The Army is leading a study with Air Force participation to examine the protection of air bases from a wide rang of threats, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on Wednesday.
The cost-to-defeat equation is critical, he said.
“What we need in particular, is a highly cost-effective way to engage those cruise and ballistic missiles and those hypersonics, and there are some promising technologies and development which we think have potential to do that,” Kendall said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing to review the Department of the Air Force’s fiscal year 2025 budget request. “We all have to make some decisions in the department about force structure and what our priorities are to acquire those, but I think it’s an important part of air base resilience that we have to address.”
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) highlighted that the service’s base budget request calls for more counter-small unmanned aircraft systems (C-sUAS) as does the unfunded priorities list provided by U.S. European Command to protect Air Force installations. He noted that recently Langley AFB in Virginia had to shut down due to a “large number of UAS” that were operating in the local airspace, which forced the base to focus on being able to defend its operations.
Kendall said that threats to air bases overseas are largely dependent on a particular region. In the Pacific theater, China’s precision ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles are designed to attack U.S. air bases, and this is the primary threat the Air Force is concerned with, he said.
A component of how the Air Force operates in the Pacific is Agile Combat Employment, which requires the movement of assets between bases to make it more difficult for China to target forces, Kendall said. Still, air defenses are necessary, and “Our wargaming says that’s a necessity,” he added.
In the Middle East, and to a degree Europe, small UAS present more of a threat, Kendall said. The Army is also the lead on research and development into C-sUAS, an effort the Air Force is participating in, he said.
Kendall recently visited several U.S. airbases in the Middle East that are protected from sUAS, he said.
Overall, Kendall said, “we’re not where we need to be yet but we’re on the path hopefully to get there.”