the Bomber Barons still will point at Japan, and the oil campaign against Germany (both of which made an excellent case for decisive contributions to the war). The Strategic Bombing Survey, with its flaws, was the weapon they used post war to justify those B36s. That and the fact that they alone could carry an atomic weapon (and later thermonuclear one) well into the 1950s.
I don't doubt that they will use exactly that line, but it may be a more difficult one for them to put across than in IOTL.
1) Their losses will be higher
2) Their effectiveness will likely be lower
3) Pointing to Japan is going to be hard because Japan didn't use anything effective against bombers (though you never know...this is the sort of weapon that the Germans could share with the Japanese quite easily, and the Japanese might be able to employ with some effect), and their overall interceptor force was far inferior
4) Even if the USSBS is exactly the same as IOTL (and this is a best case scenario, after all nothing about the rockets is going to make the bombers MORE effective), this isn't about whether the bombs hit their targets, it is about how hard it was to get them their against a determined enemy. Even IOTL, the daylight bombing raids were sometimes prohibitively expensive, and if the rockets force (for instance) significant numbers of tactical aircraft to be diverted to bomber escort, that will tend to undercut the overall value of the bomber force.
Perhaps this will mean nothing, but it may also cause some planners to more aggressively push for alternatives to the bomber force. The B-36 may be safe (it was already well in the pipeline by the time that this would have been happening), but we might have seen more effort on useful escorts, and possibly long range missiles much earlier than IOTL. Certainly we can anticipate some different doctrine coming out of all this, along with a range of new tactics to cope with the threat.
Finally, even if the USAF learns nothing from all of this (how depressingly likely!), I wonder if our potential enemies might take different lessons. I mentioned the Japanese earlier, and the Russians will discover all this as the war progresses as well. Given that the rockets we are discussing (and logical improvements of them) are reasonably low-tech weapons, we might see some new ideas from at least some of our portential enemies in the post-war period.
