Five years ago, tactical air power was in danger of becoming irrelevant, unbeknownst to the tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel who fly and maintain the Pentagon's roughly 4,000 attack jets, fighters and bombers. While the Air Force -- and the air components of the Navy and Marine Corps, too -- were still mostly equipping to bomb fixed, pre-determined targets deep behind enemy lines with big formations of mutually supporting airplanes, the bad guys were up to something else entirely.
They were ditching the heavy equipment, organizing into small cells and planning on disappearing into cities and mountains when the U.S. airplanes appeared overhead. Fighter pilots just didn't have the right tools to find and swiftly hit tiny, fleeting targets in cluttered, chaotic environments.
Targeting pods -- smallish metal containers crammed with sensors and datalinks -- changed all that. Read the full post at Ares.
