Bomb & Bomber, dumb & dumber?

Qusai Bush, Penis Cheney and new kid on the block Donald Rumsfeld are showing that they want heavy bomber missions to take over the role of global stick the US can use to beat uncooperative states with.

For political and doctrinal comments, please refer to the ‘Has the USAF beat the USN’-thread. What i am wondering here, is whether even the modern US bombers actually have that capability, and can sustain such operations.

Personally, i highly doubt it. Even with, or possibly the phrase is because of, modern guidance systems a bomber still needs to know the target it is going to hit. This means that the targets are easy to predict sites as headquarters, barracks, bridges, powerplants, stuff like that. No matter how disruptive such bombings are, they are nowhere near decisive apart from political and diplomatical consequences even if the Rules of Engagements allow such attacks. So even if bombers are attacking strategical targets, the direct military assets of an attacked country remain untouched. Usually i would however expect the military assets of a country to be the targets any US president wants to destroy, but so far it hasn’t achieved this by using bombers.

For attacking tactical targets, bombers have proven their incapability brilliantly. Apart from the Second Gulf War when B-52Gs carpet bombed well-known dug in positions of Iraqi troops, bombers never were effective. One single Arc Light mission indeed cut down more trees than a single lumberjack can do in his whole life, but their military effectiveness was meagre at best. Rosco mentioned something similar to Arc Light but with independently targeted weapons: sure, that is a nice possibility. But at what will those weapons be targeted? Kosovo proved that NATO had a very, very hard time at finding tactical targets even with rather extensive battlefield surveillance (U-2R, E-8C, large numbers of drones) equipment present. I don’t know how this should improve dramatically over the next few years, so i think Qasai Bush’ Global Power B-2 missions might face the same problem as the B-29s did over Korea, or B-52s over Vietnam: what is there to bomb?

Regards,

Arthur