Thucydides said:
Have long duration armed UAV's on station for every manouevre element,
There is, currrently, no such thing. Add the weight of bombs and/or missiles, and one is forced to remove the equivalent weight of fuel. I was quite surprised to learn how short Reaper's armed missions were, and what it's actually carrying on them. The specs in the shiny brochure may give a maximum weapon load and maximum endurance but they don't necessarily mean anything under real operating conditions. You get long endurance or armed but not both. And there'd better not be any cloud or icing conditions, either.
There will not be one "on station for every manouevre element". You can't crowd these into limited airspace, and there aren't enough anyway.
With conventional manned aircraft, augmented with tankers if necessary or rotated, however...
Rather like we do now...
Don't count on "instant response from the UAV". It takes time to acquire and confirm a target, and there is no guarantee that the target will be acquired and/or confirmed. This counts for manned aircraft as well. Some of the delay in CAS response is due to that. The bomber can be right overhead, but spec bombing is not a tactic.
O2s won't give long endurance or carry a useful weapon load, and you have to train a pilot whose skills would be put to better use flying something with more practical value. They are also a niche aircraft that could well be completely irrelevant in future conflicts. This is not Vietnam, geographically, threat-wise, or technologically any more than it is WWII, WWI, or Agincourt, and I see no value in resurrecting ancient machinery of any sort. F15s and B1s can do what they can do, and carry real weapons too, and perform in a full-blown modern war. As for "stealth issues", I've yet to see a Talib react before it was too late. Have you ever heard a jet pass overhead at 20,000 feet? They might hear the bomb at the last second, but they're not going to outrun it at that point.
The Marines want V22 because they need to cover longe distances from ship to shore as quickly as possible. At the shorter distances at which we are operating, either in the current conflict or a more traditional one, those distances are not an issue. As I have said elsewhere, most likely in this thread, you are looking at just a few minutes difference at 80 km and we are not operating at those distances too much anyway. It is not worth adding another niche aircraft for the once or twice per century that three minutes might be critical, and losing some flexibility in the process. Would we buy this,
or Chinook? Can the V22 sling a load? I don't know, and I'm not interested enough in this aircraft to bother finding out. It's certainly not going to be doing that at anywhere near its max cruise speed however - but if zipping home empty once the load's been dropped is crucial, then there's some benefit, I suppose.
"FOB CAS" or "FOB AH"...
You don't want to have to deal with defending the size of the area that this would take up, or dealing with the movement of fuel and parts in huge quantities, the increased losses of machines and likely crew, or, initially, in the construction of the infrastructure required for no benefit whatsoever. Either the machines are in the air before they are needed, or time is going to be lost starting (including post-start checks), manoeuvring prior to take-off, and working into the situation in progress if it's not over by then. And if they are going to be in the air before being needed, they can operate from a major base like KAF and leave one minute earlier for every three to four k that they need to go (in the case of helicopters, and much less for jets), like ten minutes for forty k, which would be pretty close to the time required to start and take off.
There are sometimes good and valid reasons for not doing things.
