| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| Turbulent skies: An AEI study on the US Air Force’s contribution to international competition | |
| T. Michael Moseley; Phillip Lohaus; Gary J. Schmitt; Giselle Donnelly | |
| 发表日期 | 2019-03-14 |
| 出版年 | 2019 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Key Points Current development and funding plans fail to prepare the United States Air Force to contribute to adversarial challenges short of combat. In 2024, the overall numbers of tankers and cargo airframes available, or even in commission, will continue to constrain US Air Force global operations. Efforts to address vulnerabilities in outer space and cyberspace are being outpaced by adversarial technical advances. The US Air Force’s current forward posture is insufficient to respond to simultaneous challenges in any one theater of competition, let alone in a combination of theaters. These risks may be mitigated by attainable, strategically sound investments in airframes, readiness, and command and control assets. Read the full PDF. Executive Summary In the summer of 2018, the American Enterprise Institute’s defense scholars held a two-day tabletop exercise to explore the United States Air Force’s ability to respond to multiple contingencies in a timely and effective way. The National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy were used to guide decisions about force employment and the 2019 Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) to determine service capacity and capability. The final step in the exercise was to use the results of the employment scenarios to determine what investment the Air Force might make in the near term to preserve American preeminence in the skies, space, and cyberspace. More than two dozen former senior military and civilian officials participated in the exercises, which we set in 2024, which is as far into the future as current defense planning can realistically project. The exercise tested simultaneous and ongoing challenges in multiple theaters of operation from America’s strategic competitors. In establishing the scenarios, we hewed closely to the consensus analysis of the US intelligence community and filtered through our own assessments to be sure of the plausibility of the scenarios. Moreover, none of the scenarios involved open conflict; we were more interested in ascertaining the Air Force’s ability to preserve deterrence than in doing a deep dive into whether and how the Air Force might or might not prevail in combat. Following current, formal US strategy statements, we assumed China would continue to follow its provocative and expansive ways, particularly but not exclusively in maritime East Asia. We also accepted that the People’s Liberation Army would continue to modernize, expand its weaponry, gain operational expertise, and seek to exploit new technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence to become more qualitatively competitive with US forces. Likewise, we assumed Russia would continue its efforts to undermine NATO unity and European stability through political warfare, opportunistic military engagements, and leveraging its influence in the Middle East to burnish its great power bona fides and to further pressure Europe. Finally, we assumed Iran would continue its drive toward regional hegemony in an increasingly fractured Middle East. It would do so following its habit of sectarian rabble-rousing, sponsorship of proxies, and development of ballistic and other missile systems (as well as preserving a path toward rapid nuclearization). But also, Iran, seeing an opportunity in US withdrawal from the region, would include a modest program of conventional modernization. We also maintained a traditional American understanding that each region engaged vital US national security interests, even where the quality and nature of potential adversaries and the regional and global competition for power differed. Thus, we assumed that the Air Force, while preserving some overseas basing structure and a global force posture, would rely on the long-standing Air Expeditionary Force concept as its principal means of organizing for deployment. We were also alert to the metastasizing challenge of operating in such a manner with an aging fleet of legacy equipment; we wished to understand potential effects of past postponed modernization and deferred maintenance and the limits of current munitions stocks. In sum, we wished to better know what was clearly knowable and to avoid speculating about potential discontinuities, either for better or worse. We thus presented the players with three scenarios set within a single calendar year, scenarios that would likely demand an Air Force response. In each case, we presented the decision makers with choices, but in the context of managing the Air Force’s global responsibilities. It would have been difficult to focus exclusively on a single challenge or theater in any of the moves. And, as has been the nature of US military experience in the past two decades, none of the crises was immediately resolved. The final step in the exercise process was a “lessons-learned” discussion designed to discover specific capacities and capabilities that could be fielded roughly within the time frame of the FYDP and that would likely have improved outcomes and the Air Force’s ability to respond. We identified five major issues. First, current Air Force levels of equipment and personnel fall well short of the requirements of multiple contingencies short of combat. To begin with, this is the result of budget and resourcing reductions since the early 1990s. The net result is smaller inventories of aging aircraft and equipment and increasing shortages of personnel, including pilots and squadron-level units. In the context of three decades of constant combat deployments of smaller force packages, the air service finds itself unprepared for the large air campaigns for which it was designed or would be required by strategies to deter the great powers of the 21st century. Yet even if these issues are addressed, the problems of aging equipment—and insufficient sustainment stocks—are cascading. The skies and the near-Earth space that were once the exclusive purview of the Air Force are increasingly contested domains. Current and programmed resources are insufficient to preserve preeminence in these realms—which would also have dangerous consequences for joint, surface naval, and land forces. Second, Air Force tankers and cargo aircraft are the principal enablers for all global operations, not only for the Air Force itself but also for the other US services and America’s partners. In the exercise, players were frequently frustrated in their plans to deploy fighters and bombers to spots of crisis for lack of airlift and refueling aircraft. Even though Air Force inventories of such planes appear substantial, the joint and combined dependency and effects of unanticipated rates of use of these aging aircraft represent the Air Force’s operational Achilles’ heel. Third, the situation with space and cyber forces is nearly as dire. In this case, the driving factor is the steady and accelerating progress of adversaries, particularly but hardly exclusively the Chinese. Budget shortfalls and unpredictability have resulted in Air Force investments being seriously stretched among maintaining qualitative technological advantages, sustaining legacy systems, and providing sufficient infrastructure to ensure robust, redundant, and effective command and control networks for itself and its sister services. Fourth, over multiple administrations, the decisions to retreat from overseas forward postures of the past severely complicate the Air Force’s ability to deploy in a timely and sustainable fashion in moments of crisis. Our exercise found that these problems shaped every response in every theater, let alone a requirement to deploy to multiple places simultaneously. The problem was greatest in the huge Indo-Pacific theater but even shaped responses to challenges in Europe. The availability of some crucial nodes—our exercise determined Turkey was one—can complicate deployments in several theaters. Fifth, current Air Force budgets and the resulting Air Force investments and operations and maintenance programs are insufficient to address these many and varied shortfalls in operations short of war, let alone serious or sustained air campaigns. The fiscal year 2019 program barely maintains current capabilities while doing almost nothing to address the lack of modernizing capabilities or required global capacities. The failure to address both the loss of force size and the loss of decisive technology advantages not only jeopardizes air, space, and cyber preeminence but also threatens to cripple the entire US military and the ability of even our best and most capable allies to defend our common interests. These five findings shaped our discussion about what investments could most rapidly and effectively remedy the Air Force’s needs. (See Table 6.) That discussion was shaped by strategic necessity rather than budgetary convenience, but we also limited the discussion to what was technologically, programmatically, and industrially possible. The discussion also reinforced the close relationship among forward posture, enhanced readiness, structural reforms, command and control redundancies, and improved firepower. No one remedy can be a cure-all for sustaining the “air power” that is a distinctive American way of war. Introduction The National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy of 2017–18 describe a future security landscape characterized by increased global disorder, revived great power competition, continued instability caused by rogue regimes and terror groups, and a weakened liberal international order. Of course, the United States must use all the tools at its disposal, including diplomatic, informational, economic, and military ones. But the military is key to creating an environment in which the other tools are used most effectively. Absent American military preeminence, in particular the advantages conveyed by superior airpower, American statecraft will be hard-pressed to fulfill the goals of the country’s security strategy. In the summer of 2018, the American Enterprise Institute held a two-day tabletop exercise to explore the ability of the Air Force of 2024 to respond to multiple challenges short of combat. The exercise was designed to assess the Air Force’s capacity to dissuade and deter adversaries from taking more provocative action and do so in a timely and sustainable way. In short, the exercise was a stress test for determining whether the Air Force, as currently programmed and resourced, is up to meeting an essential baseline requirement of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. It also served as a vehicle to assess investment priorities that would most likely, and most rapidly, remedy identified shortfalls. At the time of the exercise, the Air Force was still grappling with how to accomplish an expanded number of missions while inventory and hardware increased and squadrons and pilots decreased. According to Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, the number of active Air Force fighter squadrons shrank from 134 in 1991 to just 55 today; this combined with a smaller pool of pilots—pilot counts were 2,000 below the target of 20,000 as of November 2017—threatened to “break the force.” As senior Air Force leaders simultaneously came to realize the importance of recalibrating the force to better address great power adversaries, the attrition of the senior pilots charged with commanding squadrons had become all the more pressing.1 By fall of 2018, senior Air Force leadership presented the “Air Force We Need” plan, which proposed to increase the number of viable squadrons across the force from 312 to 386. According to Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Air Force spends approximately $5.2 billion per year on 40,000 airmen. An increase of 24 percent of the force would thus require an additional $13 billion per year in aircraft operations, training, and recruiting.2 The Air Force faced mounting challenges even before the release of the revamped National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. Previously, many in the Air Force thought that increased pressure on personnel and equipment could be partially mitigated by increased command and control efficiencies gained through the networking of systems and people, now commonly known as the “combat cloud.”3 For all its merits, the concept relied on the viability of communications systems that were aging and increasingly vulnerable to adversarial corruption. Space-based command, control, communications, and surveillance assets were threatened by rapid advancements in adversary anti-satellite and cyberwarfare capabilities, and terrestrial assets were similarly susceptible to jamming, electronic warfare, and other countermeasures. Although existing technologies hold promise to mitigate these weaknesses, their practicality and reliability remained unclear. As national leadership began to recognize the need to adapt the force to better compete against near-peer adversaries, the gap between expectations and reality became all the more acute. For one, air supremacy could no longer be assumed: Near-peer competitors had developed means to challenge the Air Force’s long-unquestioned ability to command the skies (along with tactics, techniques, and procedures designed for permissive environments). Secondly, the tendency of Air Force leaders to borrow individual airframes and airmen from home-based squadrons—due to capacity constraints—would add friction to any contest that required deployments en masse; assembling a “pick up team” in the face of a confrontation with a capable, numerous, and increasingly sophisticated adversary would present myriad execution challenges. Third, the cost of long-delayed capacity and capability enhancements was becoming increasingly evident as the qualitative edge long enjoyed by the Air Force gave way to the reality of aging airframes and constraints on resources and readiness. Perhaps more than any other service, technical means drive the combat efficacy of the Air Force. Technological progress does not stop in times of budget austerity, and the effects of neglecting to update capabilities and operational concepts quickly compound. In addition to under-resourcing current capacities, the Budget Control Act also wreaked havoc on the Defense Department’s ability to reliably resource pending and future capabilities. Although Russia’s and China’s ability to fully modernize and reform their armed services is sometimes overstated, even modest gains on their part threaten to close a qualitative gap with the United States, which relies on a bomber fleet whose average age is over 50, trainers whose average age is over 40, and fighters whose average age is over 30. In other words, America’s adversaries have needed to make only incremental investments to erode America’s air and space supremacy. With these developments in mind, AEI sought to test the Air Force’s ability to affect strategic results short of combat and then to consider what discrete capabilities would expand the number of options available to senior decision makers. The participants soon discovered that deployments for even routine presence missions under relatively benign conditions placed a heavy burden on aircraft, personnel, and operations and maintenance budgets. From a list devised by a panel of AEI-sponsored experts, the players—many of whom brought decades of operational experience to bear—then considered which near-term options would best sustain the Air Force’s air and space superiority into the foreseeable future. When strained American forces and new adversarial approaches meet, the challenges are amplified. In Syria, for example, adversarial air defense capabilities necessitated the use of fifth-generation fighters and full complements of escorts for missions that otherwise would not have required stealth aircraft. Although the study was completed before Secretary Wilson’s announcement of what the Air Force will require to support the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, our topline conclusions largely track with those of current service leaders. Perhaps because our exercise was focused on operational responses, some of our findings are more pessimistic than those of Secretary Wilson. For example, we found significant gaps in the projected capacity of the Air Force to provide airlift and tanker support for a multi-theater crisis, and we found that the precise makeup of an increased number of squadrons is as important as their quantity. We both found that a shift in mindset will be required to successfully adapt the Air Force to succeed in an era of international great power competition; concerns over access and redundancy will become more important than they were in the past. This strongly suggests the need for increased overseas basing options, even if not on a permanent basis. Current resourcing will not support such plans nor the increased readiness and selective procurement that our study identified as necessary to continue American preeminence in the skies and in space. Quite simply, without a major shift in how the Air Force is resourced, the United States is and will continue to be ill prepared to address the challenges outlined in the National Security Strategy. Read the full report. Notes |
| 主题 | Foreign and Defense Policy |
| 标签 | Defense budget ; Military readiness ; US Air Force (USAF) ; US military |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/turbulent-skies-an-aei-study-on-the-us-air-forces-contribution-to-international-competition/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206649 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | T. Michael Moseley,Phillip Lohaus,Gary J. Schmitt,等. Turbulent skies: An AEI study on the US Air Force’s contribution to international competition. 2019. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| Turbulent-Skies.pdf（2459KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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