I don’t know how any rational person who looks at that entire charade can come to any other conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement

While WW2 was the real proving ground for air power as a decisive factor I think it took Gulf War 1 before air power had reached the technological height that proves its dominance in conventional warfare. It may be tempting to run down Saddam’s military but they were still enormous and they got so incredibly brutalised by air power that the Soviet Generals (USSR was in the process of falling at the time) remarked they were going to have to rethink everything, and they weren’t slouches about air power to start with.

It may have been impossible at the time of Korea, and even Vietnam, to fully interdict but we can sure do it now. That’s why unconventional warfare experienced an explosion, you see a big column of troops without air cover today, they aren’t going to make it, they aren’t going to go unseen either. To compete at all with superior air power you either have to go unconventional and hope to be enough of a pain the ass the other guy decides it’s not worth it, or invest an extraordinary amount in your air forces, just an extreme amount that vanishingly few countries can attempt.

In Korea they had helicopters. If it had occurred to them to stick guns on those helicopters, I think they could have got by with fewer ground troops. Strafe the enemy from a helicopter with suppressing fire while the infantry pick them off with rifles.

Improve the design into a proper attack helicopter with missiles and you can kill the enemy from the air. Then all you need on the ground are scouts to find the target. At least until FLIR comes along.