Now I'm pretty pig ignorant about combined arms, but I recall a conversation between people (I presume) weren't that inferred an A-10 is meant to operate in uncontested airspace as a close air support platform for ground based forces such as infantry and light armour in ground that is still contested. So if there are SAM or other defences in play, something else has to go in and blow them to kingdom come first. I assume this is one of many jobs the F-35 is supposed to do.
Pretty much. The idea being that early in a war you'd used fast, stealthy planes armed with HARM or Anti-Radiation missions to seek out and destroy enemy Air defense Radars and SAM sites to clear the way for more conventional aircraft strikes. The US called these "Wild Weasel" missions but notably they're called SEAD or Supression of enemy air defense.
en.wikipedia.org
To go into a little bit more detail, destroying air defense radars is generally just as good as taking out the actual SAM sites because the SAM sites need those radars to work properly(and normally SAM lauchers are linked a mobile radar unit in the same area) Anti-Radiation missiles are designed to home in on those radars and destroy them(and apparently the newer ones still work even if you turn the radars off) but with Drones and satellites you can use rocket artillery like HIMARS or suicide drones like like the
Harpy to look for enemy SAM sites and then go kamikaze them.
Drones have apparently been evolving how this is done because if you can send a small unmanned aircraft into enemy territory, either with a missle onboard or with it's own warhead, you have another tool for clearing air defenses without risking pilots.
That being said, clearly it's more complex then this considering both Russia and Ukraine both have working Air Defense systems that prevent the other from bombing with Impunity. Russia notably has been launching missiles from Russian Airspace into Ukraine outside of Ukrainian Air Defense range in order to avoid losing aircraft(though Russia has been caught on camera shooting down some of their own aircraft and at least once and having one of it's own
SAMs boomerang back to the launcher in a bit of Irony). Those big attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure are probably the best Russia can do ATM because they just spam missiles at soft targets knowing full well Ukraine doesn't have enough air defense batteries to shoot them all down and can't ever protect everything at once.
