The discussion about air superiority got me thinking about that.

Ie, it is no longer, it has not been for a long time, about pure firepower but what the application of an amount of firepower can mean in a certain situation.

Agree or disagree?
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("At speeds that rival the fastest jets and unsurpassed firepower, Airwolf is considered too dangerous a weapon to leave in unenlightened hands. Finding it is your first priority."--File A 56-7W, voiceover intro, (w,stte), "Airwolf")

Disagree. Simply because I have no clue as to what the fuck you're talking about.

Nuking it from orbit solves a lot of problems that a single bullet can't.

Agreed.  Just because you don't have enough aircraft to blanket the entire battle zone it does not mean you cannot establish air superiority in part of that space to cover an air strike or ground attack.

It's much the same in the late 1980s when people would criticize the Wild Weasel program, saying we did not have enough aircraft to blanket the entire border of the Nato and Warsaw Pact.  Their argument was we didn't have enough aircraft and therefore we should have simply dropped the program.

However the concept of Suppression of Enemy Air Defences is like air superiority, you don't blanket the entire battle area, you concentrate your forces where you need them, when you need them.  Both are cases where overwhelming firepower is the simplistic and most expensive answer.  Reality, on the other hand, dictates that overwhelming firepower is prohibitively expensive and cannot be accomplished for practical reasons.

So better battle space management (AWACS) has become critical to allow force concentration to those areas where needed and avoid having aircraft patrolling empty areas of the battle space where they are not needed.  And it is the reason for emphasis on more capable (read expensive) fighter aircraft that are able to engage as many as eight enemy aircraft in simultaneous combat, and win.

A modern US fighter is expected to be able to control hundreds of square miles of battle area airspace, much like how a modern ground soldier is expected to control one hundredfold the area a ground soldier of one hundred years ago.