That kind of “battlefield prep” sounds like the war is over and you only need a light unit to clean things up.
How does the Airborne defeat Russian and Chinese armies by itself?
Outside of WW I & II and some aspects of Korea, our historic wars and actions were never direct major enemy interaction. Where we erred is by trying to keep up foreign based infrastructure to support isolated skirmish actions with the usual political blundering and meddling as with so many of them since Viet Nam.
If we are content with trotting out a B-2 or other exotically expensive platform for ‘show’ in a podunk attack, then we could think about a larger long-distance response instead of maintaining all these foreign bases and infrastructure that are vulnerable over time.