A U.S. Army Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System rolls off a U.S. Air Force C-17 in Rota, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, in March 2022.
SIMI VALLEY, California—The U.S. Air Force will lay out a new approach to protecting its forces in the Indo-Pacific region under a threat from Chinese long-range missiles, looking for a new mix of active defenses along with a hardening of bases and deception.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall says the plan is needed because China’s increased investment in long-range precision missiles—from the air, sea and surface—means fixed targets are a problem.
“So, we have got to increase the number of targets that they have to try to figure out and address,” Kendall told Aviation Week during an interview at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Dec. 3. “We have to figure out how to make those targets resilient.”
This was the focus of one of Kendall’s seven operational imperatives—mission areas he deemed critical for future investments beginning in the fiscal 2024 budget request. These included outreach to industry to determine what technologies could be available to address what he called “defining optimized resilient basing, sustainment, and communications in a contested environment.”
The work focused on a new mix of air defenses, deception through steps such as using decoys, hardening bases and then how to either preposition critical materiel or do logistics under attack.
“So, we’ve got a lot of initiatives and you’re going to see a lot of this in the budget that are designed to move all of that forward,” Kendall says.
First will be the Indo-Pacific region, which faces the biggest threat from these kinds of missiles, he says. Base defenses in the region have already been a top priority for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, particularly focusing on Guam. INDOPACOM commander Adm. John Aquilino has called for increased spending to defend Guam, with about $850 million in the 2023 budget request for this effort.
The Air Force has been developing tactics and procedures for what it calls Agile Combat Employment, the ability to disperse small numbers of aircraft and airmen to small airfields for operations. This will require additional defenses for the smaller airfields while also proliferating their presence across multiple bases to complicate an enemy’s targeting plans.
While the Indo-Pacific is the top priority, Kendall says there is also a need for improved defenses in Europe based on what Russia has shown it can do in Ukraine, along with the Middle East and bases in South Korea.
The U.S. Army has the lead on active air base defenses, and the Air Force has been collaborating with that service on what should be done with the mission.
“Even that’s joint,” he says. “Some of the warning associated with missile launch comes from space, and you may even have airborne systems involved in some of the tracking.”
Kendall’s approach to the fiscal 2024 budget request involves using operational imperative work to bring in more industry input and work with other Pentagon entities such as the Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation (CAPE) office and the Deputy Secretary’s Advisory Working Group to clearly explain the problems the service needs to solve. As discussions over funding evolved over the summer, the Air Force was able to lay out what it would do with more money.
“This is a model for me for what we’re going to do going forward. We’ve already started on ’25. We’ve already laid out, talked to CAPE and others, what our priorities are,” he says.
The operational imperative work over the past year defined the problems the Air Force needs to solve, with the upcoming budget request transitioning to specific technologies and funded programs to meet those issues and then move into actual execution, Kendall says.
“The challenges change over time, but I’m looking forward to it being more about execution and planning,” Kendall says.
The upcoming request will also lay out the Air Force’s new plans for air- and ground-moving target indication. The service wants to retire the E-3 AWACS and E-8C Joint STARS, moving toward using space-based assets to provide more of this role along with buying the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail. The budget will include a “more fulsome story” of the Air Force’s plans on the loyal wingman drone, which is now termed the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, along with a more clear plan for Joint All Domain Command and Control, Kendall says.
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