAF chose a straight wing jet with low wing loading, slow speed, titanium bathtub cockpit, bombs or rockets, high rate of fire gatling gun and most armies chose an attack helicopter. Those choices could hardly be more diverse.
I concur with Norman Stanley Fletcher that we do tend to treat US inventory items as ‘not invented here’. I know that when I returned from an exchange tour with first hand experience of our transatlantic cousins’ solutions to the Vietnam war and a whole arsenal of combat-validated tactics, the RAF just did not want to know. We didn’t even want to examine the lessons of the Falklands war – “It was a victory, you know. Let’s not dwell on the negatives”. Those who fail to learn the lessons from history are destined to make the same mistakes.