Are you kidding? How many innocent civilians have been killed in the last 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan? Your point about allegedly US concern for civilians well being and the lack of such by the Russians is pure rubbish, to say it politely.

War always produces casualties. It is a fact of life and cannot be avoided. However, you cannot compare the way the US is conducting it’s operations with how the ROW would have done it.

How many nations have used concrete bombs in the middle of a war in order to reduce casualties. How many nations have spent millions on other less damaging bombs (SDB FLM) in order to ensure the least amount of civilian casualties.

The US takes great pains, often at the cost of it’s fighting men & women, to ensure that civil casualties are at a minimum. The same cannot be said for the RoW. Shall we talk about the Russian invasion & occupation of Afghanistan or Chechnya?

Just because it CAN glide 100+ km does not mean it HAS to be dropped from that far away.

I can see this being useful, operationally, against dispersed fixed targets or where you are hitting an installation and you want to give them absolutely no warning that it is coming.

If there is a UAV or SpecOps group with eyes on the target, then how far away the launching AC is irrelevant.

Each SDB can INDIVIDUALLY hit a target from 100+ km away and penetrate 6ft of reinforced concrete, point detonate, or execute an areal burst to inflict the most damage to soft targets over an area.

How many FAB-anythings would it take to do the same from 100+ km away?

The days of fighters performing dumb-bomb carpet-bomb runs are over, welcome to the twenty-first century.

That is debatable.

Nope, the debate is over. Not only is every US fighter developed from now on going to to VLO, but the Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Saab, French, etc are already talking VLO.

Nobody is talking about developing any fighters that do not pay some very serious attention to it’s RCS.

Can’t wait till the F-35 does it’s first Mach Loop.

Some EODAS snapshots of the photogs as it flys past would be funny.

The Carrier does not have to face A2A and SAM threats. The VLO aspects of the F-35C are needed for it’s mission in the face of advanced threats.

The F35 don’t have a real IRST AFAIK, it just uses A2A modes EOTS, which is more similar to the A2A modes of some targeting pods.

By all means, define “real IRST”?