Fodplod,
If ASaCs and attack helos had been deployed much earlier in the campaign to monitor and block the ability of PGF (Pro Gaddafi Forces) to move along the coastal highway with almost total impunity, I suspect much misery could have been avoided in and around Benghazi [etc]
There's a couple of problems with that assessment - firstly, PGF were already in the area of Ajdabiyah etc at the start of the campaign (PGF were, after all, the bona fide Libyan armed forces at that point). Secondly, many PGF troop movements in response to the nascent uprising happened
before the UNSCR - and regardless of Gadaffi's vile rhetoric, those troop movements again represented sovereign state business until such time as UNSCR 1973 had been passed. Naval airpower has some diplomatic advantages but intervening ahead of a UNSCR isn't one of them! When the surprisingly quick flurry of diplomatic activity ahead of 1973 was completed, it was the inherent speed of response of fast air from France, the US and UK from European MOBs that helped stop PGF advancing into Benghazi - it would have taken significant foresight to have prepositioned a LPH full of deck-trained AH to be ready in the same timescale.
As regards the situation around Misrata, you have a point in that interdiction of siege forces was an ideal use of AH. However the threat there was of such magnitude that the FW boys, operating above the MANPAD envelope, could observe at leisure and engage whenever necessary during a long on-station time - a luxury not available to AH crews at the time. ASaCs (or indeed Sentinel, which did the same job over the whole of Libya, not just the coast) can only get an AH or FJ sensor into
roughly the right area and some time is required to turn this into an engagement, not my idea of fun on a moonlit night with some modern MANPADs around.
odigron!
Crabs have little confidence in their own ability/service
Au contraire, I think you'll find most Crabs currently very proud of a job well done (and not in a supporting role, for a change). Hurrah!