Yes Jon, I finally got my revenge on the valley of the shadow of death!

Although I completed it on first (real) attempt, I could have easily failed. I saw those vicious AI snipers shooting at me from air immediately after ejection. I kept moving, knowing they don't aim as well as human snipers. I had 2 of them aiming for me at once. Now THAT is scary.

I had to play a lot of the mission with absolutely no AI support, as I hadn't located much scrap yet, but I had a hangar, supply, stolen BDog Grizzly, and a 2nd SP-Stabber from armory, and I was destroying units myself and zipping around the map building silos at every scrap field I could find, and constantly reloading. There's one place where Golems keep dropping down from the top of a mountain and killing my scavengers. I just kept rebuilding them and destroying the Golems. Once I had a few Gun Towers at my base, I would leave and pick fights with a few enemy tanks and lure them into my Gun Towers. Soon enough, the enemy scavengers were coming into my base to get scrap, and the AI attacks ceased. Strangely enough, when I moved my 10 howitzers into position, they were unopposed! Nothing came out to destroy them. I expected some resistance, because enemy AI killed my howitzers a lot in other IA missions. Perhaps I simply ran the enemy out of scrap and the AI was unable to fight? Not sure though, because once I reduced the base to just a recycler, it built a scavenger. I killed the scavenger and it built another, over and over a few times, then I just took out the recycler.
The mission definitely requires strategy skills as well good shooting. It was fun. By the way, I was playing on hard like I always do, so if you're used to beating missions on medium, try them on hard.
When I learn how to make IA maps, I want to know how to make the turrets do intelligent stuff and how to get scavs to have escorts. I also want to have the AI attack with APCs, and rebuild its factory when it gets destroyed! In all the missions I've played, the factory is never rebuilt, even though the recycler is still alive.