F-22 Raptor
WASHINGTON: A key Air Force focus for the 2023-2027 budget will be “agile combat employment,” and the problem of contested logistics in globalized warfare, says Lt. Gen. David Nahom, service deputy chief of staff for plans and programs.
“As we look forward in our investment, you’re gonna hear us spend a lot of time on we’re calling ‘agile combat employment,’ or ACE: the ability to operate away from establish runways, operate in a manner that makes difficult problems for our adversaries.”
But it’s unclear what ACE will mean as far as equipment and future spending, because the Air Force has yet to fully flesh out the new operational concept for fighting globalized war with Russia and/or China — with Beijing in particular moving to beef up its missile inventories and other capabilities for power projection.
“We’re just now getting after the concepts of what ‘agile combat employment’ means, and the types of things we’re going to need to ensure that we can operate away from established areas,” Nahom told the annual McAleese conference yesterday. “I think we’re gonna have to have a lot of conversations going into the ’23 cycle.”
Air Force leaders have described ACE as predicated on a ‘hub and spoke’ network of permanent, well-established ‘hubs’ and more remote, austere ‘spokes.’ But that framework idea is based on a number of different, but inter-related, subcomponents.
“Critical infrastructure defense — based defense in other words. How do we defend what we have out there?” Nahom elaborated. “And, certainly, you’ll hear a lot about logistics under attack. Moving logistics will be very difficult in the future, and we’re going to have to make sure that we have the ability to move not just to establish runways, but to small runways and places that may not even have runways.”
The concept is an evolution of what former Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein called “agile basing” in his Joint All Domain Operations doctrine paper — and something he made one of his top priorities for future investment.
It has also become one of the four critical supporting concepts, under the term “contested logistics,” for the impending Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC) designed to lay out how the services will work together to enable all-domain operations. And as such, the question of who is responsible for protecting vulnerable bases against everything from adversary missile strikes to small drone attacks to infiltration by enemy soldiers has emerged as a roles and missions squabble between the Air Force and the Army.
ACE will require high-speed, highly protected communications networks — meaning it’s success will be highly dependent on the service’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) and DoD’s overarching Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy.
Nahom said that the Air Force is “starting off small” to both invest and experiment in how to make ACE work. The issues require further “conversations,” he explained, both internally and externally with industry partners to make sure that “we’re getting what we need at the speed we need.”
With regards to exercises and experiments, he mentioned the Rapid Forge exercise in Europe in 2019; but there have been more recent exercises as well. These include the September 2020 Valiant Shield joint forces exercise in the Pacific; the multinational Cope North exercise in January that focused on the use of austere airfields; and an Air Force-only exercise April 27-30 at Mt. Hill AFB in Idaho testing the ability of airmen to fly into a remote location, download gear from C-17 and then rapidly upload it to enable F-35 Lighting II fighters to scramble.
Investment, Nahom said is “relatively small” so far, but is “going to grow, because frankly, it has to.”
While he did no specify where dollars are being spent, one high profile effort has been the Agility Prime program to develop “flying cars” that can take off and land vertically — a brainchild of former Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown told the McAleese conference on Wednesday that the service is looking at “what it’s going to take” to be able to implement ACE, including “what are the other future capabilities” needed.
He mentioned Agility Prime as one example, noting that it could provide “vertical lift that can be automated and doesn’t require a C-130.” Discussions also are underway about the future role of the C-17, he said — which despite its large size can land on austere runways, but is getting long in the tooth.
Another issue to be resolved is “how we pre-position capability,” Brown noted. “If we have a conflict with long lines of communication, we may not have enough time to build up the force like we’ve done in the past. And so my having capability prepositioned in certain areas will be important to us as well,” he said. “These are all conversations that are ongoing.”
While Brown didn’t directly link the two, the ACE ‘conversation’ also is directly linked to what combat aircraft will comprise the future fleet — i.e., the airframe range, types of weapons (and their ranges/numbers per plane), stealth, self-defense capabilities, electronic warfare suites, etc.
And this in turn relates directly to the future of the F-22 Raptor, which Brown on Wednesday conspicuously left off his list of four combat aircraft envisioned for the fleet beyond 2030.
As colleague Valeria Insinna first reported, the service now sees the stealthy air-to-air fighter as inadequate for operations in the Indo-Pacific theater, primarily because of its short range (1,850 nautical miles), and its relatively small weapons carrying capacity. However, the Air Force has stressed that retirement of F-22 will depend on when a sixth-generation fighter, being developed under the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, is ready to take over.
As for NGAD, Teal Group’s Richard Aboulafia cautioned that: “Expectations for systems maturation are typically overstated, often greatly so. If it isn’t ready, it doesn’t seem likely that the Air Force would be willing to lose that air-to-air capability … It would represent an unacceptable gap.”
