Question.
Is the need for stealth in strike missions being overplayed? Notice I said for strike missions, not air superiority but for strike? The question needs to be asked because Syria is a mini-anti access exercise. You have a country with at least moderately effective anti-air capabilities, decent anti-ship capabilities and in order to roll back their defenses its assumed that we're going to launch a robust Tomahawk strike on the designated targets.
Air is not needed. And even if we were to put up a no-fly zone we'd still do it the same way. Air defenses would be pounded mercilessly. We bomb fixed sites, hunt down every other site with UAVs and when located we'd Tomahawk them too.
If we were to use strike aircraft in these packages it would be to launch bombs that had sufficient glide angle as to keep the aircraft out of range of the targets and hopefully we'd have F-22's flying top cover.
If I'm even remotely correct in this scenario then do we really need as much stealth as we're being sold or did we miss the boat by focusing on the bow instead of the arrow?
Just a question.