A recent argument in the defense press contends that the US Air Force is buying the wrong kind of airpower. Instead of prioritizing advanced fighters and high-end capabilities, the claim goes, the service should emphasize large numbers of drones and munitions that can deliver persistence in modern war. Mass and layered defenses, we are told, can deny adversaries freedom of action long enough to shape outcomes.
That prescription rests on a subtle but consequential reframing of the problem, shifting the objective of airpower from controlling the air and gaining strategic advantages by doing so to merely denying enemy access to it.
Air denial has its place. It can serve as an effective defensive approach for nations whose primary objective is survival or cost imposition. It is often adopted by states that lack the capability or capacity to achieve air superiority and must instead make the air domain too dangerous for an adversary to dominate. Ukraine, for instance, serves as a prime example of how air denial is vital to survival against an enemy with a superior air capability.
But the United States is not a regional power seeking only to blunt an attack. It is a global power whose strategy depends on projecting force, achieving desired strategic and operational effects, and sustaining operations across distance.
For that mission, denial is not enough. Air denial constrains both sides. Air control enables one. In a near-peer conflict, the distinction between the two conditions is between friction and initiative.
Control Enables Maneuver, And It Is Local And Temporal By Design
US Air Force doctrine does not define air superiority as permanent dominance everywhere. It defines it as the degree of dominance in the air battle that permits operations at a given time and place, without prohibitive interference from enemy air and missile threats.
Those qualifiers matter. Air superiority is inherently local and temporal, achieved where and when needed to enable joint effects. It does not require eliminating every enemy aircraft or missile; rather, it focuses on generating sufficient control in specific areas for specific durations to fulfill a specific mission.
Confusing superiority with supremacy is a category error. Supremacy implies near-total dominance, while superiority, as defined in doctrine, is operationally bounded. Against a near peer, supremacy may be unrealistic; local and temporal superiority, correctly understood, is not. The danger lies in conflating the two and declaring superiority unattainable because supremacy may be.
In practice, that means air superiority is episodic. It is generated, exploited, contested, and regenerated throughout a campaign. Those windows of control must be synchronized through integrated counterair operations and resilient air battle management capable of sensing and directing combat power in degraded environments.
Air superiority does more than enable the Navy to sail or the Army to maneuver. It also enables the Air Force itself to attack, impose strategic effects, and achieve war-winning objectives. Control of the air is not simply a supporting function. It is a prerequisite for the decisive application of airpower.
The context of what is and isn’t air superiority is important when the argument turns to unmanned systems and air defenses.
To be clear, small unmanned systems do matter, and have dramatically changed the character of land warfare. The Russia-Ukraine war has significantly altered conventional infantry and armor tactics. Attritable drones and collaborative combat aircraft can extend sensing, distribute risk, and increase magazine depth. But quantity alone does not produce air superiority.
Substituting air denial for air superiority in force design risks institutionalizing stalemate across all domains. In theaters such as the Indo-Pacific, joint campaign concepts assume the ability to generate episodic air superiority to protect naval forces, support ground maneuver, and sustain operations across distance.
Without that capability, deterrence weakens. Escalation becomes harder to manage. Operational risk increases across any joint operation. Air denial has a role, and is a necessary layer in homeland defense and point defense of critical assets. However, it should never become the objective of theater-wide airpower application.
Ukraine And Iran
Don’t take my word for this argument. The two most recent wars involving great powers, Ukraine and Iran, make my case.
Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula has argued that the Russia-Ukraine conflict demonstrates the operational cost of failing to achieve air superiority early in a campaign. Neither Russia nor Ukraine secured sufficient control of the air at the outset; both retained the ability to contest it, but the result has been a stalemate, not an advantage for either side. Both forces operate under constant threat from aircraft, surface-to-air systems, and unmanned systems. Maneuver is constrained. Gains are incremental and costly. The battlefield reflects persistent contestation rather than episodic air superiority.
The lesson is not that air superiority is unattainable against a capable adversary. The lesson is that when it is not achieved, the campaign devolves into attrition. A key aspect of airpower exists to prevent that condition, not normalize it.
A similar dynamic is visible in the ongoing conflict with Iran. Recent US and Israeli operations in the region have underscored how quickly the character of a campaign shifts once air superiority is established. When Iranian air defenses are suppressed and hostile aircraft are deterred from operating, coalition forces gain the freedom to strike military infrastructure, disrupt command networks, and impose strategic effects across the theater.
The difference is not simply tactical advantage, but operational freedom. Air superiority creates the conditions for decisive action. Without it, campaigns slow, maneuver becomes constrained and military operations revert to costly attrition.
Iran’s approach illustrates the limits of this logic. Tehran has spent years investing heavily in large inventories of inexpensive drones and loitering munitions precisely because it lacks a modern fighter force capable of contesting the air domain. Iran’s experience shows that mass isn’t enough to control the skies. Its drones can harass infrastructure, impose costs, and complicate defenses, but they have not enabled Iran to control the air over any battlefield.
Drone mass can support a denial strategy. It cannot generate air superiority. Achieving control of the air in a near-peer fight requires defeating advanced fighters, suppressing and dismantling integrated air defense systems, and coordinating forces in contested environments.
Recommit To Air Superiority
The Air Force, combatant commands and professional military education schools should reject the calls to redefine airpower in terms of denial strategies. Instead, they should reaffirm air superiority as a foundational objective and invest in a force design built around next-generation fighters, teamed with collaborative combat aircraft and enabled by resilient air battle management that can generate repeated windows of air control in contested environments.
In a potential conflict with China, the objective will not be permanent supremacy across the entire theater. It will be the ability to generate air superiority at decisive times and places to protect naval forces, enable power projection, and sustain operations across the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific.
Recent conflicts reinforce the lesson. In Ukraine, the absence of air superiority has produced a stalemate. Iran’s reliance on large inventories of drones and missiles has imposed costs on its adversaries, but it has not produced control of the air. When US and Israeli forces suppressed Iranian air defenses and neutralized hostile aircraft in the opening hours of the current conflict, their aircraft were able to strike targets across Iran with relative freedom. The contrast is instructive: drone mass can complicate an adversary’s operations, but it cannot prevent an opponent that achieves air superiority from imposing devastating effects.
Air denial is how lesser powers preserve limited airpower when they cannot achieve air control. Air superiority is how great powers impose their will in the air domain. The United States has the capacity to achieve air control. It should reinforce and expand that capability.
If the Air Force narrows its ambition from achieving air control and imposing strategic effects to merely contributing to denial, it risks duplicating defensive functions while neglecting its core responsibility to shape and win wars at scale. That is not modernization. It is abdication.
Lt. Col. Grant “SWAT” Georgulis, USAF, is a Master Air Battle Manager and currently assigned as the Deputy Chief of C2 Inspections as part of the Headquarters NORAD and US NORTHCOM Inspector General team. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Air Force.