Tell me you don't do CAS without telling me you don't do CAS.
"Hammering away"...I don't even have words other than thanks "SEAL of the Sky" for your input.
Removing the 105MM is nothing more than moronic payback from two herbivore AFSOC/CC's that hate the gunship community. There is a story about how this all started and it had NOTHING to do with anything related to combat, rather Slife wanting to harvest manpower for a pet project and being told no because they had to keep X number of gunners on the AC-130J to man the 105MM.
As a dude who has shot bad guys 27 meters form the friendlies, advocating for BVR CAS is one of the dumber things I have ever read on this forum. Slinging a Small Cruise Missile (SCM), at GPS coordinates is not CAS, doing it in a dynamic fight is Fing stupid and dangerous. As for "accuracy not being as good as folks think"...the advertised unclassified accuracy of the AC-130 is two mils. Again as a person who flew it once or twice, techniques like two-shot bring that much lower. The hammering away and they keep running scenario mentioned above is a function of poor employment or training, not the damn gun. Come on over some time, I'll pour you a glass of brown liquor and show you a couple hours of video 33 pound projectiles filled with 6 pounds of Comp B pissing-off all the virgins in Jannah because thanks to me "hammering away" with the 105MM, they are about to be overrun with business.
Rather than guard core capabilities AFSOC leadership is grasping at straws trying to remain relevant in this pivot to peer/near-peer, the Air Force is feeding that mantra as we slowly walk away from what should be a fierce dedication to those on the ground, reference insert A-10 retirement as further proof. I am not opposed to adding SCM to the gunship arsenal, it would add a great stand-off capability to suppress semi-permissive threats in CORE SOCOM mission sets, but if having 30 gunships with SCM is the key to the fight against China, we've already lost.