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.
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