While the American ability to control the air is often taken for granted, the United States risks losing this advantage over the next decade and a half. Budget pressures have delayed key investments, while others continue to develop advanced technologies that will surpass U.S. capabilities if we fail to move forward. Sensing this challenge, from mid-2015 to mid-2016, the Air Force afforded me the privilege of leading a team of experts studying how the Air Force would provide air superiority for the U.S. military in 2030 and beyond. Air superiority, often thought of as a mission, is more correctly conceived of as a condition. At its most basic, that condition is achieved when a force possesses the degree of control of the air required for joint operations succeed. Air superiority not only allows the joint force to exploit the air domain, but also grants it freedom from attack on the surface. Without air superiority, results can be devastating — witness the rout of the Republican Guard as it tried to escape from Kuwait along the “Highway of Death,” or the devastating losses suffered by the Taliban in 2001 on the Shomali plain. With this in mind, the team I led — composed of air, space, cyber, logistics, and support experts— challenged every assumption and conducted an exhaustive review of options to gain and maintain continued control of the air.
As I briefed the results of this study to various groups, some challenged our most basic assertion that air superiority matters. Some even went so far as to say they didn’t think the United States would need air superiority in 2030. In such cases, I always asked how they predicted conflict would unfold in the future. Often they’d reply that hybrid warfare would dominate, with irregular and regular forces operating in the gray zone between war and peace. In this kind of warfare, attribution and intent are challenging if not impossible for friendly forces to ascertain. Because of this, some argue that ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), tactical lift, and on-call strike assets are the most valuable airpower capabilities in these conflicts.
I agree that hybrid and gray zone conflict are likely attributes of future warfare; we’ve already seen trends in this direction, such as the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. I also agree that the airpower missions of ISR, lift, and persistent strike remain essential in many conflicts, including those in the gray zone. Where I take issue is when someone takes these first two points and then concludes that they don’t need air superiority. Indeed, if ISR, lift and strike missions are essential in gray zone conflicts, air superiority is doubly so. Simply put, you cannot fly ISR, lift, or strike missions — or ensure the adversary doesn’t fly them — without it. Ukraine again provides an instructive example, where a lack of air superiority resulted in multiple losses of Ukrainian Air Force Su-25 ground attack aircraft.
We in the U.S. military — particularly the U.S. Air Force — are victims of our own success. Many can no longer conceive of a world in which U.S. air superiority is not a given, where we must fight for it. Many also view air superiority only as a theater-wide condition, reminiscent of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s dramatic declarations during the First Gulf War.
Unfortunately, the world has changed. Middle powers possess the resources, technology, and know-how to challenge control of the air, and by 2030, many of those capabilities will have proliferated around the globe. As a result, although theater-wide air superiority provides important strategic, operational, and tactical advantages, it may be extremely difficult to obtain. We may no longer be able to prevent adversaries from operating within their own integrated air defenses. Instead, we will control their airspace for a discrete time and over a limited area, as defined by the needs of the joint force team. Control of the air is not an end in and of itself — we set the air superiority condition only so we may then exploit the air domain to maximum effect and preclude an adversary from doing the same.
Attaining air superiority when and where we need it in 2030 will not be easy. The Air Force must develop capabilities that not only target and engage air and missile threats, as doctrine has long suggested, but also counter threats to the space assets we depend on in the air battle. Likewise, adversary use of cyberspace to deliver effects against our air, space, and logistics assets could prevent joint forces from controlling air and space. Air superiority in 2030 must account for a multi-domain battlespace where air, space, and cyberspace converge. We must ensure we give weight not just to necessary advances in raw combat power across those domains, but also to equally critical basing and logistics, ISR, and command and control capabilities. We must exploit third offset technologies to provide an information, knowledge, and decision advantage, and then use that advantage to gain control of the air at the time and place of our choosing.
Achieving air superiority in 2030 will require an integrated and networked family of both penetrating and standoff capabilities. Some argue that this is unobtainable and charge that the Air Force always talks about fielding a “family of systems,” but then reverts to developing single platforms. Not true. We always field a family of capabilities —we go to combat today with fighters, bombers, unmanned aircraft, and command and control platforms like AWACS all integrated in the battlespace. Sometimes this family works well together, and sometimes there is friction, as different datalinks, communication nodes, and capabilities are cobbled together into a force package. We can minimize the friction and cost of the 2030 family of capabilities if we start thinking today about how it fits together.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll share some of the background behind our Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan at War on the Rocks. In the next installment, I’ll discuss how our team defined the air superiority problem and how that led us to our Flight Plan recommendations. Then I’ll discuss how Air Superiority 2030 counters the A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) strategy of our adversaries, including how it exploits third offset technologies and ideas. Finally, I will discuss some of the key attributes of the actual Air Superiority family of systems, as well as the need to change acquisition paradigms in order to develop these attributes.
This does not mean air superiority in 2030 will be cheap or easy. Indeed, we are already far overdue in several key investment areas across platforms, weapons, and sensors — such are the devastating effects of sequestration at home and rapid technological advances by others abroad. But with sustained commitment, discipline in requirements, and an acquisition game plan that takes full advantage of experimentation and prototyping, we can still recover.
Part II
In early 2015, the U.S. Air Force was about to begin work on its next-generation air-to-air fighter, commonly known as F-X. When beginning such a program, military services usually start with an “analysis of alternatives” to help them define the desired attributes of new systems. The objective of this analysis is to determine the most rational investment decisions prior to committing taxpayer dollars. Key funding decisions typically follow shortly on the heels of this analytic effort. As the Air Force approached these decisions, it had to decide how much of its topline budget authority it was willing to allocate to the emerging F-X program. Out of this came a cost estimate for the F-X program based on trends from similar programs in the past. The result was not pretty.
The two most recent examples analysts had available were the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II. As has been written extensively elsewhere, both programs experienced cost issues throughout development. Such issues eventually drove Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to truncate the F-22 program at 187 aircraft and also led to a re-baselining of the F-35 program in 2010. Comparing the expense of these fifth-generation aircraft programs to fourth-generation F-16 and F-15 programs, experts predicted F-X would cost substantially more than any prior fighter program in history. Additionally, Air Force planners evaluated the development timelines experienced during fifth-generation aircraft development. The combination of historically poor schedule performance with historically high costs led planners to conclude the earliest the Air Force could expect and afford to field F-X would be around the year 2040.
Many Air Force leaders felt 2040 would be too late to field the next tranche of air superiority capability. The F-22 reached initial operational capability (IOC) in 2005, and while the F-35 recently entered service in 2016, it is optimized for air-to-ground employment rather than air superiority. This means we are facing a 35-year gap between fielding air superiority platforms if forced to wait until 2040. This would have been an eternity during industrial-age aircraft development; it’s even worse in the fast-paced world of aircraft development in the information age.
This acute challenge led Air Force leadership to look for a different approach to the F-X problem. They decided the time had come to reexamine their assumptions and reframe the Air Force’s approach to air superiority. The team I led for slightly more than a year, the Air Superiority 2030 Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team (ECCT), was the result of this decision. Crucially, the Air Force chief of staff tasked the team with taking a multi-domain approach to air superiority, which in Air Force parlance meant we were to consider solutions that might not necessarily come from the air. Perhaps, the thinking went, cyberspace or space-based capabilities would be able to produce air superiority effects and move the Air Force to an entirely new cost curve. The Air Force had done this before during the 1950s, when a fundamental reframing of how to provide nuclear combat power led to the advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile, moving the Air Force off a bomber-only cost and capability model.
Air Force leaders were equally concerned with cost and our intellectual approach to capability development. To some, F-X looked like a standard recapitalization program to replace an aging platform with a newer, more capable platform. While this approach sometimes works, leaders were concerned that Air Force processes were not built to ask whether a platform was the right solution or not — they simply assumed it was. A similar assumption had been made by the Polish military between the two world wars. On the eve of World War II, they had refitted their cavalry units with entirely new equipment. Based on the lessons of World War I, they not only procured new weapons for their cavalrymen, but also gas masks for both men and horses. In effect, they had recapitalized their cavalry without ever challenging the assumption that such cavalry was relevant in modern warfare.
To help ensure the Air Force did not make that same mistake, the ECCT adopted a comprehensive analytical framework. As all military planners appreciate, the first step in solving a complex problem is to make sure you truly understand it. Therefore, our team dedicated the first 90 days of our effort to not only outlining our methodology, but also to deconstructing the air superiority problem from every possible angle. We started with ensuring our intellectual understanding of air superiority was correct. As mentioned in my first article in this series, our team knew control of the air was needed not as an end in and of itself. It was needed so friendly forces could exploit that control for ISR, strike, mobility, or even space launch — and to preclude the enemy from doing the same. Thus, we developed an appreciation for the time and geographical requirements for air superiority in various scenarios. Additionally, as we examined Air Force and joint counter-air thinking, we expanded on the doctrinal definition of air superiority. Traditionally, air superiority doctrine focused on neutralizing air and missile threats. We added other threat vectors that might preclude our control of the air, including cyberspace-based attacks and other non-traditional and unconventional threats.
The next step in our process was to examine the 2030 timeframe and the expected operational environment. Leveraging a vast array of intelligence and analysis, our team developed as much understanding as possible about that environment, dividing expected threats into two categories. The first category contained evolutionary and traditional threat capabilities, such as airplanes, air-to-air missiles, and surface-to-air weapons systems. For the most part, we think we have a reasonable idea how these technologies will evolve and proliferate over the next 15 years, as these technological cycles are relatively well-understood. The second category, however, contained a more revolutionary set of comprehensive threats, including advanced and highly accurate ballistic missiles, cyberspace threats, and threats to our space assets. While we know these threats will exist (many already do), it is more difficult to predict how they will evolve and proliferate. In the end, what we do know is that in 2030 our forces will face a combination of threats from both categories in a variety of places around the world.
It is worth noting here that our effort was not about preparing for conflict against so-called near-peer adversaries. Rather, it was about being prepared for the kind of technologies we see spreading around the world and the expected operational environments created by such technological advancements and proliferation. Indeed, such proliferation of advanced technology is already occurring, as evidenced by the advanced missiles systems found in Syria or recently acquired by Iran.
The next step for our team was to assess our planned force structure against the backdrop of the expected threat environment. Air Force analysis over the past several years had suggested numerous capability gaps existed, and we were able to validate many of these. In the end, however, only one gap mattered to our team: the Air Force’s lack of ability to gain and maintain air superiority in 2030. This gap was rooted in a number of critical shortfalls across both the proficiency and sufficiency of our planned forces. In terms of proficiency, the team assessed that we would not only lack many of the raw capabilities needed in the expected threat environment, but that we would also lack trained and ready airmen to maintain and operate these capabilities. We also assessed a lack of sufficiency. This meant that even in areas where our capability was technologically adequate and proficient, the planned quantity of those capabilities in the 2030 inventory will be insufficient in many scenarios to attain operational- and strategic-level effects and outcomes.
Our team found two main causes of this expected gap. First, the Air Force broadly (but not entirely) failed to rapidly develop and field capabilities over the last two decades. Second, even with programs the Air Force had fielded, many were focused on operations in a single function or domain without enough forethought given to interactions with other functions and domains. As an example, even the F-22 — the most advanced air superiority platform on the planet — stills fails to meet its full potential owing to its communications limitations. These shortfalls limit the speed at which F-22 pilots can pass data from their fifth-generation sensors to other forces in the battlespace or to our intelligence enterprise. (The Air Force recognized this long before our team’s effort, and it is working on enhancements that will significantly magnify the impact of F-22s on the effectiveness of other forces through improved connectivity).
Having deconstructed doctrine, threats, and the problem, we next turned our attention to solutions. We reached into every corner of the Air Force, across the other services, into agencies such as DARPA and our national labs, and across academia and industry. We wanted to leave no stone unturned in our search for creative ideas to address the air superiority capability gap. This effort led to the submission of over 1,500 different ideas, both materiel (e.g., modernization, acquisition programs) and non-materiel (e.g., improved tactics or training). We assessed each of these ideas against four criteria: effectiveness, technological maturity, expected cost, and the number and complexity of any dependencies required for the idea to be effective.
The knowledge generated from this assessment proved foundational to the remainder of our effort. We learned many ideas that sounded promising upfront were in reality either ineffective, technologically immature, too expensive, or highly dependent on consecutive miracles to succeed. As just one example, at one of our analytical events we evaluated a recommendation for a hypersonic, highly maneuverable, optionally-manned aircraft with intercontinental range and equipped with exquisite sensors and directed-energy weapons. Unfortunately, while such a platform would be highly effective, the technologies required to actually create such a capability simply did not and will not exist by 2030.
Other concepts submitted to our team included words such as “3D printing,” “hypersonic,” “swarming,” or “autonomous.” Many such concepts showed promise: 3D printing could revolutionize logistics, hypersonics could enable prompt long-range strike, swarming has been a favored tactic of fighter pilots for a century, and autonomy may drastically reduce the human workload when executing complex tasks. Consequently, our team recommended pursing these technological and tactical innovations. At the same time, we caution those who would consider any one or two such concepts “silver bullets” that would by themselves solve the air superiority problem. Furthermore, such innovations must be paired with valid concepts of operation to make them effective in the expected operational environment. A concept based on tactics or technology is interesting, but only when paired with a concept of operations can it become compelling.
In order to evaluate various innovations in an operational context, our team organized viable concepts into several conceptual frameworks for further analysis. The first conceptual framework included robust modernization of the planned force of 2030, but had few additional capabilities added to the mix. As such, this provided a base case for our analysis, showing us the maximum amount of capability we could extract from the force without starting major new acquisition programs. The force in this conceptual framework achieved control of the air the old-fashioned way, by rolling back an adversary’s integrated air defense system over time from the outside in until air superiority was attained over a desired geographical area.
Our second and third conceptual frameworks were a standoff force and attritable force, respectively. The standoff force broadly consisted of non-penetrating platforms delivering large volumes of weapons (including non-kinetic effects) from beyond the lethal range of threat systems. The attritable force consisted of a large number of platforms with modular payloads (either kinetic or non-kinetic) that could be reused multiple times, but that were also inexpensive enough that losing some in a high-threat environment was acceptable. Importantly, the attritable force we assessed in this conceptual framework did not just exist in the air domain, but in cyberspace and space as well.
Broadly speaking, we expected both the standoff and attritable forces to achieve air superiority through the high volume of weapons, effects, and/or attritable platforms swarming and converging in the desired space at the desired time to overwhelm enemy defenses. Yet deeper analysis revealed that neither force was able to generate enough awareness of targets much beyond the edge of an adversary’s defenses. Each could only achieve air superiority on the outskirts of an integrated air defense system. Over time, air superiority could extend deeper into the adversary system — but to get to that point the scheme of maneuver ended up resembling yet another traditional roll-back operation, albeit with cyberspace and space capabilities in play as well.
Our fourth conceptual framework centered on what many would describe as a sixth-generation fighter: a highly survivable, highly lethal platform supported by cyberspace and space capabilities. While our analysis showed this conceptual framework would be highly effective at the tactical level, it was hobbled at the operational level by an insufficient quantity of capability due to the high cost of the platform. Additionally, to achieve the effectiveness needed, the development program postulated for this program would carry a significant degree of technical risk, creating a very real possibility that this sixth-generation fighter would not field until well past 2030. In short, we concluded that the exquisite capabilities in this conceptual framework would cost too much and arrive late to need.
At this point in our study, the problem seemed intractable: we could not modernize our way out of the problem, multi-domain standoff weapons and attritable forces failed to achieve air superiority, and our only successful operational capability was unrealistic both in terms of cost and timeline. As we reviewed the analysis conducted on the conceptual frameworks in greater detail, however, several important insights came to light that would guide us as we developed courses of action.
First, we learned that modernization of some current platforms would allow them to perform some parts of the counter-air mission, including as defensive counter-air over friendly forces and suppression of enemy air defenses on the edge of the integrated air defense system. Second, we learned that we knew how to launch standoff weapons over long distances — the challenge would be giving them enough information to hit a target. We also learned that while we did not have access to the all information necessary to provide that targeting information today, we could significantly improve our ability in this area by fusing cyberspace intelligence with new space-based capabilities (such as using cubesat or nanosat technology to blanket an area of interest with overhead coverage).
If we could develop these capabilities and pair them with new and existing air-domain data sources, we would significantly improve the effectiveness of standoff weapons. Doing this, however, would require getting the right sensors in the right places, meaning sometimes deep in adversary territory. Attritable assets with the right sensor payloads provided one option, as did networking together current or upgraded airborne sensors, including fifth-generation aircraft and dedicated ISR platforms. Still, attritable assets lacked persistence, and fifth-generation assets could not go everywhere we needed them to go. We still would need a capability to penetrate and persist in the adversary air defense system. Such a capability was not just needed to employ weapons or project effects, but just as importantly to serve as a key node in what was emerging as a new conceptual multi-domain battle network.
In the next installment we will discuss this battle network in more detail. We will unpack the concept our team developed for going from “data to decision” in support of the counter-air mission, as well as how this concept relies on many of the third offset technologies Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has been advocating for the Department. We will also discuss how we took lessons learned from the failures of our first four conceptual frameworks to develop a plan for building and developing a force capable of defeating the anti-access/area denial strategy and gaining and maintaining air superiority in support of joint force objectives in 2030.And recover we must. Air superiority is not an optional capability. Without it, you lose.:
Part III: Defeating A2/AD
January 13, 2017
Over the last decade, would-be adversaries have been busy acquiring and fielding capabilities to preclude U.S. and allied forces from freely operating around the world. This buildup of military capabilities in the Pacific, Europe, and even in Syria and Iran, poses a complex operational problem for U.S. and allied forces across a range of missions, including in the fight for control of the air. Losing the ability to operate freely at the tactical and operational level has strategic-level impacts. If we do not respond to this trend, we will ultimately lose the ability to deter and, if necessary, defeat our adversaries in conventional conflicts. Having a credible ability to attack an enemy – especially those enemy capabilities that threaten our homeland or our deployed forces – is essential to regaining and retaining the ability to achieve strategic success.
The second installment of this series explained how the Air Superiority 2030 Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team (ECCT) attempted to solve this problem and bridge the air superiority gaps facing the U.S. Air Force in 2030. While none of our original four frameworks would suffice in the face of expected future threats, we did learn several key lessons from our analysis. We learned that while modernization of current forces alone could not solve the 2030 problem, key upgrades could keep this force relevant at the operational level and increase its overall fighting capacity. We learned that increased reliance on stand-off weapons would be technically feasible if we could figure out how to provide the right degree of targeting information. We learned that capabilities with persistence, range, and survivability were key. And, perhaps most instructively, we learned that the Air Force needs to move from an air domain-centric perspective to one that complements our air assets with cyberspace- and space-based capabilities.
As we continued our work, these lessons led us to develop a vision for an integrated and networked family of air superiority capabilities comprised of both stand-off and stand-in assets. Stand-in assets are those that seek to operate inside the threat range of enemy defenses, such as penetrating bombers or fighters equipped with short-range weapons. By contrast, stand-off assets remain outside those defenses, sending only longer-range weapons like missiles or other effects such as jamming into the most contested areas. The pairing of both stand-in and stand-off capabilities proved absolutely critical to defeating a future adversary’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy. Anti-access capabilities are those that threaten bases and logistical lines into a theater, denying access to basing or to the theater. Area denial capabilities aim to create an impenetrable bubble over key assets, denying a force the ability to operate in the protected area once it gains access to the theater. A key feature of the A2/AD strategy is the defense of high-value anti-access capabilities under the protective bubble provided by area denial assets. This puts attacking forces on the horns of a dilemma. They cannot attack an adversary’s area denial threats because anti-access capabilities prevent them from projecting power into a theater. They cannot attack the anti-access threats because they are heavily protected by area denial capabilities.
As the chief of naval operations recently pointed out, there is nothing new about A2/AD as a strategic approach. It is merely an extension of the long battle for supremacy between offense and defense over the course of military history. In today’s context, anti-access threats aim to force our capabilities to operate from beyond their effective range — whether in air, space, cyberspace, on land, or at sea. These threats include long-range aviation assets with long-range weapons, such as bombers with advanced air-launched cruise missiles. They might also include short or intermediate range ballistic missiles. Together, these weapons increase the risk to friendly forces operating across a wide swath of geography and could even prevent U.S., allied, or partner operations for at least a period of time.
Importantly, anti-access threats are not limited to the air domain or even to the physical domains. Anti-satellite (ASAT) systems are one clear example. A ground-based ASAT capability typically has the range and power (whether kinetic or non-kinetic) to wreak havoc above the atmosphere and deny the exploitation of the space domain for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), communications, or other purposes. Similarly, cyberspace capabilities might be used against air or space capabilities or against friendly cyber forces. Such threats might preclude logistics in forward areas for aircraft or force cyber operators to shift to a defensive focus — the virtual equivalent of denied battlespace in the physical domains.
As noted, an effective A2/AD strategy protects anti-access capabilities with area denial threats. In the air, this is often accomplished using an integrated air defense system (IADS) comprised of radars, aircraft, and surface-to-air missile systems. In space, this might be accomplished by rendering an orbit unusable by spreading debris. In cyberspace, firewalls and other protective systems prevent friendly actions in a similar manner throughout the virtual battlespace. Collectively, these area denial capabilities present a robust defense across air, space, and cyberspace.
Many defense analysts have focused on ways to tackle anti-access systems. Their ideas include longer-range aircraft, missiles, and weapons that allow U.S. forces to stand off beyond the range of threat systems. Others have discussed short-range defensive capabilities to provide the last line of defense at U.S. forward bases, including both active measures (e.g., short-range missile or gun systems) and passive measures (e.g., camouflage and hardening). Other useful solution proposals include advanced air refueling capabilities, robust theater- and base-level logistical systems, and new concepts for fighting from our bases. To these ideas, our team added a few others. For example, instead of always trying to go through the anti-access environment, the U.S. Air Force could and should improve our ability to go above it (in air or space) or below it (on the ground, in air at low altitude, or in cyberspace).
All of these ideas are a necessary part of the solution to the air superiority problem of 2030. Unfortunately, they are not sufficient. All the capabilities mentioned above only address the anti-access portion of the problem, ignoring the area denial portion. Paired with a sophisticated operational approach, these anti-access counters might be able to achieve limited effects over a short duration — a raid or reprisal action — but our analysis showed the adversary would still retain a significant advantage. In more complex scenarios, we found the adversary will likely still be able to mass decisive power at the time and place of its choosing. Through wargaming, our team saw the impact this had on diplomacy, access to the global commons, and a host of other national-level issues. In effect, conventional deterrence failed, increasing the danger that skirmishes or other minor conflicts would quickly escalate.
To regain the ability to deter and decisively win conventional conflicts, we must also build capabilities and concepts to attack the area denial side of the A2/AD strategy. In short, we found we needed a credible ability to attack the anti-access threats where they lived, rather than just protect ourselves against their effects. This concept is not a new one for airmen. Airpower strategists have long known that gaining air superiority by destroying aircraft in the air is necessary, but not sufficient. It is much more efficient and effective to destroy those capabilities on the ground by striking airfields, aircraft, fuel farms, and the like.
This logic still holds in a multi-domain environment. The adage that “sometimes offense is the best defense” still applies in the combined arms fight of the 21st century. For instance, making our on-orbit assets more resilient is again necessary, but not sufficient. We must also protect our spacecraft by eliminating terrestrial threats to them. Just as it is reasonable to strike airfields and aircraft before they leave the ground laden with cruise missiles, it also makes sense to defend our space assets by striking (or threatening to strike) an adversary’s ground-based ASAT capabilities left-of-launch. These strikes need not be kinetic. Similarly, cyberspace anti-access capabilities striking U.S. forces within cyberspace or elsewhere could be targeted either from cyberspace, from the air, or from space. Thus, the air superiority forces necessary to defeat the A2/AD strategy in 2030 require a combination of capabilities across the air, space, and cyberspace domains. Our analysis revealed four main considerations for such a force.
First, this force must be able to operate over long distances. Operating from range allows friendly forces to base beyond the reach of most anti-access threats while still maintaining the ability to strike them where they live, under the area denial umbrella. If forces attempt to fight from close proximity to an adversary employing the A2/AD strategy, thousands of attacks on their position will quickly overwhelm base defenses. These attacks might be ballistic or cruise missiles, ASAT weapons, or cyberspace-based attacks. Generating combat power becomes untenable under such persistent attack. If forces are instead able to operate from range — or from a different orbit, or from behind a firewall — the number of threats able to reach their position is more manageable. Similarly, generating combat power becomes more realistic, whether that’s aircraft sortie generation, space-based effects, or employment of cyberspace weapons. Military history is replete with examples of the benefits of striking from increased range, including moving from lances to pistols, from smoothbore to rifled muskets, and from fighter guns to air-to-air missiles. This concept still applies in the multi-domain air superiority battle of 2030.
Second, our 2030 air superiority force requires a robust logistical backbone capable of delivering key commodities — fuel, spare parts, weapons — even while under attack. Even while operating from range, hundreds of weapons could still harass friendly forces from the air or cyberspace domains. Mobility and logistics capabilities must be able to deliver and support the force in a world in which deploying into theater is a movement to contact and bases are no longer conceived of as sanctuaries, but instead as fighting positions. Concepts and capabilities critical to air superiority in 2030 include passive and active base defensives, logistical networks capable of supporting dispersed forces, and the ability to rapidly reconstitute, recover, and regenerate combat power after a successful adversary attack. The KC-46 tanker will be a critical backbone of that force, along with follow-on advanced air refueling capabilities and new tactics, techniques, and procedures appropriate for deploying and employing a long range force.
Third, to defeat the A2/AD strategy, the 2030 force must include both stand-off and stand-in capabilities. Stand-in capabilities include platforms such as the B-21, a penetrating counterair (PCA) platform, and space and cyberspace capabilities able to operate in or over adversary systems. Long-range strike assets such as the B-21 will provide the ability to neutralize airfields and logistics targets, while the PCA will maintain air superiority for other forces operating within the adversary IADS. Space systems overhead will provide ISR, navigation, and communications support to penetrating capabilities, enabled by a space mission force ready and able to fight through any adversary actions. Outside the IADS, stand-off forces will increase the tempo of friendly operations by providing the necessary volume of weapons and effects to keep the pressure on the adversary system. While able to affect targets at the outskirts of an IADS by themselves, stand-off forces will receive guidance and cueing from stand-in forces on deeper targets. This significantly increases the effectiveness of the stand-off force, improving its accuracy and making it a more viable option for employment. This effectively increases the amount of ordnance and the effects a commander can bring to bear. F-22s and F-35s will remain critical to the fight, providing air superiority for stand-off forces and over friendly bases.
Fully linking the capacity of the stand-off force with the superior capability of the stand-in force requires new concepts for multi-domain command and control (C2) and new multi-domain tactics. Thus, the fourth requirement of our 2030 air superiority force is that it be a truly networked and integrated family of capabilities. This force must be able to take data from the array of available sources and sensors and rapidly turn it into decision-quality information. Such a decision might be at the operational level, allowing a commander to apportion forces for desired effects, or it might be at the tactical level, providing operators with multi-domain situational awareness and targeting solutions.
To achieve this level of integration and networking, the 2030 air superiority force will need to leverage several of the technologies championed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work as part of the third offset. Work posits that the third offset will be enabled by technology and will likely include some combination of autonomous systems along with human-machine teaming and collaboration, all brought together into a battle network. In this battle network, he describes three layers, or grids: sensors, command and control, and effects. As our team looked that the multi-domain integration and networking requirements for air superiority in 2030, we independently came to many of the same conclusions that Work articulated. Foremost, our team developed a concept we referred to as data-to-decision (D2D). This emerged as we realized that in 2030 we would have a robust family of sensors across a number of traditional and non-traditional platforms. We saw a need to build an architecture that would make the most of this data and create decision-quality knowledge.
In D2D, our sensor grid is made up of a variety of assets. These include purpose-built airborne ISR assets, planes built solely for the purpose of gathering intelligence such as the U-2, RC-135, or RQ-4. It also includes other platforms that, while not built strictly for ISR, nonetheless have advanced sensors able to collect valuable data, such as the F-22, F-35, B-21, PCA, and others. It also includes cyberspace-based ISR systems that gather data from the virtual world, as well numerous Air Force satellite constellations. D2D takes the data from all of these sensors and deposits it into a cloud-based architecture, making the data accessible not only to the platform and sensor that collected it, but also to every other system in the family.
To make this happen, the family of capabilities will need an advanced communications architecture to tie this sensor grid together. Historically, the focus of such discussions has been on waveforms and datalinks. In the era of software definable radios, we will need instead to build self-healing networks that lean heavily on autonomous learning. Such an application of autonomy will allow the network to reconfigure on its own in real time in response to adversary jamming. Similar to how a smart phone can seamlessly transition from wi-fi to 4G or from 4G to 3G and all the way down to an analog operations, an autonomous, learning, self-healing network will ensure maximum performance of the sensor grid across a host of different operational environments. This does not mean it will always work at maximum capacity, just as a smart phone on 3G lacks the speed and performance it has when on wi-fi. But it does mean that the network will be able to adapt and reconfigure to its environment quickly, uninhibited by the slower pace of human assessment and action.
As we move to the command and control grid, the air superiority family of capabilities will rely on a series of applications that take the data from the sensor grid and turn it into meaningful information and knowledge. This portion of the D2D concept is similar to Work’s ideas on human-machine collaboration, in particular how machines can assist human decision-making. Machines will more rapidly turn the sensor data into information and knowledge to allow humans to make more and better decisions. This decision might be at a command and control center to reassign forces to new missions. For example, in a multi-domain combined arms fight, if an air commander loses a bomber mission due to weather or maintenance, she might reallocate that bomber’s targets to a cyberspace team. Conversely, if her cyberspace team runs into unexpected resistance due to a new software patch on an adversary system, she might reassign their target to an aircraft. Importantly, not all decisions supported by this grid will be at the operational or battle management levels. Applications resident on a B-21, PCA, or B-52 with stand-off weapons could also access and fuse sensor grid data to provide precise targeting information for kinetic or non-kinetic employment.
The concepts underlying D2D are foundational to the success of our air superiority 2030 family of capabilities. D2D is the connective tissue that ties our stand-off and stand-in forces together. This linkage is what allows for the precise application of kinetic or non-kinetic fires against the adversary system in mass. This, in turn, begins a virtuous cycle for friendly forces. Initially operating from range, as the anti-access threat is attrited, we can move our forces closer to the adversary, whether in physical or virtual space. This decrease in range translates into an increase in operational tempo, thereby facilitating the further dismantling of anti-access capabilities under the umbrella of area denial threats. This again allows forces to move closer to the adversary, allowing shorter-range and less-survivable capabilities to engage more effectively. Eventually, as tempo increases, the mass of effects brought to bear culminates the enemy force and defeats its A2/AD strategy. The adversary system is rendered ineffective, allowing the full range of joint operations.
Developing an air superiority force for 2030 capable of executing the concepts described above will require significant innovations in how the Air Force has traditionally developed and fielded systems. Not only must we link capabilities across functions (e.g., operations and logistics), but also across the domains of air, space, and cyber. The speed at which we adapt and field such capabilities must increase, as well. And we must develop airmen-leaders who are not only experts at the employment in their particular platform, domain, or function, but who can move fluidly and fluently across some of the traditional boundaries that define Air Force experiences and careers. These challenges and the solutions our team identified to overcome them will be covered in the final installment of this series.
