The Future of NATO Airpower

How are Future Capability Plans Within the Alliance Diverging and How can Interoperability be Maintained?

Justin Bronk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000206586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Corporate Governance
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Airpower remains the cornerstone of NATO's military advantage, so maintaining the ability to win air superiority over peer opponents in a conflict is key to long-term deterrence stability in both Europe and the Pacific. This Whitehall Paper examines the various modernisation and future capability development efforts being undertaken within NATO, and analyses the major threat systems and overall modernisation trends of the West's main peer-competitors – Russia and China.

US airpower capability development efforts are increasingly focused on countering the growing challenge from the Chinese military in the Pacific. To meet this challenge, the Pentagon is planning to transform the way it operates across all domains over the next 15 years. New platforms, weapons systems and increasing automation of command and control threaten to leave NATO allies behind.

Current acquisition and modernisation plans of European air forces may eventually close the capability gap with current US theatre entry standard capabilities, but by then the US will have leapt ahead once more. Furthermore, many of the airpower capabilities which the US is pursuing for the Pacific theatre are significantly less relevant for the demands of deterrence against Russia in Europe. Given continuing dependence on US enablers on the part of other NATO members, a significant divergence in capability plans threatens to undermine crucial Alliance interoperability if not recognised and managed early.

II. THE BIG PLAYER THE UNITED STATES

When seeking to understand airpower within the NATO Alliance, the United States must be the starting point for any discussion. The US possesses a greater combat air capability than the rest of NATO put together. The US Air Force is by far the largest within the Alliance, and the US Navy operates what would be the second-largest air force. The discrepancy in capability between the US and other Allies is already far greater than mere platform numbers or budgetary comparisons would suggest. The critical enablers that allow a modem air campaign to be conducted — tankers, strategic and penetrating ISTAR assets, C2 and network infrastructure, munitions stocks and more — are overwhelmingly provided by the US. For example, in 2014, the proportion of AAR tankers provided by the US compared to the remainder of NATO was 9:1. While 17 of 28 (61%) of the NATO member states operated fast jets which draw on AAR, only nine (32%) had a national tanker capability.¹

In this context, the fact that the US Air Force is aiming to increase from its current front line strength of 312 squadrons to 386 squadrons by 2030, in order to fulfil what it sees as the mission sets implied by the latest National Security Strategy, is a powerful reminder of the increasing quantitative gap between the US and other NATO air forces.² This significant expansion plan is underpinned by an attempt to change the narrative around how the US government perceives military spending in an era of great power competition. As the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force General David L Goldfein put it at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference in 2018, ‘We usually have the dialogue about the Air Force we can afford. This is different. This is about the Air Force we need to present credible options to compete, deter, and if deterrence fails, win’.³ A move to force structure planning that is led more by threat/mission requirements rather than budget limitations is completely at odds with how most NATO forces are organised and, perhaps more importantly, funded. There are certainly questions as to the long-term financial viability of the US Air Force’s expansion plans as the funding boon from the era of President Donald Trump is not expected to last, but the contrast in terms of language and ambition with other NATO member air forces is nonetheless striking and instructive in terms of broad trends, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2: US Air Force and US Navy Aircraft Fleets vs. Other NATO Member States

	United States Air Force and Navy	Other NATO Member States (Total)
Combat aircraft (fourth generation)	approximately 3,000	approximately 2,500
	(approximately 1,400 combat-ready)	(fewer than 50% combat-ready)
Combat aircraft (fifth generation)	approximately 420 (F-22 × 187 - 121 combat-coded)	approximately 50 (all F-35s, not fully operational)
	(F-35 × 300, not fully operadonal)
Heavy bomber aircraft	157	0
Aerial refuelling tankers	530	61
Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft (including RPAS)	625	44

Source: Author analysis based on IISS, The Military Balance 2019, John Venable, ‘US Air Force: An Assessment of US Military Power’, Heritage Foundation, 4 October 2018; Boston et al., Assessing the Conventional Force Imbalance in Europe; author interviews with NATO and US Air Force commanders, London, 2019; Washington, DC, 2019; Berlin, 2019.

Air-to-Air Refuelling Aircraft

When considering the combat air outlook for the US Air Force and other air arms, the AAR enabler picture must always be borne in mind because in most scenarios it is the availability and standoff distance of tanker orbits which constrain US strike options .⁴ As General David Deptula said of AAR capability, ‘There is no alternative when it comes to this mission that underpins America’s global reach’.⁵ While AAR is important for enhancing the endurance of large enablers such as AWACS, the most pressing customer group for their fuel offload capacity is short-ranged tactical fighters. Tactical fighters impose a high degree of tanker dependence on air forces even in the context of a potential European conflict, where ranges are typically measured in hundreds of nautical miles between bases and potential combat zones.

However, the primary focus for the Pentagon as it looks to the next half century or so is not Europe or Russia, but rather a rising Chinese threat in the Pacific.⁶ In the vast distances of the Pacific, the US has a serious tanker dependence and tanker vulnerability problem.

The Boeing KC-46A Pegasus next-generation tanker programme is still beset by troubles, with multiple outstanding design and quality control issues in addition to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. The state of the programme is casting doubt over the ability of the US Air Force to increase the size of its tanker fleet, let alone start to replace the ancient KC-135 Stratotankers which make up the bulk of its current 40 AAR squadrons .⁷ The US Air Force claims it needs an additional 14 squadrons (roughly 210 tanker aircraft) and is also aiming to retire its fleet of 59 KC-10 Extender tankers as the KC-46 comes into service. Clearly, the existing order for 179 KC-46s by 2028 would not come close to providing for another 14 squadrons in addition to replacing the KC-10 fleet. The Pegasus acquisition programme in its current state ‘will replace less than half of the current tanker fleet and will leave the Air Force with over 200 ageing KC-135s awaiting recapitalization’ .⁸ When one includes the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve squadrons in this total, Air Mobility Command operates 396 KC-135s.⁹ Since the youngest KC-135 in the fleet was delivered to the Air Force in 1965, making it 54 years old in 2019, the entire fleet is increasingly expensive to maintain and operate.¹⁰

However, perhaps the largest problem facing the US Air Force (as well as the US Navy and Marine Corps aviation elements) in terms of AAR enablers in high-intensity contingency planning is not scarcity or fleet age but rather the vulnerability of these assets in combat.

China is developing weapons systems specifically geared towards hunting large US tanker and AWACS aircraft, as a means to neutralise much of the US Air Force tactical fighter fleet in any armed clash. One notable example is the J-20A with its combination of low observability (LO), ability to carry up to four jettisonable external fuel tanks, large internal weapons bays and fuel capacity.¹¹ Another is the PL-XX missile seen in carriage testing on J-16 fighters in 2017 with what appears to be a dual-mode seeker and a range based on a loft-coast trajectory of around 400 km.¹² The Chinese concept is relatively simple: the US Air Force can be kept at bay if its tankers can be effectively targeted or forced to operate so far from the battlespace as to lose most of their efficiency in terms of boosting fighter reach. While the KC-46 will incorporate the latest self-defence capabilities — most likely in the form of modern active chaff and flare dispensers, as well as possibly towed decoys and even, in future, directed energy-based active defence systems — it is ultimately hard to ensure the safety of an airliner-derived large aircraft with huge RCS and very limited manoeuvrability. These aircraft are the most obvious weak link in the US Air Force’s ability to generate sorties near the Chinese mainland in a conflict and China is well aware of this. Almost as high on the Chinese (and Russian) priority target list are ISR enablers which typically operate behind the main battlespace with the AAR tankers, using powerful sensor suites to provide the whole force with wide area situational awareness.¹³

AWACS and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Aircraft

The US Air Force has traditionally relied on a series of large airliner-derived platforms for both airborne AWACS and standoff ISR. There are three main families of such big-wing ISR’ aircraft: the E-3G Sentry AWACS fleet; the RC-135 Rivet Joint family of specialised signals intelligence and electronic intelligence types; and the E-8C Joint STARS ground radar surveillance and battle management fleet. In addition, the US operates a range of smaller piloted and unmanned ISR aircraft including the high-flying U-2S Dragon Lady spy plane and RQ-4 Global Hawk UAVs, and the stealthy and only semi-acknowledged RQ-170 Sentinel stealth UAV for penetrating ISR missions.¹⁴

As the first of the big-wing ISR classes approaches retirement, the US Air Force has moved to firmly kill off the expected effort to replace the E-8C with a similar type of aircraft.¹⁵ Instead, the service intends to extend the E-8C fleet into the mid-2020s and upgrade at least seven E-3G Sentry AWACS aircraft in order to provide a bridge until a totally new ISR and C2 approach is mature enough to replace them.¹⁶ The US Air Force is counting on a distributed network of sensors mounted on multiple piloted and unmanned platforms, as well as space-, ground- and maritime-based sensors linked together and processed by its nascent ABMS.¹⁷

The US Navy is already working on a similar concept called Naval Integrated Fire Control — Counter Air (NIFC-CA), which is intended to allow situational awareness sharing, sensor cross-referencing and enhanced cooperative engagement capability (CEC) across multiple different airborne and surface platforms.¹⁸ In 2016, it conducted a live fire test in which the sensor picture from an F-35 was used to successfully cue in an SM-6 missile from an Aegis test platform beyond the range of the Aegis array’s own radar picture.¹⁹ The US Air Force has been experimenting with platform-to-platform CEC for more than a decade alongside the US Navy, to allow tactical sensor-shooter flexibility in specific scenarios.²⁰ However, what the ABMS architecture is trying to do is beyond the current scope of NIFC-CA or CEC. Rather than simply providing an architecture of datalinks to connect weapons, sensors and command centres — itself a complex undertaking — ABMS is an attempt to provide automated data fusion, analysis and optimal sensor-shooter combinations for the whole connected force...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. The Context: Home-Grown Problems and Adversary Innovations
• II. The Big Player: The United States
• III. The Medium Powers: Europe’s Leading Air Forces
• IV. The Smaller NATO Air Forces: In Search of a Viable Niche
• Conclusion: Challenges and Opportunities