A think tank warns that the lack of hardened aircraft shelters at US bases in the Asia-Pacific and beyond could be a disadvantage in a conflict against China.
Whereas Beijing has more than doubled its total number of hardened shelters and unhardened shelters over the last decade, allowing it to “house and hide” most of its combat aircraft, the USA has done very little to increase its number of shelters, contends the Hudson Institute in a report entitled “Concrete Sky”.
The report’s authors, Thomas Shugart and Timothy Walton, contend that Beijing has built shelters on the understanding that in a conflict its aircraft will come under attack on the ground.
The USA, however, has been somewhat blase about hardening bases in locations such as Guam, Japan and the Philippines. This is despite China’s massive investment in missiles and strike aircraft. In the early days of any conflict, it is a given that China will unleash massed firepower against US air bases, seeking to neutralise American airpower on the ground.
It was not always this way. During the Cold War and Vietnam conflict the USA saw the need to protect aircraft, but drew the wrong lessons from the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Allowed to mass forces unmolested before striking, US airpower was successful in neutralising Iraq’s air force despite Baghdad’s heavy use of shelters.
The Hudson Institute offers another take: “An alternative interpretation of the air campaign in Iraq could point out how despite near-total air superiority, the employment of over 2,780 fixed-wing aircraft, no successful Iraqi strikes against allied airfields, and five weeks of allied strikes against Iraqi targets, the US and its allies destroyed only 63 percent of Iraq’s [hardened air shelters].”
A foe with superior air defences that could contest US Air Force operations – read China – would be much better able to sustain operations.
The report observes that in the 1967 Arab Israeli War, Israel’s air force was effective at destroying Egypt’s air force on the ground at lightly protected bases.
The following years saw Egypt and Syria invest heavily in hardened aircraft shelters, as they also deployed surface-to-air missiles and better anti-aircraft artillery. This helped reduce the effectiveness of Israeli airpower: during the during the Yom Kippur war of 1967, Israel’s air force destroyed just 22 Arab aircraft on the ground.
“The Israelis resorted to runway attacks,” reads the report. “However, the Israeli air force observed that, in some cases, their opponents were able to effect repairs and generate combat sorties less than an hour after a runway strike.”
The report also observes that the USA is somewhat an outlier in its position on hardening air bases: in addition to China, Israel, Russia, and Ukraine have all invested heavily in hardening air bases.
The report offers several recommendations. These include bolstering the US military’s ability to strike Chinese airpower on the ground. This will force Beijing to invest even further in defensive measures – and perhaps devote less resources for power projection capabilities.
It also suggests significantly hardening US air bases in the USA, Indo-Pacific, and other regions, and accelerating the deployment of long-range aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman B-21 that are less susceptible to being struck on the ground.
“US airfields face a severe threat of attack,” says the report. “The current [Department of Defense] approach of largely ignoring this menace invites PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression and risks losing a war. Executing an urgent and effective campaign to enhance the resilience of US airfield operations will require informed decisions and sustained funding.”
