Preparing for the unknown is central to USAF's concept of air power
Graham Warwick/WASHINGTON DC
Air power has been a reality since the early days of aviation, but only recently has it come to be regarded as the preferred means of waging war.
Air power is mobile, lethal and, with the advent of precision weapons, has proved its ability to achieve political objectives with minimum casualties. But the success of recent air campaigns over Iraq and the Balkans poses a problem for air force commanders: how to maintain the overwhelming dominance of air power shaped for superpower conflict while adapting it to the reality of lesser contingencies and continuing commitments that scatter forces across the globe.
The US Air Force's answer is the expeditionary aerospace force (EAF), a restructuring to enable it to maintain its global commitments indefinitely while retaining the ability to respond rapidly to regional contingencies.
At the heart of the concept is the recognition that wars will not always be fought in traditional places. "And we have to be able to do it, not just at the high end, but at the medium and low end of the conflict spectrum," says USAF chief of staff Gen Michael Ryan (left).
"So, it's a challenge in both depth and breadth," he says. "What you have to have is a tailorable force that's able to pick up and go very rapidly and understands how it fits together even before it goes - a force that's prepared for the unknown."
Hitting the ground running
The USAF is being restructured into 10 aerospace expeditionary forces (AEFs), two of which will be active at any one time. "Since the Gulf War, our [operational] tempo has been at a sustained rate that we can cover with one-fifth of the air force at any one time. So, we can get into a cycle that allows us to maintain our day-to-day responsibilities-and prepare the forces-so they hit the ground running.
"We've been doing this since the Gulf War. We just haven't labelled it or organised ourselves to do it because there was always the thought that-we were going to go back to the old monolithic stance. That just isn't going to happen, and I don't see it happening for the next 10-15 years."
Two active AEFs are enough to meet continuing commitments and provide a small crisis response force, but not to fight a major war. But Iraq and the Balkans took the USAF beyond that level. "Desert Fox spiked us through our concept of two AEFs on line at any one time, and [Kosovo] spiked us big time - we were into a major theatre war. We had, by percentage of force, more tankers, bombers, fighters and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] assets involved in this operation than we had in Desert Storm. And, by percentage of force, this was a bigger deal than Vietnam-because we are 40% smaller than we were."
The AEFs are packaged to provide the theatre commanders-in-chief (CINCs) with a suite of capabilities. What Kosovo demonstrated, and what will shape future development of the EAF concept, is the CINCs' appetite for the best capabilities. "What the CINCs are asking for in these kinds of operations are often the precision capabilities that you have - precision in your ability to do the intelligence [preparation] of the battlespace, and precision in the form of the assets with which you supply them that produce the effects, either lethal or non-lethal," Ryan says.
The concept is re-arranging USAF priorities. "Our short-term transition is to balance up the AEFs and to leverage our Guard and Reserve forces to participate to the maximum extent that they can," Ryan says.
The USAF plans to buy additional Lockheed Martin F-16s to make up for a shortfall in capability to suppress enemy air defences. "We are looking at giving more precision capability to our Guard and Reserve," he adds, citing targeting pods and updates to allow older aircraft to carry precision munitions.
Integrating airspace
Space is coming to the fore under the EAF concept, with satellite communications links to the USA being used in favour of forward-deploying support equipment. "Reach-back is very much a piece of this aerospace force," Ryan says. In Bosnia, he says, Lockheed U-2 intelligence data was relayed back to the USA for analysis, then forwarded to the air commander.
"That's what we talk about in the use of space - integrating our satellite capabilities," Ryan says. "It's one of the reasons we are looking at a moving target indicator radar in space - Discover II - where it would have a periodic look at things that may then cue an atmospheric asset that can long dwell over it, that can then cue another asset to go in and find specifically what it is, then we can go in and kill it. Those kinds of integration across the medium of aerospace is seminal to what we think we are - very much an integrated aerospace operation.
"And we have to protect that stuff up in space too, because we are dependent on it for communications, navigation, weather, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," Ryan says. "What happens if commerce becomes very, very dependent on a web of communication capability in space and someone begins to disrupt it? I guarantee there will be a clamour for somebody to go do something about it."
Source: Flight International
