Why are airplanes so important in modern warfare? After all, they do not carry a lot of weapons with them and can be an easy target for missiles
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Well, look at Ukraine.
Both sides have heavily fortified lines of defense that make attacking extremely costly. Being able to bomb those defenses from the sky makes advancing much, much easier.
Since both sides in that war aren’t really able to overwhelm the other’s anti-air defenses the situation is much like you say – using planes is dangerous because they’re likely to get shot down.
However, if you have enough planes to overwhelm and destroy the enemy’s air defenses, you can basically attack from the air with impunity. This is, more or less, the West’s military doctrine and it’s why the US has such an absolutely massive air force and builds so many aircraft carriers.
Planes do carry lots and lots of weapons, if you have complete aerial superiority you can be flying strategic bombers a high altitude which can carry tons upon tons and munitions.
Planes are also incredibly fast compared to drones, they are also much stealthier meaning they can weave in and around of air defences more easily than drones.
Aeroplanes also have much further range add to drones. For example with the current striking of targets in Yemen, the British flew their planes from Cyprus to Yemen and back again with a bit of in a refueling.
If you exclude drones, with the exception of cruise missiles, there are very few ways to drop munitions more than a hundred miles away. Cruise missiles are exceptionally expensive compared to bombs.
they carry relatively little weapons but it does not take much to do a lot of damage. A strategically important bridge, a command post with high ranking officers,… can be taken out with a surprisingly small amount of ordinance.
Also, when you have air superiority you can basically attack anywhere at any time and the enemy has to adjust to that by for example only moving troops in the cover of darkness
A plane can kill you from 50+ miles away before you’ve even seen or heard it, and is incredibly hard to shoot down even with the correct anti-air weapons.
Modern warfare is a game of rock, paper, scissors. If you have the right counter, you can stop the enemy. If you don’t, you’re essentially defenceless.
* Someone with a gun can kill someone without a gun.
* Someone with an assault rifle can kill someone with a pistol before the pistol is even within range to shoot them.
* Someone with a tank can kill someone with an assault rifle.
* Someone with a fighter jet can kill a tank.
* Someone with a better fighter jet can probably kill a worse one.
* Once you get to a really good fighter jet, it’s very hard to kill it, or even avoid being killed by it.
Aerial superiority is very important in modern warfare as the best planes in the sky, backed up with good anti-air weapons, essentially deny the enemy from doing anything in the air.
If you can’t get your planes up, all you have is ground forces, meaning your vehicles, troops and bases can be blown up by aircraft you can’t see, shoot at or defend against.
To shoot down a fighter jet you have to detect and identify it, send planes to intercept or use ground weapons to shoot it down, all of which is incredibly expensive and difficult.
Airplanes are highly mobile. An hours drive for a tank might be a 5 minute flight for a jet aircraft. That means that for defence a single airport can deploy airplanes to respond to an attack along a very long front line. And for attacks you can deploy aircraft without warning the enemy ahead of time and even deploy the aircraft in response to a breakthrough. The speed also makes up for their low ammunition count as an aircraft can return to base to refuel and rearm and be back on the front lines much faster then for example a tank.
Airplanes also have a long weapons range. Firstly their altitude means that they can see an enemy who would normally be hidden behind a hill or beyond the horizon from someone standing on the ground. In order to shoot something you first need to see them. And secondly the missiles start with the altitude and speed of the airplane so they do not have to spend fuel getting up to those speeds and altitudes. Less fuel usage means more distance.
1. They do carry a lot of weapons, and the weapons can be delivered very accurately (relative to things like artillery) which make them deadly to fortified positions and infrastructure targets.
2. They have an enormous strike range, the recent bombing runs on Yemen by the British were launched from Cyprus, 2,500km away – a 5,000km round trip. It requires in-air refuelling but still its incredible warfighting potential. Moscow is about 2500km from the UK.
The only thing which comes close to it is long range ballistic missiles, which are much easier to shoot down, less precise and very very expensive, both in terms of the missile itself but also the launch platform.
Not only are planes very fast but they are very efficient. Large ships or other objectives can be taken out by a single plane that can be hard to shoot down before they deliver their payload. Even if the plane is shot down, as long as it made it to its destination and fired off a bomb/missile/etc, it’s one plane that can destroy a warship/important checkpoint/tank/bunker/you name it. A tactical strike can be way more important than throwing lots of infantry/armored vehicles at an objective and hoping it works.
It’s also harder to spot and shoot a plane down than people think. Especially with the advancement of countermeasures like flares and stealth tech combined with long range ordinance, 99 times out of 100 a plane will destroy their target before they’re even spotted.
[In an ideal world, this is what complete air superiority allows you to achieve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign). The ground war in Desert Storm would’ve been a lot worse if there was no sustained air campaign. Planes can carry a lot of munitions, strike areas way behind the enemy lines, and with guided munitions be a lot more accurate than conventional artillery. And if you have enough of them, you can constantly strike targets. There are artillery systems that can also accomplish this but they’re much less numerous compared to the amount of planes you can field.
And yes planes are vulnerable to ground based SAMs, that’s why you rarely see jets in Ukraine due to both sides having a lot of anti air and not much to counter. But if the anti air is suppressed/destroyed then planes can perform their role again.
Edit: Aircraft can also quickly respond to situations on the ground. If there’s a column of tanks and infantry on a road an aircraft armed with bombs can attack them without friendly troops being present. Or if friendly troops are engaged with the enemy aircraft can offer support alongside artillery.
>they do not carry a lot of weapons with them
But they do carry a lot of weapons with them. For example, one F-15E can carry 23,000 pounds of weapons. A B-17 from World War II could carry less than 5,000 pounds. Plus, up until very recently, aircraft-delivered air-to-ground weapons were much more precise than artillery.
Armies win battles. Logistics win wars. If you want to interrupt your enemy’s logistics network, you need to be able to strike deep within their territory. The fastest way to do that is with airstrikes or long range missiles. Aircraft can deliver massive amounts of precision ordnance quickly. Enemy missiles are a threat, but with proper suppression of enemy air defense, that problem can be negated.
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