Sacred Haven of Debauchery

And instantly lose all of your military "advantage." And if the planet is controlled by ground forces, then you can really fly away whenever you want and lose nothing.

Of course.

It's one thing to fight with barbarians, and another thing to fight with developed countries.

No. The question is only about the presence of anti-aircraft guns. In Stellaris, they decided that there is no such thing against orbital invaders. How realistic this is is another question.

As a rule, it is not even always called a "war," but some kind of counter-terrorism operation or something.

Well, one raid – yes.

So far, these bombardments have been of no use, and the only potential benefit from them is to give ground forces of the Syrians the opportunity to defeat someone there.

I would say that yes, there is little benefit. And I don't think the ground forces feel it, probably. There is just a lot of politics here, and they can't figure out who is the enemy and who is the friend. Anyway, with a clear goal and motivation, World War II already showed the effectiveness of bombing. A decisive factor? Well, not necessarily. But one of the important ones.

Everywhere where developed countries introduced a military contingent, they performed poorly. The only exception I can remember recently is Russia's operation in Ossetia, but there the local population was on our side.

A strange statement, considering that developed countries usually fight each other in such cases. And when they don't fight each other, they either quickly achieve their goals (Iraq, Libya – the governments were changed to those that the United States needed. Or rather, to those that no longer show direct hostility), or they simply lose interest because there is nothing more to do there (well, they can't protect the local population from spawned terrorists, can they!).

If we are talking about developed countries, such as the United States, it has long been known that they use non-citizens who want to obtain citizenship, as well as mercenaries from private armies, to artificially reduce the number of casualties among US military personnel.

Okay, that's another method.

It's one thing to try to bomb a small but proud country, and another thing to bomb a planet, a PLANET, you are a scientist, you understand the huge scale we are talking about.

This scales a little more cunningly... In modern conditions, there are not only ordinary bombs, but also atomic ones, as well as nuclear fusion. In the past, the United States already bombed a couple of Japanese cities, right? And now imagine that you have even more powerful or just the same weapon at your disposal, you are not bound by any pacts, and the enemy on the planet has areas with power plants – nuclear or whatever, even betarion, that is, with a huge energy density and potential harm... Do you think that it will not be possible to cause significant damage? I doubt it.