FEATURE ARTICLE

December 2005

Service Pondering Future Roles

By Stew Magnuson

Articulating the role of air power has been a high priority for Air Force leaders during the past several years. But exactly what assignments the Air Force will be required to carry out and what systems will be needed to execute the missions of the future is a matter of debate, experts said.

Frederick Kagan, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar, said the “shock and awe,” as portrayed in spectacular video footage from the Iraq and Serbia bombing campaigns will not be enough to win future conflicts. Shock wears off, he said at an AEI forum. “What do we do once we’ve shocked the enemy?”

David Ochmanek, senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, warned of an erosion of the aerial dominance the United States has enjoyed over its enemies for decades. The Air Force remains adept at destroying targets, but enemies are becoming savvier about concealing them.

“Finding, not shooting, becomes the determinant of success,” Ochmanek said. “It’s getting harder and harder to find things on the battlefield.” Iran and North Korea, for example, have learned to move potential targets underground, he added.

Ochmanek and Kagan both warned that future conflicts may not be the cakewalks the Air Force enjoyed in the past. Recent adversaries have relied on 1960s-era, Soviet-designed air defense systems. Ochmanek described them as “slow softballs down the middle of the plate” for the Air Force, adding that the Chinese, for example, have been working hard to upgrade and modernize their air defense capabilities.

Furthermore, potential opponents have been upgrading their ballistic missile systems. It’s a 1940s-era technology that continues to proliferate, Ochmanek warned. “The Air Force has got to be in the business of theater missile defense,” he added.

China, North Korea and Iran scenarios are speculative, large-scale conflicts. As for the present-day war on terrorism, Air Force officials are keen to point out that the service has an important role to play in lower-intensity conflicts such as the ongoing Iraq insurgency.

“Air power is a viable, critical, very necessary contributor to the counter-terrorism fight, today and certainly into the future,” said Maj. Gen. Norman Seip, assistant deputy chief of staff for air and space operations. Air Force Chief of Staff Michael T. Moseley said the global war on terrorism will last as long as a generation. The Air Force’s capability of striking targets, projecting and delivering forces, and gathering and disseminating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance will be a vital part of the fight, he said.

Ochmanek said the Air Force will face growing demands to operate in areas where they are not comfortable. “We have to care about any place where people are developing strategies to kill Americans.”

The contributions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and their operators are among the most significant made by the Air Force, said Seip. It’s not uncommon for the Predator UAV to catch insurgents planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They also can tag an IED location so demolition teams can disarm it later, Seip said. UAVs also have patrolled Iraqi oil pipelines and watched backdoors in support of ground forces during night raids, he said. They can light up insurgents in infrared and follow them so “we can scarf up the folks who think they’ve got a free pass out of the fight that they started.”

Manned aircraft such as the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, (JSTARS), initially designed to track large tanks and combat vehicles, have logged more than 10,000 hours in Southwest Asia since July 2003, Seip added. In one case, a JSTARS recorded a large explosion at an oil pipeline. The crew was able to go through tapes and track a vehicle leaving the explosion. Ground forces later swarmed over a building where the vehicle was parked and caught the bomb makers “with dirt on their hands, so to speak,” Seip said.

Moseley said JSTARS tracked Iraqi Republican Guard units in a sandstorm. “We could see them, and they could not even see themselves. That’s a tremendous asymmetric advantage,” he said.

There are currently not enough Predators or personnel trained to fly them, Seip said. In development is the Multi-Aircraft Control System, which will allow one operator to guide multiple UAVs at once. It could, for example, keep three UAVs flying on standby to be called in when needed. “I look at that somewhat as a quantum leap in UAV technology that will help us satisfy that appetite that all of us out there have for full-motion video,” Seip said.

A remote operations video enhanced receiver will allow UAV operators to circle a target of interest on a ruggedized laptop screen with a light pen, instantly sending a command to the Predator to fly to the highlighted area to either eavesdrop or deliver a Hellfire missile. These innovations will save valuable time, and for troops in combat, time is critical, Seip said.

Moseley said the Global Hawk high-altitude, long-endurance UAV will continue to be relevant. “It will be worth its weight in gold.” Humans have limits on how long they can stay in the air, but UAVs can fly up to 24 hours, he noted.

Experts said it is far from clear whether these emerging technologies and anecdotal examples of the Air Force’s contribution to counter-insurgency operations will be enough to put the spotlight back on the Air Force. Even during the 1990s, when conventional wisdom held that U.S. air power would dominate all future conflicts, it did not necessarily translate to larger budgets, Kagan said.

With tight budgets projected, Moseley said trade-offs in the Air Force’s three portfolios, strike, mobility and intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, will be inevitable. “We’re not opposed to making hard decisions. If we have programs that have had exponential [cost] growth and we need to roll that money back, it’s time to be killing some things.”

Aging aircraft cannot be replaced on a one-to-one basis, Moseley said. “The trade in each part of the portfolio will be the art form in this as we look at the right number of C-17s, the right number of C-5s, the right number of C-130s.” The Air Force will have to find ways to streamline logistics, and reduce costs and manpower, he said.

Funding can be saved by consolidating programs among the joint services. “We are completely, totally inter-dependent. And those who believe that is not quite right either haven’t fought lately, or they are hoping something will be different,” Moseley said.

“It doesn’t bother me at all to spray paint ‘U.S. Navy’ on one side [of a UAV] and ‘U.S. Air Force’ down the other side,” he added. Sensor platforms don’t care if they’re searching for targets on the land or sea, he said.

Christopher Bowie, director of strategic studies for the Integrated Systems Sector of Northrop Grumman, said speculating on whether the Air Force should put its resources into preparing for higher or lower intensity conflicts is tough business. “Predicting what you’re going to need is very difficult and our predictions are almost always wrong,” he said. If one capability is cut back in order to boost another, it’s difficult to turn the clock back and restore what has been lost, he warned.

If the war is going to continue and the budgets are going to get tight, Moseley said, it makes sense to increase joint programs with land, maritime and special operations forces.

Possibilities include a joint program with the Army on a new light transport plane — one designed to carry one or two pallets and a small number of troops, — which can take off or land with only 2,500 to 3,000 feet of runway. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita relief efforts, pointed to the need for a more flexible lift capability, he said.

The future doesn’t only lie in hi-tech hardware. Intelligence gathering systems will require more knowledgeable personnel, Moseley said. The Air Force needs to boost its human intelligence resources to keep pace with the hi-tech hardware and software it’s employing. “I don’t believe we have enough intel players … We can do better in regional skills, operations and languages.” The Air Force needs to train intelligence officers who are more flexible and adaptable, Moseley said.

Base security also goes hand-in-hand with human intelligence, Moseley added. With about 50 expeditionary bases alone in the Middle East, Central and Southwest Asia, base security personnel need to partner with intelligence officers to detect such threats as sniper, mortar and sapper attacks.

“The security force business takes on a whole new light. This is not checking IDs at a gate,” Moseley said. Security personnel need to “begin to think outside the fence.”

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