That doesn’t explain issues in Kosovo where combo was bad weather + bad terrain + relatively functional IADS that forced higher altitude tactics.

Fighting in Europe was always far more different than fighting in Middle East/North Africa. Even the cities are far more spread out – at least in the modern areas where command installations are.

Unfortunately we don’t really have an appropriate sample for modern ops in Europe or Asia.

Whatever the case A-10s have operated in reasonably contested airspace at least over Iraq in 1991 and over Yugoslavia in 1999.

The truth is the USAF brass has always hated the A-10 and would move mountains to get rid of them. They have also always loathed any mission where the have had to support the Army – hence early retirement of old C-7s and cancellation of C-27.

The kind of IADS the US seems to be talking about when they talk about “contested airspace” are those fielded by major powers ala China.

By the looks of it the USAF wants to get out of the business of real shooting wars (i.e. dirty COIN ops for the most part) and basically become an an anti-China/anti-Russia deterrent. This is the same role the USAF performed from 1953 to the early days of Vietnam.

The detachment recently dispatched to protect RAF Akrotiri from ‘rogue’ Syrian jets consisted of six Eurofighters. Why would it take 18 F-35s to merely police Dutch airspace in the heart of Europe? A non-essential job that if still deemed necessary, $250 million worth of KAI T-50s could do perfectly well.

And how many other Eurofighters are out for maintenance? And how many more are being used for essential training – QRA jets are not assigned training roles.

AAA and MANPADS have been proven to far more effective aircraft killers than radar based IADS which are suppressable by electronic means. Look at poor effectiveness of Iraqi, Yugoslav and Libyan AD or even Iranian and Iraqi IADS during 1980-88 War.

Look at how easily Syria’s IADS is shut down by Israel.

And modern IADS operated by potential opponents of the US are few and extremely far between.

The ASBC goes into this very nicely..In fact giving networked assets such as the B_2 and LRS_B to oversee such things…

Putting it into an aircraft actually increases risk (even if risk is malfunction and aircraft needing to return to base and not enemy fire).

The hacking is probably done from ground stations in Tel Aviv – global world with WWW and satelites and all that jazz

I suspect any similar US capabilities would be based in USA.