This means, I reckon, that a squadron of B-1B Lancers, similarly armed, could ruin a pretty large target?
The Muzzies and the Chinese need to be scared of us. Not the other way around.
Good post. Good message.
Well, it depends on your “large” target more than anything else:
Consider a railroad bridge over a river: you MUST hit a 10 foot wide, 200 foot long target exactly, but you only need to hit it once to cut the train traffic off completely. You could drop 200 or 300 bombs, but if they miss, you have failed.
A two-lane road bridge might only be 20 feet wide, but the trucks can easily drive around a single hole in one lane - so three, four, or five hits might be needed to cut traffic off, or one big bomb in the right place that drops the bridge completely. Even so, the next day's trucks might be able to drive down and around through the creek bed avoiding the damaged bridge altogether.
But one very accurate bomb is useless against a oil storage tank farm, a train marshalling yard, a storage depot, a troop concentration, or a truck park: the target is too spread out to be affected by a limited number of bombs, regardless of how accurate and expensive they are. So two B-52’s dropping 80 bombs “large” area target is more effective than even one very, very large bomb dropped from one plane. And the “dumb” bombs are much more effective than 24 very, very expensive cruise missiles dropped off shore from a B-1.
But a armored and buried command center or a power plant turbine building might need a single, very heavy, very accurate bomb to break through and kill the target. Hundreds of “cheap” dumb bombs dropped from many planes are useless because they not only miss the target, but aren't big enough to damage it even if one lands exactly on top of the reinforced concrete.
Same thing with an airport. You only need a small bomb to kill a fighter or missile, but you must place that bomb or cruise missile exactly in the center of the revetment around the target. Miss by 50 feet after a 400 mile plane flight (put the bomb on the wrong side of the revetment or sandbag wall or concrete shelter), and the target isn't damaged at all. So dropping hundreds of bombs when most (if not almost all) will miss the runway and enemy airplanes is useless. Specifically aiming a single small bomb - like from a F-117 or F-21 or F-35 stealth plane - is better than a large scale Vietnam era “alpha strike” with dozens of planes.
Balance all of the above against the "time" it takes to program many different "smart" cruise missile attacks in many different places by your targetting crew mission planners.
The military are always time-limited and intelligence limited: if the target can move you might be more effective striking quickly with "something" (any kind of weapon from any kind of platform)rather than waiting 48 hours and trying to hit it where it used to be with the perfect weapon platform after the perfect pre-launch planning and perfect pre-launch flight brief from a perfectly rested flight crew flying a perfectly prepared aircraft from a perfectly maintained plane flying from a perfectly clean hanger. That is a 20 hour flight time from the target.