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The US doesn't care about traditional gun based artillery

Which is why they're fielding 1500 M109 Paladins (admittedly mostly built during the Cold War, but still, so were the Abramses), with hundreds more on the way, and are on their 4th program to replace it? (I guess you could interpret the failure of those programs as it not being considered that important, but still, seems pretty wasteful even by American standards).

And like, surely the pre-eminent imperial hegemon can afford to do two thing at once? Even if artillery isn't that important, they can still make more than a couple days' consumption, just in case? The Ukraine war is exactly demonstrating the importance of deep strategic stockpiles.

These repeated procurement issues are showing rot within the US MIC - rot which also affects the airpower you're talking about, the capacity to produce planes and spare parts for them, to produce bombs, to supply fuel. I guess we could assume that it's just the ground branch that's getting screwed over, and everything's looking up for the airforce... but why would we assume that? What about the state of US industry would justify that viewpoint?

Essentially, why have artillery when you have this

Because there's obviously a massive cost differential between these two solutions? Delivering ordnance via plane, precisely-guided ordnance too, is substantially more expensive. Airpower cannot necessarily sustain such large volumes of fire - the '91 & '03 Iraq wars both involved months of preparation, of moving assets into place, stockpiling fuel and munitions, unopposed. Conversely, the Libya and anti-ISIS Iraq campaigns didn't have as much stockpiling going on, and both ended up with munition shortages and bombing having to be paused.

These two technologies do not compete with one another, they complement each other - artillery for mass, airpower for precision and range. The NATO argument has been that mass doesn't matter if you have enough precision/performance - but does that actually hold up? Has NATO actually successfully used overwhelming technological superiority to thoroughly defeat someone? Of course the classic argument here is the 2003 Iraq War - which is predicated on arbitrarily separating the "proper" war from the counter-insurgency that followed, just drawing a line in the sand and saying "Well, I won - this other thing that followed directly after and went horribly? Completely separate thing, no connection to previous events whatsoever".

how many missile launchers (and other targets) did Israel take out in Iran, using this class of SDB/SPICE 250, along with UCAVs and Mossad assets with ATGMs and FPV drones, without firing a single artillery shell? Visually verified numbers on missile launchers alone, excluding duplicates and decoys, are around 60, actual numbers likely higher.

And how much did it cost them? If Israel was ostensibly able to keep freely flying over Iran and bombing whatever they want... why did they accept a ceasefire? How much munitions did they burn through, how much damage did they themselves sustain (we probably won't know for some time due to censorship)? Was it worth it?

And the situation there is obviously different - artillery doesn't play a role here, because this is fighting between countries that don't even border one another. Airpower is obviously a more relevant factor here due to the range - but airpower doesn't win wars. Was Iran defeated? Even Iraq, while it certainly sustained damage in '91, was only properly destroyed in '03 - with a full-scale ground invasion. The Libya and anti-ISIS campaigns both needed militias actually on the ground (and in the Iraq case, whatever still functioning Iraqi army units that could be thrown together) to achieve something. The Syrian rebels weren't defeated by airpower - the Syrian army needed to actually be on the ground fighting, and in the offensive last year, Russian airpower didn't stop the rebels - with the Syrian state collapsing and the army giving up, HTS could just keep waltzing in city after city, even if they were getting bombed quite a bit.

Airpower can certainly inflict heavy damage and soften the enemy up for the eventual ground force - but that ground force still needs to come in at some point in order to actually achieve anything strategically. And they'll need artillery - because airpower by itself cannot deliver and keep delivering for months the amount of firepower necessary for a real campaign.

if they could get air superiority near Kyiv and bomb it every day with Su-34s they would

but... they are bombing Kiev, and many other targets across Ukraine quite regularly - just with drones and missiles instead. Would Su-34s do that much more damage? Did Israel do that much more to Iran than Russia has been able to do to Ukraine?

if they could do a NATO style combined arms maneuver offensive they would, but they tried that in the summer of 2023 and failed, they don't have the air assets for that

Ah, the classic "it's only NATO tactics is it's from the Náto region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling combined arms" - maybe tactics that are completely dependent on highly expensive assets like this are bad, and the fact that Western advisors didn't have any alternative approaches to offer is an indictment of them and the inflexibility of their doctrine?

Ukraine is a unique situation and this does not apply to a hypothetical US-Russia conflict, or a NATO-Russia conflict

How is the Ukraine conflict not applicable to a NATO-Russia conflict? Like, what? For a US-Russia conflict sure, those are countries separated by an ocean, but fighting across the plains of Europe is obviously relevant for NATO-Russia?!

Like, I don't disagree that airpower is important, and SEAD/DEAD is important and Russia has deficiencies in that area - but to dismiss the entire concept of artillery with "eh, we'll just bomb them with planes" is just... baffling to me.