For more than a decade the United States and its allies have held air superiority without a peer competitor wherever they flew, but NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe (SACEUR) and the commander of U.S. European Command said current events in Eastern Ukraine show the need for a renewed focus on high-end kinetic conflict and advanced systems after years of counter-insurgency expertise.
“I think that we for years have taken for granted air superiority,” Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove said Monday at the Air Force Association Conference in Washington. “I don’t think we can take air superiority for granted in eastern (NATO) skies. We have to earn it instead of inherit it.”
Photo: U.S. Air Force
Looking at events in Eastern Ukraine, Breedlove said in the near term NATO is dealing with advanced generation aircraft and surface to air missiles (SAMS) Russia has near Ukraine. While tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) and interoperability among allies is as high as ever, it is not in the context of a high-end collective fight, or something that could be an Article 5 event.
“There is a need for exercising and planning for and thinking about how to empower and invest such that we are as interoperable in a high end kinetic fight as we have been in this insurgency” world of Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
Breedlove said it’s important to focus, for example, on how to enter anti-access area-denial (A2AD) areas that NATO saw built on the Eastern side of Ukraine, where Russia layered tactical and strategic surface-to-air missile systems (SAMS).
“We haven’t had to address it in the past,” he said.
Additionally, what was learned in Libya and other campaigns was that NATO doesn’t have enough precision strike munitions for a lengthy campaign.
Or, as he said, most commanders will all say there’s never enough Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) in this world. ISR brings unique capabilities that enable air and ground units.
“This is going to be the coin of the realm of conflict in the future and we need to stay on it,” Breedlove said.
At the recent NATO summit in Wales, all 28 nations approved the Readiness Action Plan (RAP) and embraced moving forward with cyber policy and a cyber ability to fight. RAP is to assure nations that felt most threatened and deter those nations that might threaten the alliance.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine changed the way European nations think about their security when many thought the times for rearranging national borders by force were a thing of the past, he said.
NATO is challenged to make the investments it desperately needs such as in ISR and precision munitions. To industry, Breedlove said, “We are a team, this is not about industry, or the acquisition process.” NATO and industry must manage the ability to maintain programs on budget and on schedule.
The four star made similar comments earlier Monday at the Atlantic Council, and on Tuesday at a Pentagon briefing.
SHAPE is drilling down into the RAP specifics and plans to present a paper with details at next week’s NATO Defense Ministers meeting.
Breedlove said think about the RAP as a three-legged stool. If one leg is pulled out, the stool fails.
The NATO Response Force (NRF) does “exactly what we asked it to do,” Breedlove said. However, “it is now not adequate to the task in front of us with Russia.” The NRF must “respond at speed and bring capability to the forward area if we are to address this hybrid warfare we see coming from Russia.”
The entire NRF must be brought to a quicker response time on air, land and sea and available “at the most, in five days.”
A subset of the NRF will be a Very High Readiness Force, a unit that will be able to rapidly deploy to help protect member nations.
The second leg of the stool is to create a corps-level element that will be given the collective defense mission 365 days a year, 24/7, to “ think, plan, and prepare” for Article 5 collective defense actions on a day-to-day basis, he said.
To date, NATO has made decisions about force structure, basing, and the way it approaches action in Europe as if Russia were a partner, he said. There has not been an operational or tactical headquarters looking at Article 5 collective defense.
Thus, for the third leg of the stool, Breedlove said, “We believe that there needs to be a forward element of NATO forces in these nations most threatened.” Such a force in peacetime would do things such as prepare for receiving forces, exercise with local nations, prepare for and determining materiel, supply, and munitions in the area required to fight. They would prepare the area to receive forces that come forward rapidly.
Attached to this element would be enablers to work on their specialty. For example, three-month rotations of logisticians, air defense, fire support, command and control and other enablers to provide forward preparation, so in conflict or during increased tensions rapidly responding NRF elements could arrive, reconstitute, be ready to go.