Why don't countries just exclusively invest in their airforce and then use light infantry as ground forces?
>wipe out your entire enemies military capabilities with a swift and brutal air campaign Desert Storm style
>send in the airborne to capture the enemies governmental/military leadership VEH DEH VEH style(see storm 333 or gostomel assault)
>enemy surrenders, use military police to occupy and VEH DEH VEH to launch swift anti-insurgency operations(see U.S air calvary in vietnam and Russian VDV in Afghanistan)
>but america lost in vietnam!
>and russia failed at gostomel!
Mind you we're talking about a modern airforce with Gulf War-esque capabilities, not Vietnam era rolling thunder or " ENTIRE UKRAINIAN MILITARY KNOCKED OUT ON DAY 1 " Russian shit.
Top tier aircraft, precision weaponry, excellent communications, well trained pilots, etc.
Not every theatre is unique. Ground targets from the air become imcreasingly difficult to hit as topography becomes more cluttered. It worked im desert storm because i mean it's a fricking desert, hard to miss shit. This logic is like saying all infantry should use lmg's with 6x scopes. The best method is to mimic nature, find a niche and fill it.
>all infantry should use lmg’s with 6x scopes
That’s an interesting idea.
The Gulf War strategy would work just as well in the vast plains of Russia or the coasts of China as it did in the deserts of Iraq
What about jungles of vietnam?
I miss the USS Iowa's. artillery fire withing 30 miles of any coast.
That being said, what purpose do tanks serve if they are only useful in wide open fields and are vulnerable to aerial attacks anyway?
There is precisely one country on the planet with “Gulf War-esque capabilities”. And that country’s primary opponents are near peers, not smaller countries that can easily be rolled over with overwhelming firepower.
I wonder how a war between the U.S. and Iran would play out, the difference between Iran and the United States is less than the difference between the U.S. and Iraq in 1991 and 2003.
I think that Iran would take a lot of loses but since they are fighting on their home turf they would win, especially if the United States doesn't have an neighboring ally to launch a land invasion from.
>especially if the United States doesn't have an neighboring ally to launch a land invasion from.
Isn't both iraq and pakistan nominal allies of america? Plus you have the entire sinai peninsula who both hate shia with a passion and sell oil to the US to finance golden lamborghinis, making the logistics of a naval invasion from the gulf a lot less challenging. Iran was a heavy hitter back when they fought iraq, but if four decades of corruption, sanctions and stagnation has done to them what it did to russia I don't see the fight being too difficult for the yanks
US would win in immediate terms against Iran air and ground forces, but would not fare any better if a long term occupation is done akin to Iraq and Afghan.
The IRGC is as fanatical as Al qeada or the Taliban and has tremendous sway over Iran's population, and is huge in numbers. Think suicide bombings 10x more than previously
Not just the facts that you mentioned, but also the fact that IRGC has incredible experience in conducting insurgencies all around the middle east. They are experts, so imagine going against the experts on their home turf. Game over, long drawn out occupation.
actually comrade puccia has been upgraded to peer in hato handbook because of how impressed they are with glorious victory in luganda. Westoid redditor trannies seething and coping as always
>There is precisely one country on the planet with “Gulf War-esque capabilities”
Because other countries choose to invest in shitty oversized ground forces.
Iraq would have been a more formidable force in 1991 if instead of investing in a million Shia conscripts with shitty Soviet armor who hate your regime Saddam just had the Republican Guard and 300 MiG 25/29's with skilled pilots and a decent radar/command structure and their existing AA network
The air war was the only time the Iraqi's ever inflicted some decent casualties on the coalition as is(thanks to AA given Iraq's shitty airforce)
300 MIG 29s would have gotten torn up by the coalition just as quick as the ground forces—even quicker, actually, since they were even more outmatched in the air than they were on the ground. And all the command and control on the planet wouldn’t have helped Iraqi SAMs target stealth bombers, or allowed them to tell decoys from actual planes. To fix those things, you need a cutting edge material science program. You need a domestic engine industry. You need a space program for GPS. You need a massive training program for the soldiers, and a top-of-the-line university system to train everyone else. You need a frickhuge economy to pay for all of the above. There’s only one country on the planet that can justify blowing that kind of cash on defense. Everyone else either rides Americas coattails, tries to carve out a niche in one of those things, or makes crappy copies with whatever they can scrape together. It’s literally impossible for any other country to do what America did in Desert Storm.
It would be better if they largely invested in precision based artillery. Artillery is looking like the new king of war these days.
Enemy has SAM's and just wienerblocks your airforce or blasts them out of the equation. Then their tanks and APCs run over your shitty light infantry and 20 years later you and your people are fully genocided and erased from history.
>Why doesn't the wurld just buy machine guns?
>shoots real fast
>kills really hard
>ammos is cheep
why hasn't every country been defeated by X weapon? Is it a israeli Conspiracy????????????????????
SAMs have proven to be a meme, Patriots stink and having vast arsenals of advanced Soviet AA systems did nothing to help Egypt, Syria, Iraq or Libya
Hey bro, sorry about your coma. There's a war between Russia and Ukraine right now I think you might find interesting,
>Patriots stink and having vast arsenals of advanced Soviet AA systems did nothing to help Egypt, Syria, Iraq or Libya
Like most ideas formed in the cold war, they are wrong.
Do not invest too much in air because if the enemy goes underground, which is inevitable, it will put them exclusively as WWI type artillery/machine guns.
Russia didt this to Ukraine in the first 48hrs, but to /k/ le ukraine is winning
Desert Storm was a brilliant operation the likes of which will probably never be surpassed in that way.
Also combined arms. The answer is always combined arms.
Jets are extremely expensive to operate, the F-35 probably used 2500 gallons of fuel per flight how, and needs like 20 hours of maintenance for every flight hour.
Air power is expensive, heavily reliant on skilled support personnel, require frequent downtime for maintenance, and requires lots of flight hours to build the required pilot skills. That’s too much for most countries.
On top of that it’s very vulnerable to having its ground facilities blown up in case of a war. So if your country is relatively small none of your air bases are safe. AD systems can mitigate some of that threat but not sufficiently vs a serious opponent. Unless you have an equally serious AD setup. Can your country really afford all this?