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Do you want to win the war or follow the user's manual. We've been at this for two years. Billions in flight time and pilots at risk. They still got their capital and the second largest city in Iraq. The lights are on everywhere and gas stations are pumping gas. WTH. This is no way to fight a war.
The headline is more sensationalism than anything else.
This. F-22 is an amazing plane, by far the best air superiority fighter on the planet... but for dropping JDAMs or SDBs from high altitude in uncontested airspace it is no more effective than an F-15E.
Afghanistan is also a colossal failure after all these years.
Not sure about Africa. Seem like Russia is chomping at the bit to have a conflict with us. They are eager to try out their new weaponry, and they have really been pushing the boundaries with us lately. They would love nothing more than to destroy us.
This. F-22 is an amazing plane, by far the best air superiority fighter on the planet... but for dropping JDAMs or SDBs from high altitude in uncontested airspace it is no more effective than an F-15E.
Or a KC-130 or MQ-9... the delivery of GBU-30 series of weapons is, to paraphrase a popular insurance ad campaign, so simple even a caveman can do it.
Who cares? If you're delivering ordnance to GPS coordinates why would you fly at an altitude with MANPADS risk?
You would not. If high enough the DRPCBs would never know it's coming until they hear the swish right before they are a pink mist with teeth, hair and eyeballs.
Tough to fight a war when rules of engagement are set by, well, whatever you want to call them.
Every war the United States has ever fought, from the War of Independence to the Civil War to World War II to today, has had rules of engagement. Wars are not conflicts between militaries - they are conflicts between states, in which one of the various tools used to prosecute the conflict is military force.
Were there no rules of engagement, a couple hundred nuclear weapons would end ISIS. But since the catastrophic repercussions of doing so are obvious to the civilian leadership (and, frankly, ever last four-star out there), there is no way that would ever be allowed (even in some alternate reality in which some number of military commanders were delusional enough to advocate such). And what do you call the restriction on nuclear weapons? Rules of engagement.
The idea that there should be no such limits rests on the woeful inability to comprehend the interests of states and the nature of conflicts. It's simplistic, naive, and absurd.
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