Annotations on Maj Gen Grynkewich's Assertions

-171450-120967500
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7067550101600T00T7118985179705E00E5934075156845M00M603123073660I00IMITCHELL INSTITUTE
6488430367030p00p6431280360045s00s6350635345440o00o6302375325755r00r6233795300990e00e6152515262255A00A6082665192405r00r6022340143510o00o599821097790f00f710501565405s00s7059930119380e00e7044690159385i00i6982460199390d00d6922135247650u00u6879590281940t00t6814185309880S00S6709410346075e00e6637655360680c00c6565900367665a00aPolicy Papers
Air superiority and unity of command in its employment will remain critical to the success of future joint operations.
Achieving air superiority in the future requires realizing the ascent of information as a dominant factor in warfare. Building an architecture that integrates data to create decision-quality knowledge is key, and the ability to share it with sensor- shooters in every domain.
The Department of Defense must change its acquisition approach, or adversaries will outpace our air superiority capability development.
Foreword: Preserving 21st Century Air Superiority
A prerequisite for efective military operations in all domains for all service components—the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines—air superiority is the sine qua non for successful coalition and joint force operations. Since the end of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, US and coalition military operations have enjoyed the advantage of going into combat against adversaries that possessed little to no capability to deny US operations in the air above them. Military operations for over 25 years in permissive airspace has led US national security leadership to become accustomed to operating with unchallenged air superiority. As a result of the condition of continuous air superiority for over a quarter of a century, a presumption of sufciency in air superiority force structure has built up. This has led to investment priorities dominated by near- term confict and wishful thinking about potential future threats, along with reductions in planned defense resources in deference to other discretionary spending. Over the last decade the US Department of Defense leadership has truncated investment in air superiority. Correspondingly, capacity of this critical capability has atrophied and is no longer sufcient to meet the needs of the current National Security Strategy. This condition may prove calamitous to US military operations in future confict. Beyond the elective, low intensity contingencies of the past 25 years, major regional confict that can dramatically afect critical US national interests are likely to occur. The question is not if, but when. In this paper, Brig Gen Alex Grynkewich clearly and concisely illustrates how he and his team of US Air Force professionals worked for over a year providing a way ahead to address this most critical conventional warfghting mission area.
Lt Gen David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.) Dean, The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
Many national
Introduction:
Controlling the Air in the 21st Century
While the American ability to control the air is often taken for granted, we risk losing this advantage over the next decade and a half. Budget pressures and near-term priorities in lieu of long- term threats terminated key investment in America’s air superiority capability at the same time other nations were developing advanced technologies in this critical mission area.1 Russia and China will surpass our necessary air superiority capacity if we fail to correct the erosion of America’s ability to control the air.
Sensing this challenge, from the middle of 2015 to mid-2016, the US Air Force aforded me the privilege of leading a team of experts studying how the Air Force could provide air superiority for the US military in 2030 and beyond.2 Air superiority, often thought of as a mission, is
more correctly conceived of as a condition.
those capabilities will have proliferated around the globe. As a result, although theater air superiority provides important strategic, operational, and tactical advantages, it may be extremely difcult to obtain. While many view air superiority as a theater-wide condition, reminiscent of Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s dramatic declarations during the First Gulf War, we may no longer be able to prevent adversaries from operating within their own integrated air defenses, or contesting US and allied airspace. Instead, we will control their airspace for a discrete time and over a limited area, as needed by joint or coalition forces. This context is important: control of the air is not an end in and of itself—the US and its allies set the air superiority conditions only so we may then exploit the air domain to maximum efect and preclude an adversary from doing the same.
Attaining air superiority when and where we need it in 2030 will not be easy. The Air Force
security and military personnel can no longer conceive of
a world in which US air superiority is not a given, or where we must fght for it.
At its most basic, that condition is achieved
when a force possesses the degree of control of the air required for military operations to succeed. Air superiority not only allows coalition and joint force operations to exploit the air domain, but also grants those friendly force operations freedom from attack on the surface. Without air superiority, results can be devastating—witness the rout of the Iraqi Republican Guard as it tried to escape from Kuwait along the so-called “highway of death” in 1991, or the losses sufered
must develop capabilities that not only target and
engage air and missile threats, as doctrine has long suggested, but also counter threats to the space assets we depend on in the air battle. Likewise, adversary use of cyberspace to deliver efects against our air, space, and logistics assets could prevent joint and combined forces from controlling air and space. Air superiority in 2030 must account for a multi-domain battlespace where air, space, and cyberspace converge. The USAF must ensure the service invests not only in necessary advances in raw combat power across those domains, but also
by the Taliban in late 2001 on the Shomali Plain in Afghanistan during the opening phase of Operation Enduring Freedom. With this in mind, the team I led—composed of air, space, cyber, logistics, and support experts—challenged every assumption and conducted an exhaustive review of options to facilitate continued control of the air by US and allied air forces.
Many national security and military personnel can no longer conceive of a world in which US air superiority is not a given, or where we must fght for it. After all, no American ground forces have sufered enemy attack from aircraft since April 15, 1953.3 Unfortunately, the world has changed. Middle-sized powers now possess the resources, technology, and know-how to challenge control of the air, and by 2030, many of
in equally critical basing and logistics, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and command and control (C2) capabilities. We must exploit “third ofset” technologies to provide an information, knowledge, and decision advantage, and then use that advantage to gain control of the air at a time and place of our choosing.4
After more than a year of exhaustive study and rigorous analysis our team concluded that achieving air superiority in 2030 would require an integrated and networked family of both penetrating and standof capabilities, operating not just in the air but across space and cyberspace as well. To explore how we reached our conclusions, the next section of this paper will discuss how the team defned the air superiority problem and how that led us to our overall recommendations. This paper will
also show how the Air Superiority 2030 family of capabilities counters the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy of our potential adversaries, and how it exploits third ofset technologies and ideas. The fnal section will then highlight some of the key attributes of the Air Superiority 2030 family of capabilities, including the imperative to adjust our acquisition paradigm, if we are to succeed.
The Air Superiority Problem
In early 2015, the US Air Force began to work on its next-generation air-to-air fghter, commonly known as F-X.5 When beginning such a program, military services usually start with an “analysis of alternatives” to help them defne the desired attributes of new systems. The objective of this analysis is to determine the most
The combination of historically poor schedule performance with historically high costs led planners to conclude the earliest the Air Force could expect to feld F-X would be around the year 2040. Many Air Force leaders felt 2040 would be too late to feld the next tranche of air superiority capability. The F-22 reached initial operational capability (IOC) in 2005. While the F-35 recently entered initial operational service in August 2016, it is optimized for air-to-ground employment rather than air superiority. This means the USAF is facing a 35-year gap between felding air superiority platforms if forced to wait until 2040. This would be an eternity during industrial-age aircraft development; it’s even worse for the fast-paced world of aircraft development in the information age.
The combination of
rational investment decisions prior to committing taxpayer dollars. Key
This acute challenge led Air Force leadership to look for a diferent approach to the F-X problem.
historically poor schedulefunding decisions typically follow
They decided the time had come to reexamine their
performance with
shortly on the heels of this analytic efort. As the Air Force approached
assumptions and reframe the Air Force’s approach to air superiority. The team I led for slightly more
historically high costs ledthese decisions, it had to decide how
than a year, the Air Superiority 2030 Enterprise
planners to conclude the earliest the Air Force could
much of its topline budget authority it was willing to allocate to the emerging F-X program. Out of this came a cost
estimate for the F-X program based
Capability Collaboration Team (ECCT), was the result of this decision. Crucially, the Air Force chief of staf tasked the team with taking a “multi-
domain approach” to air superiority, meaning we
expect to feld F-X wouldon trends from similar programs in
were to consider solutions that might not necessarily
be around the year 2040.
the past. The result was not pretty.
The two most recent examples
come only from the air. Perhaps, the thinking went, cyberspace or space-based capabilities
Many Air Force leaders feltanalysts had available were the F-22
would be able to produce contributing efects to
2040 would be too late to
Raptor and F-35 Lightning II. As has been written extensively elsewhere,
achieving air superiority and move the Air Force to an entirely new cost curve. The Air Force had done
feld the next tranche of airboth programs experienced cost issues
this before during the 1950s when a fundamental
superiority capability.
throughout development.6 Resource constraints and the prioritization
reframing of how to provide nuclear combat power led to the advent of the intercontinental ballistic
of then-current combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—to the exclusion of potentially more demanding conficts in the future—led Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to truncate the F-22 program at 187 aircraft and to restructure the F-35 program in 2010. Comparing the expense of these ffth-generation aircraft programs to fourth-generation F-16 and F-15 programs, experts predicted F-X would cost substantially more than any prior fghter program in history. Additionally, Air Force planners evaluated the development timelines experienced during ffth-generation aircraft development.7
missile (ICBM), which moved the Air Force of a bomber-only cost and capability model.
Air Force leaders were equally concerned with cost and the team’s intellectual approach to capability development. To some, F-X looked like a standard recapitalization program to replace an aging aircraft with a newer, more capable aircraft. While this approach sometimes works, leaders were concerned that Air Force processes were not built to ask whether an aircraft was the right solution or not—they simply assumed it was. A similar assumption had been made by the Polish military between the two world wars. On the eve
of World War II, they had reftted their cavalry units with entirely new equipment. Based on the lessons of World War I, they not only procured new weapons for their cavalrymen, but also gas masks for both men and horses. In efect, they had recapitalized their cavalry without ever challenging the assumption that such cavalry was relevant in modern warfare.8
To help ensure the Air Force did not make that same mistake the ECCT adopted a comprehensive analytical framework. As all military planners appreciate, the frst step in solving a complex problem is to make sure they
to-air weapons systems. For the most part, we think we have a reasonable idea how these technologies will evolve and proliferate over the next 15 years, as these technological cycles are relatively well understood. The second category, however, contained a more revolutionary set of comprehensive threats, including advanced and highly accurate ballistic missiles, cyberspace threats, and threats to our space assets. While we know these threats will exist—many already do— it is more difcult to predict how they will evolve and proliferate. In the end, what we do know is that in 2030 our forces will face a combination of
Traditionally, air superiority doctrine focuses on
truly understand it. Therefore, our team dedicated the frst 90 days of our efort not only to
outlining our methodology, but
threats from both categories in a variety of places around the world.
It is worth noting that our efort was not
about preparing for confict against so-called
neutralizing air and missilealso to deconstructing the air
near-peer adversaries. Rather, it was about being
threats. Our team added other
superiority problem from every angle. We started with ensuring
prepared to face the technologies we see spreading around the world and the expected operational
threats that might preclude ourour intellectual understanding
environments created by such technological
control of the air, including
of air superiority was correct. Our team knew control of the
advancements and proliferation. Indeed, such proliferation of advanced technology is already
cyberspace-based attacksair was needed not as an end
45720095250and other non-traditional and00and other non-traditional andin and of itself, but so friendly
forces could exploit that control
occurring, as evidenced by the advanced missile systems deployed in Syria, or the weapons recently acquired by Iran.10
unconventional threats.
for ISR, strike, mobility, or evenspacelaunch—andto
The next step for our team was to assess our planned force structure against the backdrop
preclude the enemy from doing the same. Thus, we developed an appreciation for the time and geographical requirements for air superiority in various scenarios. Additionally, as we examined Air Force, joint, and combined counter-air thinking, we expanded on the doctrinal defnition of air superiority. Traditionally, air superiority doctrine focuses on neutralizing air and missile threats.9 Our team added other threats that might preclude our control of the air, including cyberspace- based attacks and other non-traditional and unconventional threats.
The next step in our process was to examine the 2030 timeframe and the expected operational environment. Leveraging a vast array of intelligence and analysis, our team developed as much understanding as possible about the future environment, dividing expected threats into two categories. The frst category contained evolutionary and traditional threat capabilities, such as airplanes, air-to-air missiles, and surface-
of the expected threat environment. Air Force analysis over the past several years suggested numerous capability gaps existed, and we were able to validate many of these. In the end, however, only one gap mattered to our team: the Air Force’s lack of ability to gain and maintain air superiority in 2030. This gap was rooted in a number of critical shortfalls across both the profciency and sufciency of our planned forces. In terms of profciency, the team assessed that we would not only lack many of the raw capabilities needed in the expected threat environment, but that we would also lack trained and ready Airmen to maintain and operate these capabilities. We also assessed a lack of quantitative sufciency. This meant that even in areas where our capability was technologically adequate and profcient, the planned quantity of those capabilities in the 2030 inventory would be insufcient in many scenarios to attain operational- and strategic-level efects and outcomes.
Our team found two main causes of this expected gap. First, the Air Force broadly—but not entirely— failed to rapidly develop and feld capabilities over the last two decades. Second, even with programs the Air Force had felded, many were focused on operations in a single function or domain without enough forethought given to interactions with other functions and domains. As an example, even the F-22—the most advanced air superiority aircraft on the planet—stills fail to meet its full potential owing to its communications limitations. This gap limits the speed at which F-22 pilots can pass data from their ffth-generation sensors to other elements in a joint military operation or to our intelligence enterprise. The Air Force recognized this long
exquisite sensors and directed-energy weapons. Unfortunately, while such a platform would be highly efective, the technologies required to actually create such a capability simply will not exist by 2030.
Other concepts submitted to our team included words and phrases such as “3D printing,” “hypersonic,” “swarming,” or “autonomous.” Many concepts showed promise, such as 3D printing, which could revolutionize logistics.12 Hypersonics could enable rapid long-range strike in the future, and swarming has been a favored tactic of fghter pilots for a century. Autonomy could drastically reduce human workload when executing complex tasks in future operations as well. Consequently, our team recommended pursing these technological
A concept based on tactics or technology can be
before our team’s efort, and it is working on enhancements to magnify the impact of F-22s, by increasing the
efectiveness of other forces through
and tactical innovations. At the same time, we caution those who would consider any one or two such concepts “silver bullets” that would
by themselves solve the air superiority problem.
interesting, but becomesimproved connectivity.11
Furthermore, such innovations must be paired
more compelling when
Having deconstructed doctrine, threats, and the problem, we turned
with valid concepts of operation to make them efective in the expected operational environment.
integrated with an entireour attention to solutions. We reached
A concept based on tactics or technology can be
concept of operations.
into every corner of the Air Force, across the other military services,
interesting, but becomes more compelling when integrated with an entire concept of operations.
into agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), our national laboratories, and across academia and industry. We wanted to leave no stone unturned in our search for creative ideas to address the air superiority capability gap. This efort led to the submission of over 1,500 diferent ideas, both materiel (e.g., modernization, acquisition programs) and non- materiel (e.g., improved tactics or training). We assessed each of these ideas against four criteria: efectiveness, technological maturity, expected cost, and the number and complexity of any dependencies required for the idea to be efective.
The knowledge generated from this assessment proved foundational to the remainder of our efort. We learned many ideas that sounded promising up front were in reality inefective, technologically immature, too expensive, or highly dependent on consecutive miracles to succeed. As just one example, at one of our analytical events we evaluated a recommendation for a hypersonic, highly maneuverable, optionally manned aircraft with intercontinental range and equipped with
In order to evaluate various innovations in an operational context, our team organized viable concepts into several conceptual frameworks for further analysis. The frst conceptual framework included robust modernization of the planned force of 2030, but had few additional capabilities put in to the mix. This provided a base case for our analysis, showing the maximum amount of capability we could extract from the force without starting major new acquisition programs. The force in this conceptual framework achieved control of the air the traditional way, by rolling back an adversary’s integrated air defense system over time from the outside in until air superiority was attained over a desired geographical area.
Our second and third conceptual frame- works were a standof force and a force that could take attrition, respectively.13 The standof force broadly consisted of non-penetrating platforms delivering large volumes of weapons (including non-kinetic efects) from beyond the lethal range of threat systems. The attritable force consisted of a large number of platforms with modular
payloads (either kinetic or non-kinetic) that could be reused multiple times, but that were also inexpensive enough that losing some in a high- threat environment was acceptable. Importantly, the attritable force we assessed in this conceptual framework did not just exist in the air domain, but in cyberspace and space as well.
Broadly speaking, we expected both the standof and attritable forces to achieve air superiority through a high volume of weapons,
timeline. As we reviewed the analysis conducted on the conceptual frameworks in greater detail, however, several important insights came to light that would guide us as we developed courses of action.
First, we learned that modernization of some current platforms would allow them to better perform some aspects of the counter-air mission, including as defensive counter-air over friendly forces and suppression of enemy air defenses on the
...deeper analysis revealed that neither force was able to generate enough knowledge of targets much beyond
efects, or attritable platforms swarming and converging in a desired space and time to overwhelm enemy defenses. Yet deeper analysis revealed that neither force was able to generate
enough knowledge of targets much
edge of an integrated air defense system. Second, we determined we could launch standof weapons over long distances—if we could provide enough information for them to hit a target. We learned that while we do not have access to all information necessary to provide targeting information
today, we could signifcantly improve our ability
the edge of an adversary’sbeyond the edge of an adversary’s
in this area by fusing cyberspace intelligence
defenses. Each could only
defenses. Each could only achieve air superiority on the outskirts of
with new space-based capabilities, and close this gap. This could include using cubesat or nanosat
achieve air superiority on thean integrated air defense system.
miniaturized satellite technology to blanket an area
outskirts of an integrated air
Over time, air superiority could extend deeper into the adversary
of interest with overhead coverage, for example.
If we could develop these capabilities and
defense system.system—but to get to that point the scheme of maneuver ended up resembling yet
another traditional roll-back operation, albeit with cyberspace and space capabilities in play as well.
Our fourth conceptual framework centered on what many would describe as a sixth-generation fghter: a highly survivable, highly lethal aircraft supported by cyberspace and space capabilities. While our analysis showed this conceptual framework would be highly efective at the tactical level, it was hobbled at the operational level by an insufcient quantity of capability due to the high cost of the aircraft. Additionally, to achieve the efectiveness needed, the development program postulated for this program would carry a signifcant degree of technical risk, creating a very real possibility that this sixth-generation fghter would not feld until well past 2030. We concluded that the exquisite capabilities in this framework would cost too much and arrive late to need.
At this point in the team’s study, the problem seemed intractable: we could not modernize our way out of the problem, multi-domain standof weapons and attritable forces failed to achieve air superiority, and our only successful operational capability was unrealistic both in terms of cost and
pair them with new and existing air-domain data sources, we would signifcantly improve the efectiveness of standof weapons. Doing this, however, would require getting the right sensors in the right places, meaning they would have to reach deep in adversary territory sometimes. Attritable assets with the right sensor payloads provided one option, as did networking together current or upgraded airborne sensors, including ffth- generation aircraft and dedicated ISR platforms. Still, attritable assets could lack persistence, and ffth-generation assets could not go everywhere we needed them to go. We still would need a capability to penetrate and persist in an adversary air defense system. Such a capability would not only employ weapons or project efects, but just as importantly it would serve as a key node in what was emerging from our analysis as a new conceptual multi- domain battle network—a “combat cloud.”14
As we continued our work, these lessons
led us to develop a vision for an integrated and networked family of air superiority capabilities comprised of both standof and “stand-in” assets.15 Stand-in assets are those that seek to operate inside the threat range of enemy defenses, such as penetrating bombers or fghters equipped with
short-range weapons. By contrast, standof assets remain outside those defenses—sending only longer-range weapons like missiles or other efects (such as jammers or even cyber efects) into the most contested areas. The pairing of both stand- in and standof capabilities, according to many analyses, is critical to defeating a future adversary’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy.16
Defeating the A2/AD Strategy
Over the last decade, would-be adversaries have been acquiring and felding capabilities to preclude US and allied forces from freely operating around the world. This buildup of military capabilities in the Asia-Pacifc, Europe, and even in the Middle East, poses a complex operational problem for America and its allies across a range of missions, including in the fght for control of the air. Many of our would-be adversaries have adopted A2/AD as a means to counter US and
with adva...