Is air supremacy the deciding factor of a war?

Iraq was a guaranteed win solely because of the Navy and Air Force roflstomping the ground before the land units even set foot there.
The issue with Vietnam is that it was just a half assed attempt to curb communism completely rather than pulling a Korea and having North and South Vietnam, not to mention the thick jungle. And while airstrikes may have been common they were for the most part sporadic and didn’t really target anything of particular value a good bit of the time, case in point the Ho Chi Minh Trail still existing by the end of the war.

This. If we had treated the North Vietnamese command and control structure like we had treated the Iraqi military apparatus, the Republic of Vietnam would still exist. Admittedly, the capability to do that was in its infancy at the time but it did exist and could have been employed to much more dramatic effect.

Wait....
Did we win in Iraq?
What did we win?
Is it safe for tourism now?

Saddam's dead, and his government's removed. It's a win. Arabs being terrorists and militants is just the wildlife of the middle east

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAP

Can we have a thread that mentions the A-10 without a retard doing an autist screech?

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAP
BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAP
BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAAAAP. BRAAAAP

>Is air supremacy the deciding factor of a war?
Is this why the US hasn't won any wars since WW2?

>Thinking asymmetrical wars against ideologies are anywhere close to a war against a uniformed enemy

>It's a win.
Dumb nigger, it's a win for Iran only. Shiites took over Iraq and now the US is closing bases there and GTFO because of a possible confrontation with Iran.
And if Iran goes to war against the US, Iraq is now in their camp.
Stupid low IQ shitheads such as yourself is the reason we're in this mess.

Iraq has seen several different conflicts in the time span since the initial invasion.

We won the war and then fucked off while the insurgents were still messing around. Iraq’s conventional forces were completely defeated.

Personally I’d blame how much of a rush job Vietnam was over things like tech and doctrine. The pieces were all still there, but no one really knew what the end goal was aside from chasing the ghost that was communism. Hell America didn’t even really care and was on relatively good standing with Ho Chi Minh until the French got involved and tried to both be a 19th Century tier colonial power while also completely rebuilding itself after WW2.
Gulf Wars were victories (Saddam stayed out of Kuwait) and the coalition did technically win the war in 2003. What wasn’t won was the insurgency that followed, either because no one learned a goddamn thing from Vietnam or the likely scenario of more money being made the longer it lasted.
The US is closing bases because more and more people are tired of dealing with Middle Eastern and Israeli bullshit.

>The US is closing bases because more and more people are tired of dealing with Middle Eastern and Israeli bullshit.
Oh, is this why all the NEOCONS are pushing the US into another ME war? You do read the news right?

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The only people who actually believe their stupidity are boomers and Evangelicals user. Neocons haven’t been popular at all outside of that crowd for a mountain of reasons.

Vietnam would like a word.

Theres a strong correlation between economic power and the quality of a country's air force.

Yes it's also why the US hasn't fought a war since WW2.

Wasn't a real war so air power could not be used effectively.

Iraq would like a word

I saw some jets today what kind are they?

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F-150's

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youtu.be/2esAob3tEiw

Easily one of the most important in a modern war. It's why we're still spending boat loads of money on modern air superiority fighters despite them seldom being used post cold war.

This is true, but how well is the wartime economy going to do if all your factories have been bombed into oblivion?

Absolutely.

Lmao found the sand nigger who's bomb buddy got brapped

No. One side suing for peace is.

Of course it is.

It's been over 70 years and their are still ash-covered Germans seething on the internet about the untimely barbecuing of their grandparents.

Air power would have absolutely won Vietnam had the political leadership not lacked the will to carry out successive Operations Linebacker. America had the airpower to bomb the fighting spirit out of the Vietnamese, but lacked the courage to do so. So, the Vietnamese understood that all they needed was to hold their ground, weather out the bombings and eventually America would pull out since their politicians were a bunch of chickenshit faggots.

I wonder what would have happened if we had been allowed to go north. If we took out the North Vietnamese in their own territory then the VC would have had a lot less supplies going their way.

Mo its always the PEN

Thank you for your service, John Bolton.

How the fuck did the USAF lose so many Phantoms during Linebacker?

Not shellacking the AA hard enough.

Shitty first gen a2a missiles and no gun

Hughes should have stood for Treason for the performance of the Falcon.

During WW2, battles were won by artillery and tanks. In order to win the war you had to prevent the enemy from producing enough artillery and tanks. You could this by bombing the shit out of the enemy factories. That's what the Allies did and it won them the war. Hell, USA even made Japan surrender without setting a single foot on their islands solely by their air power.

Now, battles are won by planes too. CAS (both fixed and rotary wing) has become a deciding factor in the tactical level. So air supremacy isn''t only decisive in the strategic level anymore, as it was during WW2. Countries don't focus as much in using strategic bombers anymore, instead they need air supremacy fighters that can protect their CAS so that they can obliterate the enemy on the field.

Depends

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We murderlated the shit out of them with airpower in Vietnam. Not their fault political jackoffs half a the world away lost the war for them.

Iraq

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Not this stupid shit again. Read a book, nigger.

Bosia

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Looks like F-18s

Though they could be F-22s

You sputtering fuckautist, we're talking military not politics. You're not fucking smarter than anyone else here.

Politics is another factor in war. Apparently it's even more powerful than Air Supremacy

Still, despite dropping more bombs in vietnam than in all of WW2 we weren't able to sweep the enemy aside. We'd destroy all the troops on a hilltop only for them to come back the next day.

>S P A C E F O R C E
>P
>A
>C
>E
>F
>O
>R
>C
>E

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It's hard to win a war if you aren't allowed to invade

>in open warfare
Yes
>enemy hides in tunnels and ambushes your ground troops
No, air supremacy only realy helps with logistics here.

When your enemy are willing to die in droves, and you lack the political willpower to destroy them at their point of origin, you have already lost.

F-15s.

>not allowed to fly into air space over north vietnam, where the enemy is
>nothing gets accomplished
>order denying entry lifted, operation lineback I and II kick off
>USAF pounds nork ass harder than the army or marines ever did in two fucking weeks so goddamn bad that the norks were forced to discuss a cease fire agreement
Yea, Vietnam absolutely proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that, so long as their are convential targets, air power is the singular deciding factor in a modern war.

Warefare is 80% logistics. The military with the best ability to move and reach out and touch someone is always going to be the strongest military. In this regard, whoever has the best naval and air forces is going to win. Coincidentally, modern naval power is decided almost entirely by who has the best and/or most air craft carriers.
Air power is THE king of conventional warfare.

Again, in an open and conventinal war you are correct, however that is not always the case.

And in case of the Afghan war, if the US had the logistics and firepower to bomb Pakistan back to the stone age without being on the receiving end of several nuclear-tipped IRBMs, the Taliban would've long become ancient history.

No

Racial superiority is.

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>We didn't really target that capability in Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh trail was bombed for the whole war, I think. Or at least halfway through there was an emphasis.

Based

I think you mean logistics

Depends on what kind of war, but a one that would involve gain ground, air superiority importance decrease quickly

>no gun
>this meme

You mean total war, Air force can collapse the tunnels. Only thing stopping is the civilian suffering

Logistics wins wars.

When it's a stand up war where two sides slug it out? Yes. When it's a prolonged war in which different groups of fighters constantly crop up and perform hit and run attacks with limited resources and plenty of hideaways difficult to access from the air? Not so much. In the past couple of wars we've allowed ourselves to get baited into deploying a full scale military structure against people who could never even dream of the necessary power they'd have to bring to bear to fight against us in a head-to-head war. What we should have learned by now is that absolute supremacy in every fighting discipline doesn't fundamentally mean anything if:
>1
Your enemy is persistent and willing to die for objectives that you are not.
>2
Your enemy has a huge territory to exploit for hiding places be they in urban or wild areas.
>3
You are unwilling to completely destroy your enemy's ability to continue fighting.
>4
Your enemy places you in a situation where any time you engage them it increases their recruiting.

I think we forget that the people who we've been fighting since WW2 ended both come from parts of the world where prolonged, ruthless wars have been common for thousands of years before our society even existed. They're used to extreme cruelty, they're used to civilian casualties, and they understand how to use their enemy's actions to constantly replenish their numbers which allow them to fight past the point when most "civilized" countries would have been exhausted of war.

FERD

going north might've just been too bloody.

Wtf

not really
theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/09/balkans1

This, but the VC figured out pretty quick that if you got close enough to our troops, we wouldn't call in airstrikes "As Much"©

The traditional war part went pretty well, it's just that we stuck around after we "won".

>Is air supremacy the deciding factor of a war?
no access to nuclear weapons is. Ask the Japanese, and they can be delivered by sea or land, covertly or overtly by any means of transport that the human mind can conceive. Along with nuclear weapons determination ( not just to win but not to surrender and also capacity to stomach mass slaughter and devastation )population, population dispersion, reproduction rate, wealth, educational level, scale of economy, technological level (see nukes), terrain, climate etc. Planes don't work well in bad weather, electrical storms, tornadoes, typhoons, underwater or in tunnels. They are an accessory to war, an important one but not the deciding factor by a long shot. They are best viewed as a conventional force multiplier

>Is air supremacy the deciding factor of a war?
FUCK NO.
Want proof? US got invaded and conquered without any air power.

then yes
now no
meme supremacy unironically wins wars without even starting them

F15Es