– difference between air to surface and air to sea capabilities in military
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Air-to-surface: an aircraft can attack any surface target with this. This is also often called air-to-ground.
Air-to-sea: an aircraft can attack any sea target with this. The more common term for this is anti-ship or anti-submarine.
Air-to-ground would include missiles, bombs, and any gun the aircraft is equipped with. Anything that can be used to target something on the ground would fall into this category.
Air-to-sea or anti-ship weapons would include missiles as well as torpedoes. Since most ships are assumed to be well defended by anti-aircraft systems, bombs are less common; the ideal is for the aircraft to launch the weapon up to a hundred miles away to stay as far as it can from any anti-aircraft weapons. Anti-ship missiles tend to use the sea to its advantage; the seas are quite flat compared to land, so the missiles will tend to fly low and fast, to it make it harder for the target to detect them among the waves.
Torpedoes, of course, aren’t going to be very effective against land targets, so those are exclusively air-to-sea weapons; specifically, since most submarines operate submerged for long periods of time, torpedoes are often the most effective weapon in the anti-submarine role. They tend to have much shorter range than missiles, so they aren’t as common in anti-ship attacks unless the ship in question doesn’t have effective anti-air defenses.
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