Taihei Tengoku wrote:The Viet Minh fought against an advanced mechanized force with complete air superiority and came out the better. Fighter aircraft don't necessarily have an easier time picking apart anti-air installations, SEAD/Wild Weasel is a specialized, perishable, and highly risky skill and just having a jet fighter doesn't mean it'll be suppressed. Until that's done they will have to fly low and won't be able to efficiently plink from medium altitudes.
Given that the high-altitude IADS had to have been nonexistent, reliably suppressed, or destroyed for the air drop to occur in the first place, medium-altitude attacks are almost certainly the best option for the supporting attack aircraft. Low-altitude attacks would suffer from much higher levels of attrition as they have essentially every time they've been tried. Suppressing the short-range air defense is less a matter of dedicated SEAD aircraft and more a matter of having enough strike aircraft on hand to continue to suppress targets as they are spotted.
The comparison to Egypt and Vietnam does work--all he needs is a few days to break up and annihilate the paratroops.
Which he says he isn't doing because those troops have hostages and are entrenched.
.JPG){kind=link}
