All that firepower off of the coast of Beirut (including a battleship doing 16 inch punitive hits) and there was no effect.
To show you how much has changed since then, those were the days of how many aircraft are needed to hit one target.
Today since the JDAM etc, we are in the era of how many targets can be hit by one aircraft.
Let us compare today if we had to hit the same targets. Now to be fair, the failed air strikes happened because F-14s doing a photo run were shot at by AAA and small SAMs.
Today we would get that ISR without even bothering threats. But let us continue with the strike.
Instead of that bad day of losing 1 A-6 and 1 A-7 (and the loss of 1 crewman dead), 2 F-35Cs with 16 small diameter bombs (SDBs) could have hit all the targets and then some.
How times change.
As an aside, the JFK did play with precision guided munitions on that 1983 cruise. An A-6 team tried a loft shot assuming a ground USMC buddy lase. The Paveway went a mile or so off target and landed in an apartment building.
The F-35C may also justify building some small carriers to help our big carriers. We could probably make a down-payment on that effort by retiring all the cruisers and ending the Zumwalt-class stupidity. I suspect we could probably have 12 carriers. 6 large nuke carriers and 6 small conventional carriers. Not perfect, but better than 6 big carriers only.
In order to have presence around various world hot-spots, you actually have to be able to afford it.
A simplistic graphic showing 2 squadrons of F-35 for the carrier. Each squadron has 12 F-35Cs and 4 K-35D recovery tankers. Add the other support Dets (E-2D, UCAS-N and multi-role helos as you see fit).
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F-35 in the carrier air wing -- really?
F-35C bad if it fails and maybe bad if it doesn't fail
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