"By splitting its 40 F-22s into elusive, four-apiece “Rapid Raptor Packages,” the 3rd Wing at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska apparently hopes to sidestep one of the biggest threats to American air power in the Pacific: China’s arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles, primed to hammer American airfields in the event of a major war."
I assure you, it isn't just the Air Force that is thinking like this--the USMC, soon to be armed with the F-35B--is likely to deploy its Airpower in similarly dispersed fashion in a Pacific campaign. One need go no further than the stated military objectives of the Joint Operational
Access Concept (JOAC), and other concepts nested within it, including Air-Sea
Battle and the USMC/USA Concept for Gaining and Maintaining Access to find the intellectual underpinnings of this approach. Chief among these objectives appears to be a
desire to operate in a dispersed fashion, stated directly here (JOAC p. 31) as “A
joint force will lessen its exposure by a combination of dispersion, multiple
lines of operations, speed of movement, agile maneuver that reroutes around
threats, deception, masking or other concealment techniques, and disruption of
enemy intelligence collection through counter-reconnaissance,
counter-surveillance, and other methods. Once arrived in the objective area,
joint force elements can no longer use some techniques to avoid detection and
will therefore rely on active and passive defense measures to defeat actual
enemy attack.” The
JOAC reinforces the importance of robust Phase 0 operations thusly: “…the
challenge presented by opposed access will be determined largely by conditions
created prior to combat…Preparing the operational area will be a continuous
priority effort for combatant commanders, commencing well in advance of combat
and continuing after combat begins…” (p.18).
Sixty plus years of hunkering down in the Pacific has led to a situation in which a considerable amount of U.S. firepower is concentrated in only a few locations. The defense of these locations is largely the responsibility of Army Air and Missile Defense (AMD), using the PATRIOT and THAAD systems. Army
AMD forces are currently postured in the Pacific providing protection to
critical U.S. and allied assets in Japan and South Korea. As with any military capability, decisions
must be made about how those assets are employed and to what degree. With respect to AMD, this process is known as
the “CAL/DAL” process, which identifies a range of critical targets (the
critical asset list, or CAL) representing assets/or locations that the defended
force would wish to defend. The defended
asset list (DAL) represents that portion of the CAL to which available assets
are ultimately apportioned after a process of prioritization. This process takes into consideration threat
capability and likely raid size, target characteristics, and available
defending assets. Ultimately, defended
assets receive protection to a mathematical confidence factor based on the
foregoing attributes. Because ADA is not
limitless, some CAL assets are not protected, and DAL asset confidence factors
are not 100%. Virtually all
AMD assets in the Asia-Pacific are operationally employed in Japan and South
Korea; that is, they are in place and “on mission”, providing air and missile
defense to assets that the United States or its allies consider important.
Japan
and South Korea receive this priority for several reasons. Mutual defense treaties top the list, as does
the presence of considerable U.S. force structure in both countries. Additionally, the lion’s share of AMD related
exercises and theater engagement opportunities are focused on these two
Northeast Asian countries, which is understandable given AMD’s theater posture
and lay-down.
Yet
China’s attention is increasingly drawn South and Southeast, to the nations
ringing the South China Sea. Conflicting
historical territorial claims mix with growing evidence of resource wealth on
the sea-bottom to lay the predicate for future conflict, conflict which could
threaten U.S. interests and those of friends and allies in the region. And while these nations are not (in some
cases) as close to Chinese missile batteries as Japan and South Korea, China’s
ever-increasing missile bombardment envelope now includes most of East Asia,
excluding Australia, nations such as the
Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand. Both Thailand and the Philippines are also
treaty partners with the United States, and Singapore has begun hosting a group
of U.S. Navy ships at its Sembawang Harbor.
So the mismatch emerges; we are proliferating locations and assets to be defended (as the USAF initiative demonstrates), while the primary means to defend them (ADA) remain fixed and largely immobile. Some Airpower enthusiasts would suggest that the stealth inherent in the F-22 (and the F-35B for that matter) mean that dedicated ADA for dispersed operations would be unnecessary or if some were needed, Navy destroyers and cruisers would provide it. I would suggest 1) that is an unhealthy sense of confidence in stealth and 2) that the Pacific Fleet Commander has other jobs for those cruisers and destroyers than fixed base BMD. The Army needs to quickly work with the Air Force to add some level of ADA to this package that could plug into a larger IAMD architecture and provide some level of protection to the Airpower there assembled. One villager with a cellphone/radio is all it takes to target these airfields.
The entire concept of dispersal has at its heart, the objective of creating doubt. Doubt about where are forces are, doubt about how they are defended, doubt about where they will strike.
The
creation of doubt—and its by-product, assurance to allies and partners—begins
in peacetime through the development of innovative increased capabilities and
concepts (such as the Air Force is considering here), and through increased and targeted engagement with traditional and
non-traditional partners essential to obtaining the operational objectives
cited in the Joint Operational Access Concept, not the least of which is force
dispersal. The creation of doubt
continues with active engagement and exercises that stress Joint Force mobility and
unpredictability while gaining operational experience and creating professional
relationships throughout the region.
Should deterrence fail, years of engagement and exercises would have
created a multiplicity of potential sites for Joint Force employment—greatly
complicating the targeting problem of the Chinese. To be honest, the PLA does not have a targeting problem when it comes to US forces; it has a math problem (i.e.--how many missiles are required to overcome the defense).
Put another way, while the current
operational employment of Joint Forces Pacific offers a measure of
protection to critical U.S. and allied interests, it is a known commodity which
can be planned against and around. China’s
ability to produce (relatively cheap) projectiles cannot be matched by U.S.
production of (more expensive) interceptors alone, at least under foreseeable
budgetary environments. The entire Joint Force--and especially Army ADA--must
become more proficient at “thinning the quiver” of the PLA through mobility, deception, integration with other aspects of
military power (i.e. cyber), and weapons diversity, all of which would increase
the odds that in any given missile bombardment, holistic U.S. defenses are not
automatically disadvantaged due to raid size.
I am heartened by USAF thinking here, and I hope that they exercise this capability often and in many places. I would like to see the newly muscular US Army Pacific commander (now a 4 Star) step up and begin to advocate for additional, mobile, networked ADA in the Pacific to exercise with and be employed alongside these USAF Rapid Raptor Packages--EVEN if when the shooting starts, the Rapid Raptor Packages deploy without the ADA. What will have developed over the years would be an operational pattern that would complicate PLA planning. All of this happens in peacetime; all the time. This is an example of how Phase 0 employment of the force can act as a deterrent--which is something that critics of AirSea Battle rarely acknowledge as an attribute of the concept.
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