USMC Harrier Sundown

[MIDNJAC]

A couple reasons. The vast majority of Marine air support doesn’t involve dropping bombs on a target. Secondly, the ability for us to “own” airspace relies on having an ability to defend it. Largely provided by Marine TACAIR. In practice, that ownership means when aircraft come to work into our airspace, we have the biggest (If not all) say in how it is employed. That has probably been transparent to you. It also gives us a seat at the big air planning table. You guys are focusing on the ship as the biggest issue, but it extends way further into how we operate as a multi-domain task force. We can debate STOVL vs non-STOVL all day long - but that was a problem created by budget crunchers years ago.

I watched a ship captain pull a boat off station to do a crossing the line ceremony in the middle of a named op. In doing so, It pushed our alert lines out of range. Color me skeptical about Navy commanders and their priorities. Risk at sea does not equal risk ashore.

I think this is all valid criticism of big Navy, et al. But to the original point, most of us are used to forward deployed Harriers showing up in the CAS stack with 3 seconds of on station time and one GBU-12. So basically nothing to do with the original blueprint of the Harrier design or purpose. In the GWOT, I'd argue that it was outclassed by most other similarly land-based FW CAS platforms the USAF threw down, and even compared to sea-based F/A-18s.