You would have had a heck of a time getting the Crusader into Afghanistan and then operating it there.
The arrival of the GPS bomb and then finally getting air-ground coordination and communication working is really transformative.
Before it, there was airpower, effective, but a lot of promises and claims that never panned out. Now, there's AIRPOWER.
It's simply a lot easier to have an orbiting B-52 or B-1 overhead in a lot of areas of the world than get a big 155mm SP gun to that area of the world and keep it supplied and running. And the kicker is now that you're not really losing any speed in fire support.
You must be ex-Air Force, my old man's service. Those guys never figured out the value of the words "occupy" and "loiter". Sometimes you just have to be there, or be square. Air power can make things go boom, but it's the repeatability, your ability to make the other guy's intolerable situation persist along the time axis, that makes victory permanent. Otherwise you're just handing him a bad afternoon. You can't just paste a target and call it Miller time. We supposedly learned that lesson in our postwar assessment of air power's contribution to the victory over Germany -- and its severe limitations, which were very much more significant than Hap Arnold and Curt LeMay would admit while the war was in progress.
Osama's watchword is persistence. His strategy is to wear down the West and fatigue our people's efforts. He is Rudyard Kipling's nightmare. The antidote to Osama is to make him and all his followers permanently dead, or their efforts permanently nonviable because of your own persistent presence, or that of responsible governments that won't put up with him. Air power doesn't give you that. The Navy, however, does give you that over 2/3's of the earth's surface, and big-gun FS for the Marines ashore is part of that picture.
We need the BB's, and we aren't just making stuff up. The defense contractors are, because they're selling systems, not systematic success.
Doctrine produces success, and you equip for the missions that doctrine says you need to carry out. BB's and CV's are the legacy equipment that has been designed around that continuing mission. Neological DD's that look like Civil War monitors are designed around Don Rumsfeld's and George Bush's favorite word: "cheap" ( = "no people"). They're a distraction from what is needed, a reversion to interwar Republican cheapness in defense spending.