I think we should head over to the Army board and tell them that we're going to do all our CAS training in the sim from now on. I am sure that the reaction will be overwhelmingly positive.
I can confidently predict a future "car crash" on this particular subject unless some better ways of doing business are found before the ground attack fleet gets much smaller....
- Training a FAC for one operational tour and then using him for something completely different thereafter - unsupportable, end of. New FAC career structure urgently needed. RAF Regiment missed a trick, I fear, by focussing on force protection instead of carving a niche for themselves as the air-land interface a la USAF JTACs and TACPs.
- Insisting that FACs make a certain number of 'hot' controls to qualify or stay current - unsupportable in a world where practice bombs are history and live bombing can only be carried out on certain enormous rocks from very restrictive parameters. And there's not enough strafe training in this world to keep all the FACs current (besides, talk-ons to range strafe targets are hardly realistic training for anyone).
- Insisting that FACs make controls with real aircraft when the vast majority of FJ CAS is conducted from medium level, and hence the aircraft is never even seen - waste of time. The majority of such training could be conducted using a pilot talking into a ground radio whilst looking at an aerial photograph of the area being described by the JTAC.
- The only aspect of medium-level CAS that really needs a proper aircraft to support FAC training is targeting pod downlink work, and you could do this from a civilian contract aircraft for a pittance, instead of using flying hours on a 5th-gen fighter.
So yes, someone needs to talk to the Army (and ideally NATO as well, to get the FAC STANAG changed) before the whole system collapses on its arse. Getting synthetic training fully accredited for FAC training would be a decent solution.