[freebilly]

I had an idea about those JDAMs. What if we put encoded homing beacons on some of the JDAMS, activated when dropped, then simple seeker heads on the rest of the load of weapons, comprised of dumb bombs, and then sent in B52s with say, 25% of there bomb loads comprised of JDAMS, the rest seeker bombs, could be a cheap way to accurately obliterate targets from very high altitude?

No good. If a particular JDAM with a homing beacon goes off target you can end up with a very expensive crater next to an unscathed target....

[JasonC]

JDAMs hit GPS coordinates, which means a particular spot on the earth's surface. That is great for buildings and bridges and SAM sites. It is rather less useful against tanks, which move from moment to moment. The way you kill armor is to fire a specifically anti-tank missile, or a tank main gun round, at that particular point target.

To deliver the ATGMs or rounds, you can use fixed wing planes (Mavericks e.g., a few at a time), or helos (Apaches, 16 at a time), or Bradley fighting vehicles (a few TOW missiles each, but vunerable to tank round replies), or M-1s (many at a time). The 101 Air Assault (alone) has around 70 Apaches for exactly this task. 70 times 16 is over 1000 ATGMs. Per sortie. That is enough to blow away several divisions in an afternoon even with many misses.

The firepower of the army, using its specialized weapons on the particular targets they are meant for, is enourmous. Higher even than that of the air force, it kills easily achieved per unit time. The air force has longer reach and is somewhat harder to hit back, so it is great for "going deep". But if you want to annihilate an enemy army you use the army - that's what the bleeding thing is for.