Recent strategy has been precision strikes against military and industrial targets and the occasional milk factory followed by a land invasion that meets no resistance, capped off by a hugely expensive decade-plus occupation because leaving would create a genocidal civil war that would ensnare the entire continent. Sadly after all that work the country remains sovereign because going around toppling governments and taking over countries is frowned upon by jealous haters, so we wind up spending trillions for fucking nothing.
Why do we go through the trouble then? Because some people in power profit from this. Note that I don't mean that the war provides a net profit for the American people, that would be ridiculous: we lose trillions. But waging war in this manner does provide mountains of profit for the people who own our politicians. And these job creators drive our economy by investing in real estate in China and building new factories in Mexico.
Carpet bombing, or the "glass parking lot" approach, is different because the profit comes from more long-term rebuilding efforts, as with Japan. And who the hell wants to wait 30 years for an investment to pay dividends?
(yes I turned cynicism up to 11, the real reason we don't carpet bomb anymore is because precision weaponry has so far made it unnecessary and looks better to the public, even if the media makes a huge fucking deal over every single incident of collateral damage when not that long ago we'd happily bomb half a city to hit one factory)
