The biggest factor is the use precision guided munitions (PGM), much bigger than most realise. The JDAM only entered service in 1999, 8 years afterwards. The entire US Navy air wings only used 330 to 340 PGMs during the entire Gulf War! 205 laser guided bombs (Paveway II), 120-130 TV guided glide bombs (AGM-62 Walleye), and 3 AGM-84 SLAM. That's it!. Sourced from PBS frontline, this excludes the Walleye and SLAM, and Hellfires are not fired by tactical fighter aircraft. The vast, vast majority of ordinance dropped by the US Navy's tactical fighters was unguided during the Gulf war, over 10 000 MK-82, over 10 000 MK-83, almost 1000 MK-84, and almost 7000 MK-20 Rockeye cluster bombs. All these are unguided "dumb bombs". That means that just over 1% of munitions employed by US Navy tactical fighter aircraft during the Gulf war were precision guided. The US Air Force had more access to PGMs. Those 2200 bombs dropped by F-18C/Ds, 98-99% of those were unguided, just dropping multiple bombs on a single target hoping for a hit, and having to re-attack these targets if unsuccessful. With these unguided munitions, you need multiple stories just to destroy a single target. With PGMs, you destroy multiple targets in a single sortie. These days, 99% of ordinance dropped consists of PGMs. It's an inversion of the numbers now on multiple levels.

On munitions used, there's little need to guess what the US Navy used now that we have pictures of the aircraft, and knowledge of what they use. For example, the GBU-39 SDB is an Air Force weapon, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet with it's canted pylons cannot quad rack the weapon currently. The US Navy uses the JSOW. Same with the APKWS, the triple ejector rack used to fit the 7 shot launchers is difficult to fit on the canted pylons. (This means that the US Air Force was performing CAPs for the Navy, obviously not great). This also means that the Navy can't daul rack 500lb class JDAMs like the Air Force can (again, canted pylons), only one 500lb JDAM per pylon. JASSM is an Air Force weapon, the Navy operates the anti ship LRASM version, which has a different multimode seeker used for anti ship targeting. The Navy uses the Tomahawk cruise missile for land attacks.

Looking at one squadron from the USS Abraham Lincoln, VFA-41, this was the air to surface ordinance employed:

• 173x GBU-38 500lb JDAMs.
• 52x GBU-31(V)4/B 2,000lb JDAMs
• 48x GBU-54/B 500lb Laser JDAMs
• 41x AGM-154 JSOW stealth glide bombs with multimode guidance.
• 30x GBU-31(V)2/B 2,000lb JDAMs
• 27x GBU-32 1,000lb JDAMs
• 10x AGM-84K SLAM-ER cruise missiles with multimode guidance, including human in the loop guidance.
• 1x GBU-12B 500lb Paveway II.

382x PGMs by a single squadron, and of those, only 51x were standoff weapons, 41x glide bombs and 10x cruise missiles. 13% standoff. However for a true analysis, you'd need the total ordinance dropped by the whole air wing (can't rely on original image which is not specific enough excluding certain munitions, would need to go aircraft by aircraft), and then add Tomahawk cruise missile numbers from the Lincoln CSG. I guess this would put standoff numbers higher, anywhere from 20-35% with Tomahawks, JSOW and SLAM-ER included, depending on how inaccurate this initial image is. If you wanted to be really biased the other way, you could say a single squadron dropped more PGMs than the entirety of the US Navy during the Gulf War. However that is not helpful either, and very biased.

Risk tolerance is another factor. From the Saratoga, an F-18 was shot down by a MiG-25 on the first night of the war with the pilot killed, and an A-6 was shot down with the crew captured by Iraq. The US was trying to avoid this as much as possible, look at the effort put into recovering a single WSO from the F-15E shoot down over Isfahan.

Russia is another story entirely, their glide bombs are not comparable to dropping JDAMs, where the aircraft is close enough that the target can be viewed by the aircraft itself using the targeting pod. Time to target is also multiple times greater. The way Russia uses these glide bombs is to shell the frontline, almost like airborne artillery. Russian aircraft aren't plinking tanks/aircraft on the ground or groups of Ukrainian troops, Russia uses the man in the loop guided Geran drones for that. Now why Russia doesn't fit man in the loop guidance to glide bombs, I have no idea. If the infrastructure exists for drones, surely it can exist for glide bombs. Also, the Su-34 is their only glide bomb dropper, and can't escort itself vs Ukrainian aircraft and air defense, it needs Su-35 SEAD and CAP escort for glide bomb strikes.

always love it when mainstream reality catches up to the hexbear news mega six months late

Have the majority of air strikes and sorties come from air bases in the region and europe vs aircraft carriers? it seems like once the Lincoln was challenged by drones and anti-ship missles, and subsequently suffering from laundry fires, they were positioned further away and tasked with enforcing the “blockade of a blockade” instead of bombing schools and hospitals deep inside Iran. Its not hard to believe the scope of The Lincolns role in the war would be different than the Saratoga in Iraq War 1- I don’t think Iraq of the 90s had the naval, technological, or defense capabilities to counter sea-based air-strikes with stealth technology and guided weapons. That probably made the risk to the Saratoga nill after the first few hours

more on this https://x.com/ripplebrain/status/2108564373505523725

Ok more detailed summary statistics for the Lincoln's deployment have been published in the US media since yesterday, so let's do a breakdown comparing the Lincoln to the USS Saratoga in the Gulf War. First, some caveats. We don't know if the bombs dropped figure painted on the Lincoln is just gravity bombs, or if it includes air-launched cruise missiles too. We'll also need to compare the Saratoga's two F-18 squadrons to the Lincolns two F-18 squadrons plus its ten F-35s and its EA-18G Growlers, because we have much more detailed statistics for the Saratoga's F-18s than we do for its full air wing. What we see is that the Saratoga's F-18s heavily outperformed the entirety of the Lincoln's air wing by 100% in terms of ordnance delivered even though:

• The Lincoln has almost 2x the strike aircraft in this comparison
• The Lincoln's aircraft flew more combat sorties (these are supposedly ground strike sorties, not air defense sorties, so the comparison is valid)
• The Lincoln has 2x the potential sortie rate
• The Lincoln's strike aircraft can carry a heavier payload
• The Lincoln had more days of combat operations

The mitigating factors for the Lincoln are:

• The share of precision guided munitions it dropped is probably much higher
• Its aircraft had to sortie much further from their targets because of the danger of Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles

Possible explanations for this:

• Casualty aversion led CENTCOM to fly fewer missions over Iran
• Logistics difficulties in keeping the Lincoln stocked with munitions
• Difficulty in locating targets

I've seen people defend the idea that the carriers deployed to the Arabian Sea during this war have a greater combat potential than the larger fleet of naval assets deployed during Desert Storm, and that should be true, but the statistics don't bear that out. This is total napkin math but just for comparison, Russia drops 9,000 glide bombs a month on Ukraine. Almost all of those sorties are flown by the Su-34, and the Russians operate ~150 of them. That's 2 bombs per airframe per day. Let's assume the Lincoln had 80 days of "combat operations" during the entire war (the real figure is probably much higher than this). That's 0.42 bombs per airframe per day. And the airspace over Ukraine is probably less permissive than the airspace over Iran. The Lincoln's air wing was heavily constrained by distance. Even if we assume all of the Lincoln's bombs were delivered within the initial 40 day phase of the Iran War, and its aircraft then sat around doing nothing for the rest of its deployment, the Russian Air Force is 2.4x more efficient, aircraft per aircraft

https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/WithLabor/status/2108566695845806170

6 and change hour average sortie time vs 3hr 45min on the Saratoga shows you how fucking scared and stood-off we were compared to Iraq1...75min transit time each way covers a lot of miles even in a dirty F/A-18 on the way there

the video link was dead (and twitter) but I believe it was this:

https://funker530.com/video/su-34-deploys-munitions-over-ukraine

IMO most likely the number of "bombs" also includes regular standoff munitions like JASSMs and maybe even Tomahawks that the strike group fired.