Is air-power more effective...
... using precision-guided munitions? Hit what you want, when you want, and avoid anything else
... carpet-bombing someone? Erase entire city blocks or grid squares and who cares about collateral damage
Sound off below!
By: Brant
23 August 2011
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3 comments:
PGM, obviously. Ever more accurate air bombing is one of the major advances of the post-WW2 period, if not the most important one.
Carpet bombing? Well, a few weeks ago we met at Fort McNair, named for a general killed in 1944 by his own side's carpet bombers. How's that for collateral damage....
Saw an Arc Light strike in Nam and it was so impressive.
We never knew if there was a worthwhile target they were striking or Westy gambling with old intel.
If you're going to use carpet bombing/arclight you need up to the minute intel, or you're just creating impressive special effects.
Due to the time to put a carpet bomb force together, there are a lot of advantages to using precision munitions. A single plane, with good info from the troopers on the ground is probably going to have better results than a carpet bomb effort that takes over an hour to get to the target area.
For the cost of a single Paveway II you could get about 70Mk-82’s, so assuming that there is an equal threat to whatever aircraft would deliver either ordnance package and you don’t give a hoot about collateral damage, I would go the economical route of carpet bombing.
If CD were a principle concern of the operation (hearts and mind bullshit), then you would have to go the route of the precision-guided munitions, albeit that in and of itself is no guarantee that they will be successful. If the intelligence is bad, then the strike itself is equally as bad, if not worse.
We call it a warehouse storing weapons of mass destruction; they call it a civilian factory making baby formula for expectant mothers. In either case, if there are hundreds of civilian body parts strewn about the crater, it really doesn’t make too much difference if it was a smart bomb or a dumb bomb.
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