In Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, space and cyberspace, the United States faces a bewildering array of military threats that are likely to grow worse in coming decades. For the U.S. military services, deciding which new systems and capabilities are worth investing in to meet future challenges is never easy. But given the additional constraints of the nation’s ballooning debt and the looming specter of sequestration, these choices are especially daunting today.
Of all the military services, the U.S. Air Force needs the most clarity and national consensus on the direction its modernization efforts should take in coming years. Our sense is that the highly successful but largely supporting role that air power has played in Afghanistan and Iraq has eroded clarity and consensus among civilian and even some military leaders about the core missions of the Air Force, and where the limited modernization funds are likely to be available in coming years should be focused.
The Air Force’s combat aircrafts are aging rapidly, due in part to the wear and tear of continuous combat since 1991. With a couple of exceptions, the service’s 160 bombers and the bulk of its roughly 2,000 tactical fighters were funded prior to 1994. Of these, only the 20 B-2s have both the range and stealth to reach targets from bases outside the range of China’s growing force of longer-range missiles, while evading advanced fighters and surface-to-air missiles.
The U.S. Air Force today is heavily weighted toward fighting from increasingly vulnerable forward bases with short-range aircraft. This posture was workable in Europe during the Cold War but faces severe limitations in the vaster expanses of the Asia-Pacific region against the growing capacity of the People’s Liberation Army to dominate Taiwan and the western Pacific with conventional missiles, advanced fighters and SAMs, cyber malware, anti-satellite weapons and other systems intended to exploit the vulnerabilities in the American military’s precision-centric way of war. Not only U.S. forward bases but even carrier strike groups in the western Pacific will be at risk in the event of a crisis or conflict with China, and Iran may eventually pose similar problems in the Persian Gulf.
In the long term, the foremost U.S. aim should be to deter China and Iran from acts of aggression or coercion. President Barack Obama’s strategic “pivot” to Asia-Pacific and Mideast illuminates the fundamental modernization imperatives now confronting the Air Force. The most basic Air Force missions — its raison d’être — are: to hold the adversary’s most valued assets at risk anywhere, anytime; to control the air; and to support friendly ground and naval forces.
Air control was never a serious challenge in either Afghanistan or Iraq after 2003. American fighters and bombers, operating from forward bases or aircraft carriers in undefended airspace, largely functioned as “bomb trucks” for coalition ground forces. Given the absence of robust enemy air defenses the U.S. military has experienced since 2003, it is easy to forget how difficult it was for the Allies to achieve air superiority over occupied France prior to the Normandy landings, or to sustain strike operations against North Vietnam in the face of Hanoi’s MiG fighters and SA-2 SAMs. The fact that American soldiers and Marines have not been subjected to attack by enemy aircraft since the Korean War rests on the U.S. ability to control the air with highly trained air crews and advanced fighters, and the country may yet regret the decision to halt production of the advanced F-22 at a paltry 187 planes. Nevertheless, the Air Force’s 1,365 F-16C/Ds and A-10s desperately need to be replaced, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the best option.
What about the Air Force’s long-standing mission to be able to hold any target at risk anywhere, anytime? Because of the B-2’s high average unit cost (over $2 billion each because only 21 were built), some argue that this mission has become prohibitively expensive and may also be too difficult to retain given “doubts” about the future of stealth. After much study, the Air Force has decided to remain in the long-range strike business by designing and procuring 80-100 stealthy penetrating bombers to replace its B-52s and B-1s. These new platforms will be integral elements of a long-range, reconnaissance-strike capability aimed at containing unit costs and extending the effectiveness of stealth. Their development should not be sacrificed to declining defense budgets. Among other things, these new bombers will give credibility to the U.S. policy of reducing dependence on nuclear weapons.
In an era of fiscal austerity, the investment decisions the U.S. military services make in the coming years must give others pause as they consider military competition or conflict with the United States. For the Air Force, this means preserving a highly credible capability to strike any targets anywhere on the globe while recapitalizing its aging inventory of combat aircraft.
This op-ed was published in the September 26, 2012 issue of Politico.