With a few teeth-clenching exceptions (the Korean War's MiG Alley battles), since 1944, American land, sea and air forces have enjoyed the military and diplomatic benefits of U.S. air superiority. Unfortunately, in 2014 there are strong indications that America's air advantage is diminishing.
Given the increase in precision, we should not want to find out what failing to achieve aerial supremacy means:
Each CBU-105 is actually a container carrying 40 BLU-108/B SFW (sensor fused munitions) bomblets. These were originally called SADARM (Search And Destroy Armor Munitions) when first created in the 1980s. Individual SADARMs have their own radar and heat sensor that searches for armored vehicles below and destroys them with a special shaped charge warhead. ...
The first use of the CBU-105 was on April 2nd, 2003, when a B-52 dropped six of them on an Iraqi army column moving south from Baghdad. Most of the vehicles were later found destroyed by SADARM.
We should not be on the receiving end of weapons like that. I'm a land guy. But I appreciate that we need a dominant Navy to deploy and supply our Army and dominant air power (Navy, Marine, and Air Force) to keep the CBU-105s falling on the enemy rather than on our troops.
