And the first one to enter in liberated Deir El Zour was…

… A L-39!!!!!

Excuse me but what relation have a TLAM-D with warplanes, exactly?

@TomcatVIP
You have to remember how all the discussion sprang forth: Vnomad called the Tornado Anachronistical, I replied that it entered service in 1979, so there were nothing of that in such times.
Discussion kept on, even if I tried to close it saying it could at maximum be conceded that it aged fast not that it aged quite fast, not that it was an anacrhronism but it kept on at the point to transfer the discussion on a dedicate thread, so we are still discussing.

So, you are right, we are in the 2017 now and about forty years after its own introduction in service Tornado is still operating with success, something that when it entered in service no one envisaged for sure, given the substitution cycle of planes at its own time.
No one are saying there that we ought to keep it for another twenty years or like so, just that the substitute for it is a little late it seems but this seems to be a common destiny to all major players nowadays.

Yes but there we are talking about first gulf war, a conflict in which just the 8% of mission were made using guided ordnances, let’s image stand off ones.

Actual Storm Shadow/Apache/kept350 were in fact developed as direct descendants of the JP233/MW1/Durandal so let’s say that the eventual problem in using such kind of weapon was well know and substitutes were already sought when the Gulf War started.
Cluster and land mines conventions and the shift of priorities after the collapse of WP led however to a redesig of such weaponry toward carring a single warhead instead of the multiple payload they were initially designed for.
Anti-runway mission was always considered as of primary importance during the Cold War above all by European NATO members that developed a series of dedicated weaponries for it.
One of those, the Matra Durandal was acquired by the same USAF in the eighties and used on F-111 and surprise, surprise by the F-15E itself.
Naturally in the same historical perspective you have to consider how also toss bombing and terrain following approach were considered as a tentative form of respectively stand off weaponry and stealth approach to counter the heavy WP air defence systems, obviously utilizing the available technologies of the time.

@JangBoGo

Without going in a tirade like Haavarla , I would say that a post like your show the classical syndrome of what I use to call JDAMiotism i.e. the false perception of what is the role of tactical aviation following the mass introduction of satellite guided PGMs.

When you wrote something like this:

With hardly 30 fixed winged aircrafts at the disposal to service the entire Syrian theatre and 8 x dumb bombs on a normal basis is not going to cut it. Theoretically, even if 30 aircraft are airborne at a time, it brings to the table ordnance only enough for 240 targets over the entire Syria theatre. Then for the next 2-3 hours its going to be without any air support.

You are in fact assuming that there are hundreds of predetermined target every day in the whole Syria theater that have to be engaged at the same moment.
It was never like so, Intrnational coalition has much more attak planes appointed to missions in both Syria than Iraq but passed much of its own time engaging an average of 5-10 targets a day for a pair of years on a row until recent times, when having secured themselves a real land force in the form of YPG/SDF (and using real attack planes like A-10 starting from Incirklik, not F-16 et similia starting from Qatar) has finally begun to generate a not ludicrous number of air attacks.

Just as a practical example, let’s take this reports referring to the same day (31 of August) in the last 3 years.

http://www.inherentresolve.mil/Portals/14/Documents/Strike%20Releases/2015/09Sept/20150901%20Strike%20Release%20final.pdf?ver=2017-01-13-131154-547
http://www.inherentresolve.mil/Portals/14/Documents/Strike%20Releases/2016/08%20August/20160801%20Strike%20Release%20Final.pdf?ver=2017-01-13-131341-420
http://www.inherentresolve.mil/Portals/14/Documents/Strike%20Releases/2017/09September/20170901%20Strike%20Release.pdf?ver=2017-09-01-084208-477
Did you see the difference, not just in absolute numbers but in the relative concentration of strikes between the battlefield zone and the rest of the territory?

I can however assure you than the most of the other dates I have cross-checked in such a way follow the same pattern, with the good share of targeting referring to front loaders, excavators, cranes and fuel stations dubbed as military targets included: you always get a spike in the number of raids only when a major infighting is taking place like actually happening in Raqqah.

Just note than however when a similar occurrence i.e. a large group of enemy combatant in a concentrated place happen on the russian side their own planes goes out like that:

A configuration seen actually only in fighting around Palmyra, East Aleppo and recently Sukhnah where their
enemies are making a desperate stand instead of just resisting until tactically convenient.

Usually they are however utilized as tactical planes, not like B-17 in disguise, with a more limited load ( relatively to the usually huge maximum they can carry) you noted.
The idea is to have always a pair of plane flying near to the various fronts in which Syrian troops are engaging combat (Syria is quite small thanking God) with others in the base ready to take off in a few minutes, so than when the need would arise or suitable targets are discovered the ones already in flight engage them while the other take off to take their place so to never leave the troops without an available air support.
There are several flicks of planes landing with still a part of the payload on, sometimes in an asimmetrical load still on, sign that they were out in such a type of “free mission” and has not engaged enough target to deplete the full load.
Even so, the total numbers of engagements of not just the RuAF but also of SyaAF and the (actually not more so) tiny IqAF are however always been until the last year, well superior to the ones of the coalition despite the huge difference of the numbers involved.
To explain it in a simple way, the flaw of the JDAMization is to consider the number of targets as always constant, just eventually to be discovered by drones if hidden, when instead they are in the case of guerrilla organizations almost exclusively depending by the tactical situation.
So the coalition kept on trying to conduct a campaign of strategical bombing in a theatre and against an enemy that just is not quite vulnerable to such type of infrastructural damages nor it offerWHEN NOT PRESSED BY ENEMY LAND FORCES
enough type of available tactical targets.
Now, they also have a sort of “boot in the ground” and finally also them can get their share of long-begged targets.

It should have been obvious that it was a joke , Spudman, no need to give it a serious reply.
Idem for the Paranoia issue, Tomcat, let be sure that I had a real suspect about a serious issue or about a covering up I would have used a completely different tone than that.

@mrmalaya
also because it was stated that all Eu major player are actually well deep in the MALE 2025 project, so something very concrete would be available in a reasonable time.
Strange that an usually rational and competent poster like TomcatVIP seems sometime to be felt head-on in such a mood also.