14 Jul 17. America’s Air Superiority Crisis. The Air Force already has a big hole in its capabilities for the future: it needs what it is calling Penetrating Counter Air, a very fast, long-range, sensor-loaded and furiously lethal aircraft. But that effort is designed to fill a need in 2030. Dave Deptula, head of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute and a former lieutenant general who orchestrated air operations over Iraq and Afghanistan, argues the US already faces a quantitative gap in America’s all-important efforts to ensure we own the skies in any battle. Read on! The Editor.
The United States Air Force is suffering an air superiority crisis after 26 years of combat operations. Today, the service possesses just under 1,000 aircraft capable of air-to-air combat — F-15s, F-16s, F-22s, and F-35s. That is down more than 65 percent since the end of the Cold War. Given the global demands of our national security strategy, operational considerations, and force rotation factors, this amounts to fewer than 100 fighter aircraft available in a particular location at any given time.
Fighters are employed in a rotational fashion—with one third of aircraft on station, another third returning to base, and the last third preparing to launch. That means in reality only about 30 fighters are immediately able to engage at any given time in a particular region. Put bluntly, that number does not cut it when it comes to projecting necessary air-to-air capability to meet increasingly lethal threats that are more challenging today than during the Cold War.
The country needs a full spectrum of capabilities and the strongest Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps in the world to meet the demands of our current national security strategy. Empowering that joint team means America needs a robust, properly sized fighter force. The paramount first step toward success in large-scale military operations is air superiority. Without it, all other military missions are at risk. Simply assuming sufficient capacity in such a critical mission area portends much risk and could prove catastrophic. While planes like the F-22 boast impressive capabilities, the reality is that the few that we have are not enough to meet the demands of our defense strategy. History is replete with examples when air superiority was the fundamental lynchpin of military success—Desert Storm, D-Day, and the Battle of Britain are some of the most well known. The fate of nations has resided on air superiority more than once—and it will again one day in the future.
Troops on the ground, sailors at sea, airmen in aircraft like tankers and airlifters, and personnel at regional bases are at extreme risk if an enemy is free to strike from the sky. When the Cold War ended, the U.S. had a force structure of 3,212 fighters capable of air-to-air combat. However, the 1990s saw this number almost halved to 1,814 F-15s and F-16s. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw those fleets shrink further to free up funding for counterinsurgency efforts. Many of these cuts, like the fiscal 2010 Combat Air Forces Reduction Plan (CAF REDUX) that retired 112 F-15C/Ds and 134 F-16C/Ds, were meant to be temporary, but have now been normalized. Modernization efforts like the F-22 were prematurely cancelled because leaders at the time (ed: that would be Bob Gates, former Defense Secretary) failed to appreciate the importance of air superiority. The only remaining fighter recapitalization effort — the F-35 — has been continually reduced in numbers produced per year to meet arbitrary budget bogeys, not our nation’s security strategy.
Not all of the air superiority setbacks are tied to airframes. Vital upgrades to critical aircraft components like radars and avionics also have been dramatically curtailed. Not only did we fail to secure the fighter aircraft plan to recapitalize a geriatric Air Force, but we also undercut the fall back position of modernizing the continual aging legacy fighter force remaining.