After years of prolonged operations and little chance of a decreased tempo in years to come, the U.S. Air Force faces force structure shortfalls to varying degrees for each of its aircraft classes, a new study by the RAND Corp. has found.
Analyzing four separate hypothetical operational situations, the nonpartisan research group found that whether the service is involved in longer regional conflicts, supporting shorter-term counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations or participating in peace enforcement operations, the fleets would be unable to meet at least part of the required demands.
The August report titled, “Is the USAF Flying Force Large Enough? Assessing Capacity Demands in Four Alternative Futures,” declared that as of 2017, no aircraft class was capable of meeting even 80 percent of its demands across all four scenarios.
Of the eight categories – airlift; attack; bomber; command, control, communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance/battle management (C3ISR/BM); fighter; Special Operations Forces (SOF); tanker; and “other” aircraft to include combat search-and-rescue helicopters – five were not sufficiently ready for a regional conflict similar to the Vietnam and Korean Wars.
C3ISR/BM platforms – primarily unmanned aerial systems such as General Atomics’ MQ-9 Reaper or surveillance aircraft including the E-3 airborne early warning and control (AWACS) platform and the E-8 joint surveillance target attack radar system (JSTARS) – are only able to meet 50 percent of demands, the report said.
The airlift and bomber fleets also face shortfalls in shorter conflicts, such as Operation Desert Storm, but the service should meet between 84 percent and 100 percent of demands for the other six aircraft, it added.
Historically, peace enforcement operations have been the most stressful to Air Force capacity, the report noted. The need for prolonged no-fly zones means that fighter, tanker and bomber platforms must be in continuous rotation, and five classes of aircraft meet less than 46 percent of demands in that hypothetical, while two meet 53 percent to 64 percent of demands. Airlift platforms such as Boeing’s [BA] C-17 transport aircraft, however, were ready to meet 97 percent of possible demand.
A future with continuous counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations offered mixed results among the fleets, with the RAND Corp. assessing that four aircraft classes could meet over 90 percent of contingency demands, but the other four classes could only meet between 54 percent and 76 percent of demands.
The fighter portfolio was deemed the most prepared, meeting 93 percent or more of demands in three futures and 64 percent in a peace-keeping scenario. With small fleets and increased demand, C3ISR/BM platforms look to be the least robust across all potential futures, meeting 84 percent of demands for short regional conflicts but only 29 percent to 63 percent in the others.
Since the Cold War, the U.S. military has experienced a high operational tempo, the report noted. Although there are noticeable peaks for major combat operations “the ‘ebb’ periods never quite returned to the low levels taken for granted during much of the Cold War,” it said.
While the higher tempo originally seemed manageable, efforts by Russia, China and other countries to field more advanced weapons are forcing the Air Force to meet combatant commander demands while simultaneously improving its own capabilities to keep ahead of peer competitors.
The Air Force has been involved in 46 prolonged operations (lasting longer than one year) since 1946, and every U.S. president in that timeframe has inherited and initiated at least one such operation. In addition, the average length of operations has grown since the end of the Cold War. That has stressed the service’s force structure by pushing multiple aircraft beyond their projected service lives and into roles they were not meant to perform, the report noted.
The Air Force has understood the demands of small, continuous rotations for decades, and DoD officials have become increasingly vocal about the readiness problems each service faces, the report said. Service leaders have frequently cited the impact that enduring budget caps has left on fleet readiness, on top of the increased ops tempo. Secretary Heather Wilson, in one of her first appearances before the Senate Armed Services Committee, addressed the issue by noting, “We are too small for what the nation expects of us now, and sequester would further hollow this force.” (Defense Daily, June 6, 2017).
The service is also investing in several new platforms that will bring relief to its fleets. The B-21 bomber, in development by Northrop Grumman [NOC], will eventually supplement the aging B-52 bomber fleet, as the Air Force plans to retire the younger B-1 and B-2 platforms by the 2030s.
The possibility of procuring an off-the-shelf aircraft that can perform light attack and close-air support missions in permissive environments is becoming more of a reality a year after the Air Force announced its “experiment” to test several platforms on a $6 million budget. The service recently announced its intent to solicit limited proposals for such an aircraft, and to potentially award a contract as early as fiscal year 2020 (Defense Daily, Aug. 6).
The Air Force also received endorsement in the FY’18 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to replace the current JSTARS fleet with a network of sensors spread across various aircraft and unmanned systems, dubbed the advanced battle management system (ABMS). (Defense Daily, July 23)
But the service could do more to better assess its assets’ readiness before any future conflict, the RAND report said. It recommended Air Force leaders supplement current force-planning processes with historically informed simulations of possible future scenarios, and develop metrics that can better illustrate the consequences of prolonged operations on their fleets.
“More objective, quantitative measures of the force structure implications of prolonged operations would help USAF leaders … make the case for more force structure in interactions with DoD leadership, Congress, the media, and the public,” the report said.