[marvin]

I don't have any information about the second Iraq war, but a relative of mine works with radar systems. From what he told me, Iraq's air defense during the first Gulf war was ridiculously poor - the Iraqi air defence forces just turned on their air defense radars and waited to get a bomb dropped on top of them.

Apparently, there was a NATO exercise in Norway a couple of years ago where the US expected the same tactics to be used and hence to easily achieve air superiority. However, the opposing force moved their radar and missile systems around, used the terrain for cover, performed feinting maneuvers by giving the impression that the air defense systems were located in different locations and also obverved using mobile observers on the ground. Apparently, the US lost the air battle spectacularly.

Imagine a military conflict with an enemy that doesn't follow conventional doctrine like this. It's very hard to extrapolate from history how things are going to play out. A large-scale war with today's technology is going to look a lot different than the assymetric warfare the US currently seems to be optimizing for.

[pclark]

This has been played out in a huge war game in 2002 involving Lt General Paul Van Riper and your assumptions are correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

[marvin]

This is a very fascinating read. The exercise I mentioned probably took place after the 2002 exercise you have linked to.

Without being too deeply informed on this subject, it seems to me like the US military refuses to acknowledge the weaknesses of its doctrine in a large-scale conflict against a sufficiently skilled and advanced adversary.

[JJMalina]

Not true. Baghdad had very heavy air defenses. Dangerous enough that the U.S. lost 2 F-16s and decided to only use F-117 stealth aircraft afterwards. See: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_Q_Strike [2] http://www.patricksaviation.com/videos/LucasStL/1180/

[learc83]

I'm sure there are some surprises that would catch the Air Force off-guard, but from all of the training exercise results I've seen (and this is just publicly available stuff, nothing from a relative on the inside or anything) the US Air Force (with F-22s) just completely dominates anything else.

The F-22s had close to 200:1 kill to death ratios in most of the training exercises I've seen. Enemy aircraft are dead before they are even aware that an F-22 is in range.