Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-25

[crazy canuck]

No, to damage the enemy at range required costly investment in the manufacture and development of bombers.  The opposite of what is occurring now.

Sort of?

Germany had over 1500 bombers when the war started. By '42 Britain was producing about 5000 bombers a year.  US produced about 50,000 heavy and medium bombers during the war.

The airframes weren't that hard to build.  Finding good pilots and crew is another story; drones have an advantage there.

I think you may be downplaying the effort it took to transforming the US manufacturing base into something that could turn out that many bombers.  It was only after that was done that finding crews to man them became an issue.

[The Minsky Moment]

I think you may be downplaying the effort it took to transforming the US manufacturing base into something that could turn out that many bombers.

It was done pretty quickly.  The US obviously had a lot of underutilized industrial capacity.

I concede it isn't a real apples-to-apples situation; even the more heavily armed long range drones are a lot cheaper than medium bombers.  But the idea of facing a strategic situation where the adversary has the means of conducting lots of deep penetration strikes that could be tough to reliably against was definitely on people's minds in the 1930s and as it turned out with some good reason.