raghava wrote:
the big takeaway for me from this video was that Iran planned 27 missiles and fired 16 at one (albeit big) airbase. Assuming our missiles are more accurate than the Iranian ones, we would need at least 10 missiles per airbase...
I sincerely hope we have the huge number of conventional SRBMs required for an intense 2 front war...
Not easy to deduce that. For starters, the US only uses a small portion of the Iraqi base that was under attack here. Secondly, the attack and targets chosen by Iran were undefended and their intention was a one time strike and not part of an ongoing conflict, where the tactical need would be different (to render the air-base inoperative for a particular amount of time). Had this been a larger more permament CENTCOM base then they would have had to use different tactics and a different raid size. Target planning is essentially an effects based exercise. What effect are you trying to bring to bear, how well is the target defended, and how and what the conventional escalation looks like. So it will vary greatly from scenario to scenario. For example, the USAF has demonstrated an 80-JDAM sortie for
air-base attack using the B-2. But there may be perfectly useful effects at a quarter of that payload depending upon what you are trying to achieve. So it really depends what targets you want to render useless, and the overall effects you are trying to create. Finally, it is also a question of your own ISR capability and your opponents C-ISR capability. So if there is a huge mismatch there then you can use fixed attack fires very effectively. But if that space is highly contested then you may need more dynamic targeting options. There may be 50 targets you may want to strike at a fixed location. But unless you have great ISR (and/or your opponent not so great C-ISR), it gets difficult to filter that down to a handful and/or prioritize based on importance. ISR is equally, or even more important than having the fires capability itself. You don't wan't to run out of high-quality/relevant targets before you run out of your kinetic options. ISR is often the limiting factor, particularly with long range strike as kill chains get long and coordination and deconfliction come into play.