The Air Force does not have enough stealth aircraft to wage an effective air campaign against China or North Korea, according to a recent study by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington/.../
Working with the rest of the U.S. military, the Air Force currently has the ability to prevail in a conflict in any of the potential hotspots across the globe, said Mark Gunzinger, who served as a senior advisor to the Air Force for the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review.
Gunzinger, who is also a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for forces transformation and resources, now works at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank in Washington.
Looking to the future, the Air Force and the other services risk losing their advantage because they have too few long-range aircraft and other weapons, such as bombers, carrier-based aircraft and cruise missiles, Gunzinger said.
“We’re on the path toward building too much short-range capability vice the longer range, longer endurance capabilities that we might need in the future — especially when you consider the geographic challenges of the Pacific and the fact that we may not have bases in the Persian Gulf region as available as they’ve been in the past,” he said.
Long-range strike would be a key capability in a future conflict with Iran, which is developing cruise and ballistic missiles to attack any U.S. air bases in neighboring countries, preventing U.S. aircraft from being forward deployed, Gunzinger said. That would pose a tough problem for the Air Force.
While the F-22 and F-35 can penetrate air defense systems, they are not a long-range aircraft, meaning they would need to be refueled — and that would be impossible over enemy airspace because the tankers would be shot out of the sky, Gunzinger said.
Meanwhile, the B-52 and B-1 bombers cannot penetrate advanced air defense systems, so that would mean the Air Force’s 20 B-2 bombers would be the only aircraft capable of striking Iran in such a future conflict, he said.