Reddit reviews Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War

No prob, it's an interesting topic to me. I will say, regarding the Gulf War, from what I've read it's not at all regarded as an exception or temporary thing, but rather as the dawn of a revolution in warfare, and particularly a revolution in air power. The first Gulf War saw the full-scale wartime advent of stealth, precision-guided munitions, GPS, night vision, ground-scanning radar, and other technologies which are still used today. And technology has gotten much much better since then. And although it's true that Iraq's military turned out to be quite fragile, never recovering from the surprise onslaught of the first night's attack, almost all the fancy technology (possibly excepting the Patriot's nascent ABM capability) turned out to perform basically as advertised even in a miserable operating environment and under wartime pressure. That tech has generally only improved from there. Of course, so have the countermeasures...

And in previous wars, from WW2 even up through Operation Just Cause in the late 1980s, it's true that air power's ability against tanks was mixed, but it wasn't completely useless by any stretch. Tanks were regularly killed by ground attack aircraft in WW2 (consider the Il-2 and Ju-87G, most famously). Most other wars haven't had enough armored combat to show the success of air power against tanks specifically, but point targets in general were at least a partial success. In the Six-Day War, the Israelis destroyed hundreds of Egyptian aircraft on the ground, and in Vietnam, helicopter gunships were very successful in accurate ground attack. Late in Vietnam, the introduction of PGMs started the revolution that simmered quietly until the Gulf War kicked it wide open.

Getting back on topic, I haven't done much experimentation in CMANO with iron bombs and tanks, but I don't recall being overly impressed by their performance, nor with rockets. They work fine on soft targets and buildings, but tanks are more difficult. That said, in planes with advanced bombing systems like the F-15E, Su-24, A-6E, and others, iron bombs can be fairly accurate. One book I have, Storm Over Iraq, says the CEP of iron bombs dropped from F-16s in peacetime at low altitude was 30 ft, and in wartime dropped from medium altitude (~15k ft) was 200 ft (page 212). In Operation Opera in 1981, Israeli F-16s used unguided Mk 84s to bomb an Iraqi nuclear facility, with sources indicating about half hit their aimpoints directly, destroying the reactor and other critical underground facilities. CMANO's log will tell you how far away from a target the bombs hit, so you could set up some test scenarios with various planes and targets. If you could demonstrate some statistical inaccuracies, again I would bet the devs would at least hear you out. :)