Tag Archive for: Air Power

More F-35s, more tankers: a reliable way to strengthen Australian deterrence

If the Chinese navy’s task group sailing around Australia a few weeks ago showed us anything, it’s that Australia has a deterrence gap so large you can drive a ship through it. Waiting for AUKUS or hoping Australia’s troubled shipbuilding program will deliver—in the 2030s—is a recipe for annual panic about grey zone coercion as Chinese deployments become routine.

Boosting our air combat capability is the fastest way to address Australia’s deterrence gap. That requires two things: more combat aircraft and more airborne tankers.

For decades, received wisdom has been that 100 fighter aircraft were enough for Australia. The logic was vague and came from the Royal Australian Air Force’s four fighter squadrons retaining different mission specialisations. Given multi-role capabilities and sensor fusion of modern aircraft, this specialisations argument is outdated.

So, can 100 aircraft provide credible deterrence?

Currently the RAAF has 72 F-35A Lightnings, 24 F/A-18F Super Hornets and 12 EA-18G Growlers (electromagnetic attackers), for a total of 108 combat-capable aircraft. The jets are supported by seven A330 MRTT tanker-transports (called KC-30As by the RAAF).

Combat readiness is a different story. The Australian Department of Defence doesn’t provide combat aircraft availability numbers, but in 2019 the then US secretary of defense, James Mattis, told the US Navy and Air Force to attain an 80 percent mission-capable rate for combat aircraft.

There are four RAAF F-35A squadrons, including one that’s a training unit in peacetime. Each is allocated 18 aircraft to provide an intended 14 ready for duty while airframes and engines are cycled through maintenance. Two of the 14 are usually held as spares during squadron operations. Therefore, in a crisis the Australian government can expect to call on 36 operational F-35As. The same considerations result in just 16 F/A-18Fs and eight EA-18G Growlers being available

That’s a total of no more than 60 aircraft for a continent the size of Europe—hardly enough.

During surge operations the 60 RAAF combat jets could all be available. But during ongoing crisis operations—such as conducting defensive combat air patrols in the east, north and west of Australia or keeping aircraft next to runways for quick intercepts—the air combat force will quickly run into sustainment problems.

Historical observations of British and US combat aircraft availability show the mission- availability rate can be even worse—for example, due to unreliable parts supply.

On an island continent, air power is the fastest and most efficient means of deterrence. But we just don’t have enough air power.

The Royal Air Force operates 171 combat aircraft and 14 tankers from a land mass 3 percent the size of Australia. The Japanese air force has about 330 fighters and a land mass 5 percent of Australia’s. No other nation seems as committed as Australia to doing so much with so little. The only comparable air force in size to the RAAF is Canada’s, which has 79 fighters.

If Australia is serious about retaining strategic independence, including the ability to credibly deter an enemy, we should increase the size of the RAAF’s fighter force by two squadrons—36 aircraft—and add four A330 MRTT tankers. This should be phased alongside introduction of unmanned semi-autonomous teamed aircraft on a ratio of three uncrewed systems, including some for refuelling, for each additional crewed combat aircraft.

Increasing the fighter force to seven operational squadrons, including the existing dedicated electronic attack squadron but not the training unit, and supplementing it with about 100 autonomous aircraft would grow the RAAF’s combat capability to 240 aircraft before 2034.

A force this size reduces the fragility of the current air combat capability by adding depth through numbers and provides the government with a much broader range of options.

The flexibility of packaged air combat aircraft means they can quickly swing between roles and locations in a matter of hours. Missions can range from air policing and regional assurance to cruise missile defence, maritime strike and counter-air missions. Combat aircraft can be permanently stationed on both the west and east coasts.

The United States is the only country that could supply 36 fighters quickly. The obvious choice is the F-35A, since Lockheed Martin is pushing out 150 fighters of that design annually. Moreover, acquiring aircraft of designs that are already in-service avoids the risks inherent in introducing new types.

Over the long-term, policy settings such backing the development of long-range autonomous and teamed systems can be put in place to make us more strategically secure. But what we need now is an air combat system that helps us understand, decide and act.

The building blocks are in place. The RAAF operates the Wedgetail airborne surveillance, P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and MC-55A Peregrine electromagnetic surveillance aircraft. Combined with the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar network and Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, these give us a reasonable understanding of what is happening in our region and where.

But there must be greater emphasis on the action part of the system—the combat aircraft—because deterrence is about the potential for response.

This is an ambitious proposal that would require significant investment in airbase and support infrastructure, particularly in the north and west of the country. But as a realistic, actionable plan that secures Australia’s future it is within our reach. And what’s more, it can be attained in years, not decades.

Something old, something new: the very practical rules of Chinese aircraft development

Year-end revelations of two new Chinese combat aircraft designs, the Chengdu J-36 and the Shenyang J-XX, should have put an end to the idea that China’s aerospace and defense industry just copies the West.

Yet sometimes China does produce copies, for good practical reasons. At other times it just does its best with the technology it happens to have available.

Here are some principles that Chinese military aeronautics development follows.

Copy if possible and necessary. The Xi’an KJ-600 configuration copies the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye’s, down to details. As on the E-2, one of the inboard fins of the four-fin tail has a moving rudder and the other doesn’t. That works on the Hawkeye, so why do it any other way? There’s a reason that the Hawkeye is still in production after 66 years.

KJ-600. Original image source unknown.

Good enough. The Xi’an H-6 bomber is the Soviet Tu-16, 12 days younger than the B-52. But at the age of 55, the design got a complete makeover from the Chinese industry: a new forward fuselage housing a three-member crew, all with ejection seats and glass displays, and a multi-mode radar. 1970s Russian engines replaced the 1950s originals.

The H-6K update and later versions provide the Chinese air force and naval aviation force with a heavy weapons platform with some features that even the forthcoming B-52J (a B-52 update with new engines) cannot match: the Chinese bomber has six wing pylons and an ability to carry an outsize store on its centerline.

Innovate to meet urgent needs. Those stores include not only an air-launched boost-glide weapon but the AVIC WZ-8, one of a group of very innovative Chinese military drones that represent a much more creative culture than what we see in Western aerospace.

WZ-8. Image: Wikipedia.

The WZ-8 is an air-launched, runway-recoverable drone with a blended-delta shape and rocket propulsion. It has (by US intelligence estimates) a speed of Mach 3 at 30,000 metres altitude and a range around 500 nautical miles (900km) including a long gliding descent.

In most respects, it could have been designed and built in the 1950s. But a remarkable feature of the WZ-8, visible on the website of a company specialising in additive manufacturing, is that the entire center-section box, the structural heart of the aircraft, is 3D printed in titanium.

The WZ-8 is the definition of a point design—an inflexible one intended for a single purpose. China regards the ability to attack US aircraft carriers as a strategic goal. And it’s well known that the US Navy relies on its carriers’ ability to move fast and far in the time between when they’re detected and when an attack on them arrives. Jamming and decoys help. The WZ-8’s job is a last-minute reconnaissance sortie to locate the carrier.

Borrowing technology that the West has ignored. The Guizhou WZ-7 Soaring Dragon drone, in service in small numbers, resembles a Northrop Grumman Global Hawk in size and body shape. But it has a four-surface joined wing.

Advantages claimed for the joined wing include combining a skinny wing shape (high aspect ratio, to the aerodynamicists), thinness and sweep. The result is an unusual combination of high speed and low drag.

The joined wing was invented in the US and has been studied by NASA several times, but the space-fixated agency never found budget to demonstrate it in flight. The Chinese designers would have found plenty of open-source data to work from.

 

WZ-7. Image: Wikipedia.

But another drone, Shenyang’s WZ-9 Divine Eagle, has no parallel. It is a high-altitude carrier for two large-aperture radar arrays. Its status is uncertain. It was first seen in 2015 and reappeared on video in late December. The two radar antennas occupy separate fuselages, connected at their front and rear extremities by a wing and canard, with a single engine above the wing. With no crew and high-aspect-ratio wings, the drone can fly higher than a big-cabin crewed platform and has a longer radar horizon.

The WZ-9’s unique shape indicates something about China’s electronics technology. The designers must believe that their radars are so efficient that the cost in weight of carrying two separate units, each with its own power supply, is acceptable. The concept also shows that China can rely on using datalinks alone to operate a complex radar system.

The WZ-9 and WZ-8 typify another trend in China’s technology: firing weapons from one platform (a ship, submarine, aircraft or ground vehicle) by using targeting data from another source. Western experts already believe that China’s growing, diverse fleet of airborne radar systems can be used for direct weapon guidance. The WZ-9 allows weapon-quality guidance to be extended farther without endangering a large crew on an aircraft that cannot defend itself.

Viewed as a group, alongside new combat aircraft like the J-36 and J-XX (J-XDS, according to some sources), these programs also illustrate another, hugely important feature of Chinese aerospace development: the sheer number of new and unique projects.

An engineer who started at Chinese fighter specialist Chengdu Aircraft in the late 1990s could have successively joined new development programs for four combat-aircraft types—the JF-17, J-10, J-20 and J-36. That engineer could also have worked on major upgrades and engine changes for the first three of those. All have entered service or are on track to do so. Working at rival Shenyang Aircraft would provide a similar experience level, with Xi’an Aircraft not far behind.

That engineer’s US counterpart might have worked on one new program from inception to service entry—if he or she had chosen the right company to start with.

It is that growing experience gap, rather than individual systems, that should worry us more than it does.

China’s big new combat aircraft: an airborne cruiser against air and surface targets

The speed, agility, range and stealth of an individual aircraft type are still important, but they’re no longer the whole story of air combat. Advances in sensing, processing and communications are changing military operations.

The Chengdu J-36, the big Chinese combat aircraft that first appeared on 26 December, has been developed to exploit these changes and support China’s strategic goal: to establish regional dominance, including the ability to annex Taiwan by force.

If J-36s can fly supersonically without using afterburning, as the prototype’s shape suggests they will, each will be able to get into and out of battle faster and more safely than conventional fighters and bombers, which cruise subsonically. A high degree of stealth will greatly help J-36s in penetrating defences. Supersonic cruise would also mean each J-36 could fly more missions in a given period.

The design’s big main weapon bays are sized for considerable air-to-surface missiles, which J-36s could launch against such targets as airfields, aircraft carriers and air-defence batteries. With great speed and height, J-36s could also throw inexpensive glide bombs farther than other aircraft could.

The main weapon bays are big enough to carry unusually large air-to-air missiles for engaging aircraft at great range, including vital support units such as tankers and air-surveillance radar planes. Targeting data for this might come from other aircraft, ships, satellites or ground sources. The missiles might also be launched at fighters at ranges that keep J-36s safe from counterattack.

J-36s are themselves likely to be sources of targeting data for other aircraft and for ships, using large passive and active sensors that aircraft of such size can easily carry. They may command aircraft that fly with them. In all this, they’d use radio links that are hard for an enemy to detect.

To call the J-36 an airborne cruiser may not be far off the mark—and may call into question the West’s decision to prioritise development and production of fighters that are, by comparison, mere torpedo boats.

(An earlier article in this series technically assesses the design of the J-36. The type’s designation is likely but not certain.)

For the Taiwan mission, China’s principal opposing force is US-led air power, comprising the US Air Force and the US Navy’s aircraft carriers, with support from Japan, Australia, Taiwan and maybe South Korea and others. Air power from China’s opponents can hinder its maritime and amphibious operations, resulting in slower progress and higher casualties.

So, counter-air capability is crucial for China. This is what the US thinks of as China’s anti-access and area denial capability. It includes surface-to-air weapons, fighters, air-base attacks and the information realm.

To understand where the J-36 fits in, start by considering China’s current force, of which the Chengdu J-20 is the spearhead. The J-20 is fast and stealthy, with good range for a fighter, but its weapon bays are limited to short-range and medium-range air-to-air weapons. Like the F-35, it is more detectable outside its forward quadrant. That becomes a greater vulnerability in a networked environment, where a sensor platform on your beam may not be well placed to launch a weapon but will pass your track to one that is.

The long-range Xi’an H-6 bomber, used as a missile carrier, can launch attacks at air bases throughout the Western Pacific. But its effect is limited to the warheads of up to six costly missiles that must fly far enough to keep their vulnerable launch aircraft safe.

The J-36 combines speed and range with all-aspect stealth. Potential internal loads include such long-range air-to-air missiles as the PL-17, which the J-20 cannot carry internally. Heavier, air-to-surface missiles would be aimed at airfields and warships. It also probably supports the kind of mass-precision attacks made possible by accurate, more autonomous weapons, or—as autonomous technology advances—the carriage of loitering munitions and jammers.

The J-36’s smaller outboard weapon bays might accommodate defensive and support weapons, possibly on extending rails like the J-20’s side bays.

The large transparent side apertures in the forward fuselage could be wide-field-of-view passive warning and cueing systems. But there’s another possibility: if you wanted to integrate a high-energy anti-missile laser into an aircraft, with a hemisphere-plus field of fire but without unstealthy turrets, it might from the outside look like those transparencies. A single optical chain could feed left and right steerable heads under the conformal windows. Cue panic.

Speed is not just valuable for survivability, although it does erode missile engagement envelopes. Even Mach 1.8 supersonic cruise halves flight time and greatly increases sortie rate compared with a subsonic-cruise aircraft.

The US considered developing a supersonic strike aircraft in the early 2000s. But with 9/11 and the cost of the F-35 program, a high-speed project could not get funded. ‘Response time, and cost per target killed, were the two holy grails,’ a Northrop Grumman engineer commented in early 2001. The supersonic aircraft was big and complex, but the sortie generation rate was far higher than that of subsonic alternatives, and fewer aircraft were needed. And it could use cheap, unpowered glide weapons with a stand-off range estimated at 170km from a Mach 2 launch.

Speed on one side of a conflict is an important advantage. If the J-36 can penetrate to threaten bases in the second island chain, forcing the US to move B-21s, B-52s and other high-value assets further back, US strike sortie rate and effectiveness will diminish.

It’s important to keep in mind that the J-36 will be part of a family of systems and a network of capabilities. The appearance over the holiday season of the KJ-3000 airborne early warning and control system, based on the Xi’an Y-20 airlifter, is significant.

China has produced five different airborne radar systems since 2003, more than any other nation, all based on the technology of active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs). It has expanded their role beyond that of forward-passing adversary track data to fighter aircraft. AESA radars can update tracks much faster than a rotating-antenna radar, so these systems can provide guidance-quality midcourse updates to missiles.

Compared with the propeller-driven KJ-500, the KJ-3000 can be moved faster and farther forward to support an operation, and it can fly higher for greater sensor range. Working with a KJ-3000, the J-36s could launch missiles while remaining radar-silent.

If its speed and stealth allow it safely to get close to the enemy, a J-36 itself will be able to provide targeting data to other weapons, such as missiles launched by H-6s that prudently stay well behind it. It will also be the command and control hub for other aircraft, crewed and uncrewed. If it is a two-seater, the second crew member will likely be a force manager.

As for how to classify the J-36, too many people have rushed to call it a ‘sixth-generation fighter’.

The ‘fifth-generation’ term, invented in Russia, was picked up by Lockheed Martin as a marketing tool in the early 2000s. What Lockheed Martin would call 5-gen fighters combine supersonic speed and maneuverability with some degree of stealth. The Chengdu J-20 fighter is fifth-generation by that standard.

But this ‘generation’ taxonomy misleads more than it informs, because combat aircraft designs need not and do not fall into discrete sequential groups of characteristics.

And ‘fighter’, ‘bomber’ and ‘strike’ definitions are getting less clear. Most Boeing F-15s, nominally fighters, have been built as strike aircraft, and the fighter-derived Sukhoi Su-34 is another step down the same path. Designed against air and land threats, the J-36 is even larger than the Su-34. Its size and flight performance put it into its own category, for which there is no name. Maybe ‘airborne cruiser’ will catch on.

China’s big new combat aircraft: a technical assessment

China’s aircraft industry celebrated Mao Zedong’s birthday in style, unveiling three aircraft developments that will comprise an air warfare family of systems for the 2030s and beyond. One, from Shenyang, looks like a demonstrator for a fighter-size aircraft with next-generation stealth, possibly carrier-compatible. Also new was an airborne warning and control variant of the Xi’an Y-20 airlifter, the latest in an unparalleled air-surveillance line-up.

The most spectacular debutant, making its maiden flight on December 26 was from Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group: a stealth combat aircraft that various anonymous commenters on the Chinese internet identify as the J-36. It is the largest combat aircraft designed and developed in China, and the second-largest to fly anywhere in 35 years.

The J-36 (if that really is its name) is designed to combine supersonic performance with all-aspect stealth. That’s also the goal of the US Next Generation Air Dominance program, currently stalled by budget and policy issues. (A second article in this series looks at the J-36’s roles.)

There may be more. Anonymous Chinese internet commenters with better records for accuracy than others say that the new arrivals are part of an air warfare ‘tea set’ and that we have not yet seen the ‘teapot’—the long-expected H-20 stealth bomber; this will probably be an analogue to the Northrop Grumman B-21. Nonetheless, the J-36 alone has given observers enough to chew on.

Its revelation followed the pattern as the appearance of the J-20 fighter exactly 14 years earlier. No technical details have been released officially, and it’s unlikely that any will be soon, but a prototype for the design flew in daylight from an airfield in a dense urban area, and the Chinese government permitted images to be released.

The aircraft was chased by a two-seat J-20B, giving a good indication of its size. It’s longer than the J-20—about 23 metres—and its double-delta wing spans an estimated 19 metres, with around 200 square metres of wing area. (The F-22’s wing area is 78 square metres.) As I commented on the Global Combat Aircraft Program’s Tempest design, large, moderately swept deltas can accommodate a lot of fuel and are very useful if the designer is looking for long range.

The tandem-wheel main landing gear units point to a big aircraft, since single wheel, tyre and brake units are inadequate at weights above about 35 tonnes. The main weapon bay, about 7.6 metres long, and supplementary side bays for smaller weapons also suggest considerable size. A 55-tonne take-off weight is a reasonable guess, two-thirds more than the J-20 and compared with an estimated 82 tonnes for the Northrop Grumman B-21.

The J-36 planform unequivocally speaks of stealth and supersonic speed. It is a modified version of the Hopeless Diamond, the first shot by Lockheed’s Skunk Works at all-aspect stealth, which got that name because it could not be made to fly with 1970s technology. Another variation on the planform was tried in 2003 with Northrop Grumman’s X-47A Pegasus unmanned combat aircraft demonstrator, which did fly. Once.

On the J-36, the diamond is stretched into a double-delta to reduce transonic and supersonic drag. It has a leading-edge kink, a change in sweep angle. That’s not ideal from the standpoint of radar cross-section but, as Northrop Grumman’s cranked-arrow designs have shown, it can be lived with. There is an unbroken edge and chine line around the aircraft, and all sensor apertures are inside it (not the case with the J-20 and other fighters). That is the foundation of all-aspect stealth.

There are no vertical tail surfaces and no visible control surfaces other than the wing trailing edges, with five moving panels on each side and one behind each engine; such surfaces are called ‘elevons’. (It’s possible that there are flight-control effectors that we have not yet seen, such as inlaid panels in the upper surface of the wing.) The hinge lines of trailing-edge surfaces appear to be covered by flexible skins. The outer pair of surfaces are split horizontally to form brake-rudders, as on the B-2 and B-21, and were fully open in all pictures of the first flight.

Elevons have reliably provided pitch and roll control since the 1950s, but dispensing with the vertical tail is a challenge, and more so with a supersonic aircraft. The J-36 can rely on its brake-rudders when it is not close to an enemy. But, for stealth in a threat zone, it will need to keep them closed and use both aerodynamic and propulsive effects to keep the pointy end in front—which brings us to another almost unique feature.

J-36 has three engines, side-by-side at the rear of the broad centre-body. F-22-like inlets of caret shape, with swept and canted lips, under the wing leading edge, supply the left and right engines, and the center engine is fed by a diverterless supersonic inlet above the body.

The three engine exhausts are ahead of and above the trailing edge, which comprises what appear to be articulating panels. Full turbofan reheat boost would impose scary thermal and acoustic loads on the trailing edge structure. (The trenches at the rear of the Northrop YF-23 into which its engines exhausted did not endure the environment as well as expected.) This tends to support the idea that the J-36’s engines are either non-afterburning or have limited afterburning used for transonic acceleration.

Some commentators have suggested that the J-36 has three engines because China does not have an engine design large enough to power it in a twin installation. This doesn’t seem likely. Even if your available engines were delivering only two-thirds of the thrust required for a production-size twin-engine aeroplane, you could build an 80 percent linear-scale demonstrator with two-thirds the wetted area, and it would be both easier to develop and more representative of the final configuration.

There has to be a good reason to justify the added complexity. One possibility is that the two outer engines provide enough thrust for subsonic flight, while operating at full thrust and peak efficiency, and the third cuts in for supersonic cruise.

A variation on this theme would be to have a center engine optimized for supersonic flight, which would deliver some of the advantages of a variable-cycle engine without its complexity and risk (I can hear the logisticians screaming, 12,000km away) but in a configuration that could be fitted later with a VCE.

One former combat aircraft designer suggests that the trijet arrangement could be influenced by stability and control considerations, allowing for symmetrical thrust vectoring in pitch with one engine inoperative.

The trailing edge flaps would provide thrust vectoring in pitch when used symmetrically and in roll with the outer engines’ exhaust deflected asymmetrically (while still using the center engine for pitch). It is entirely possible that fluidic control (injecting fan-stream air asymmetrically into the nozzle) could be used in the yaw axis.

Three engines in the thrust class of 22,000 lb (10,000kg or 100-kilonewtons) should be enough to make the J-36 a supercruiser—an aircraft that can fly supersonically without using fuel-guzzling afterburning. Its sweep angles point to doing this at Mach 1.8 to Mach 2.0 (1900km/h to 2200km/h, depending on altitude). The key is not so much achieving enough static thrust but building the engine to withstand the high temperatures at the exit of its compressor. China’s engine technology has been headed in this direction.

Agility? High maneuverability is in opposition to combining supersonic cruise and range—the F-22 being deficient in the latter—because it demands large control forces and high installed thrust (and the weight it brings). Physics are a limitation: the J-36’s trailing-edge controls and thrust-vectoring systems must provide all the control force for the aircraft, unassisted by vertical stabilizers, canards or pitch-recovery devices like the Sukhoi Su-57’s movable leading-edge root extensions.

As for the need for maneuverability by a supersonic stealth aircraft packing a heavy weapon load and long-range sensors, the reader is referred to the classic movie short, Bambi Meets Godzilla.

We will learn more about the J-36 as it follows the pattern of the J-20 through a pre-production and service test phase. There are other puzzles about the design: apparently large electro-optical sensor windows on either side of the nose, and a dark-tinted canopy that wouldn’t be road-legal in many US states. But one thing can be said firmly: those who accuse Chengdu chief engineer Yang Wei and other Chinese designers of being copyists need to take a seat.

New USAF focuses: fighter-like drones and electromagnetic warfare

‘Listening to new options’, according to a senior civilian advisor, is a key piece of the US Air Force process of force redesign.

One of those options is using the fighter-like drones that will come from the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, which was central to a panel discussion at the US Mitchell Institute’s Air Power Futures Forum in November. Another is a tighter focus on electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO), the currently favored term for electromagnetic warfare (EW) and related activities.

CCAs, formerly called loyal wingmen, will be much cheaper than crewed fighters and are intended to work with them and enhance their value—for example, by moving forward to detect targets. EMSO encompasses such decisive effects as seeing what is going on in a battle while blinding or deceiving the enemy’s sensors, foiling the guidance of its weapons, and disrupting its communications while preserving one’s own.

Both designs chosen for the CCA program’s Increment 1, from General Atomics and Anduril, have passed critical design review, according to Colonel Timothy Helfrich, cyber systems lead in Air Force Material Command. The project is ‘ahead in some areas’ of an overall objective to achieve initial operational capability by the end of the decade, he said—because demands had been relaxed where necessary. ‘We need to be able to know when good enough is enough. Instead of adding features, we have made tough decisions.’

Helfrich added that the air force had learned ‘appetite control’ in Increment 1, and that attitude is going into Increment 2, which is to produce new designs and will be the subject of concept refinement studies with industry early in 2025. ‘It’s dangerously close to getting started,’ he said.

Pilots are getting experience with CCAs in the complex Joint Simulation Environment, developed to support the F-35, as well as with live surrogate aircraft. One lesson: ‘Pilots are finding that they can take custody of more CCAs than we thought.’ Helfrich said. The F-35 has flown with Kratos’s Valkyrie test aircraft to demonstrate ‘disaggregation of sensors’—sharing sensor tasks between two aircraft. Helfrich calls the technique ‘unbelievably powerful’.

Mike Shortsleeve, vice president for strategy and business development for General Atomics, said that the first aircraft built under the Increment 1 contract, based on the XQ-67A design, would fly soon. Diem Salmon, vice president for air dominance for Anduril stressed that ‘the schedule is the capability, being able to deliver at the point of need is the capability.’

The air force’s goal is to own and manage a common architecture to build autonomy into CCAs, Helfrich said. Rather than ‘platform-specific autonomy’, the government side is building an industry consortium to create an evolving architecture. His point was echoed by Mike Benitez, director of strategic product development at software-focused Shield AI: ‘You need two things. You need a standard and you need governance—and not one-and-done; it requires continuous involvement.’

Autonomy is not easy. Benitez notes that ‘for every hour of mission autonomy, you need 100 hours of hardware-in-the-loop testing. Behind that is 10,000 hours of high-fidelity, real-time systems-in-the-loop testing, and that’s backed up by 100,000 hours of faster than real-time, low-fidelity systems simulation.’

Once that’s done the picture changes. In development, ‘processing is huge,’ says Shortsleeve, but once you’ve done it, the decision-making by the system is simplified and within the capacity of commercial off-the-shelf chips.

Result: CCAs will evolve in the direction of more autonomy and more onboard sensor processing, increasing the number of vehicles one pilot can manage and lightening the load on communications systems. But in the process, they will rely more on advances in EMSO to keep their systems up to date in the face of a threat that will also evolve rapidly.

‘If we lose in the spectrum, we lose the fight in the air,’ says Colonel Larry Fenner, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, ‘and we’re going to lose quickly. Our job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.’

The wing was activated at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida just over three years ago, and its primary function is to translate electronic and other intelligence into the mission data files (MDFs) loaded into active and passive EW systems. It assumed oversight of the F-35 Partner Support Complex, which manages the MDFs for non-Israeli exported F-35s.

There is a back-story here: as panel moderator Brigadier General (retired) Houston Cantwell explained, ‘for the last three decades, EMSO fell below the Air Force cut-line’ in budget requests and was not properly funded. Cantwell blamed budgets, but active EW, such as jamming, fell by the wayside in the era when stealth was dominant. Panelist Chris Moeller was from the BAE Systems EW business in Nashua, New Hampshire, which was once Lockheed Sanders, and in the early 1990s, the director of engineering at Sanders declared that ‘we see traditional jammer business going the way of buggy whips.’

It didn’t.

The hardware side is coming back, Moeller citing the L3Harris EA-37B Compass Call communications jamming system, built into an adaptation of the Gulfstream G550 business jet, as a system comprising ‘20-plus third-party apps on a BAE baseline’. The open architecture runs with the help of flexible software-defined radio (SDR) components.

Together with a modular approach to assembling the system—and sharing modules between different applications and uses, that opens the way, Moeller says, to upgrading without having to find more space, supply more power and carry more weight. It’s a concept already used on space systems, which is the near-term goal as EMSO technology reaches towards the target of ‘cognitive EW’—systems that can detect a previously unknown signal and respond without human intervention.

‘We’re not there yet,’ says Fenner about cognitive EW, but the government and industry are working on ways to use artificial intelligence and machine learning on the ground, to speed the flow of new data into front-line systems. ‘The data’, adds Fenner, ‘is the weapon.’

World War I was the crucible of air power. Ukraine looks the same for drones

Some experts on air power will tell you that Ukraine is not the best place to learn lessons. Neither side in Ukraine enjoys air superiority, retired Lieutenant General David Deptula of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute think-tank said last month. ‘We want to never find ourselves in such a situation’.

There’s always a need for balance between paying too little attention to lessons that challenge conventional thinking and generalising from a single type of conflict. That happened when the US Army and Pentagon bosses pushed the US Air Force into spending too much in 2008 to 2015 on drones that could be used only where an enemy couldn’t shoot at them.

But we seem to be seeing a new kind of air battle—lower, slower at close quarters and in a physical environment where fighter aircraft cannot intervene affordably or effectively. Could it be that Ukraine is to small unmanned systems what World War I was to aircraft?

It’s hard to overcome cognitive dissonance when you’re listening to speakers call for investment in aircraft engines that will cost well north of $10 million each, as I was last month at an Air Force Association meeting, and the overnight news was a devastating deep-strike attack on the Toropets ammunition depot. The attack involved detonations that triggered earthquake sensors and was carried out by drones that had propellers and snowmobile engines and flew flying just off the deck at 150km/h.

The impact of the unmanned was very apparent a few weeks later at the annual show of the Association of the US Army (AUSA). Not long ago, AUSA’s exhibitors filled the caverns of the Washington Convention Center with mine-resistant vehicles that looked like bank vaults perched on creaking truck chassis and loomed over booths full of plastic or ceramic armor, not to mention mine-resistant underpants. (Really.)

This year, much of the hardware was suspended from the ceiling and could fly. What wasn’t up there was variously designed to either control or manage said hardware or destroy or jam it. For a Brit of a certain age, it was inescapably a reminder of General Jumbo, a plump and geeky kid in the weekly Beano comic who commanded a miraculous army of miniature armed robots.

As with aircraft in World War I, drone operations in Ukraine started with artillery spotting before evolving quickly into direct attack with improvised weapons and then into finding targets well behind the front lines. And just as in World War I, the first air-to-air engagements have taken place, and defensive weapons are being employed on the ground.

Tiny-payload vehicles are shockingly lethal against expensive protected targets. From the start of Ukraine operations, it was clear that even grenades dropped from first-person view (FPV) commercial drones have effectively zero miss distance. They act as detonators rather than warheads, using the target’s fuel and ammunition to destroy it.

A new Royal United Services Institute paper makes the case that a future force will require a panoply of defensive systems to protect against drones. This will include short-range, mobile radar and electro-optical sensors, a countermeasures-resistant communications system, drone interceptors (such as Anduril’s tail-sitting Roadrunner) and missiles and guns with burst-at-range pre-fragmented ammunition. All this will require a software environment to identify and prioritise threats.

Killing drones may cost more per kill than the drone itself, but that is not the point. A ground force that cannot do it will either not survive at all or will spend so much time and effort moving, dispersing and adding passive protection to its equipment—like the Russian army’s cope cages and turtle tanks—that it will be ineffective.

Signs are emerging of a technological arms race in drone warfare, in which unmanned systems respond to anti-drone technologies by becoming more diverse and resilient and by sensing at greater range. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) at AUSA showed a concept for a system named Ariel, based on an automated mission manager that tasks individual anti-drone equipment automatically. Human controllers, seated at terminals in an armoured vehicle and communicating with the robotic systems via an airborne data relay, approve the mission plan. The Ariel system interprets the commander’s intent and tells the individual vehicles where to go and what to look for.

Different sensors need to be in different places for best performance, so the Ariel system envisages a common drone platform that can carry radar, passive electronic, optical or magnetic sensors or a communications package. IAI is working with startup Aerotor on the Apus 25, a quadrotor powered by a multi-fuel generator driving variable-pitch rotors. Free of battery limits, it has an endurance of up to nine hours. The Ariel system also includes unmanned ground combat vehicles, remote weapons stations on a small tracked vehicle.

You can extend the World War I analogy further and argue that Ukraine’s long-range attacks can be compared to the birth of strategic bombing. A retired USAF officer with experience in unconventional operations agrees that low-and-slow is a vulnerability in high-end air defense systems. Tracking low-altitude targets calls for Doppler processing pick out moving targets while ignoring ground clutter and slow-moving objects such as ground vehicles and birds. And that’s where low-slow targets can be a problem. The Doppler processing ignores them.

Ukraine’s drone attacks have been bolder since Ukrainian forces shot down two of Russia’s handful of Beriev A-50 airborne radars. Nonetheless an undisclosed number of Ukraine’s drones have been shot down. Ukrainian air defenses have also blunted Russian drone attacks. The crucial difference is that the Ukrainian survivors seem to be accurate enough to target specific aimpoints within sprawling energy and munitions storage facilities.

How this is done is not known, but one candidate is optical navigation—comparing visual images of the terrain with map databases. This is not unlike the software that journalism operations such as Bellingcat use to locate the sites where videos have been taken, and it has become much more accessible now that global terrain imagery is ubiquitous. Israeli missile-defense guru Uzi Rubin said a decade ago that ‘if you have an iPad, you have a guidance system’.

Whatever the technology, there is a lesson: I can lose a lot of cheap unmanned weapons, as long as the ones that get through can get close enough to detonate the enemy’s ammunition or fuel.

The rise of small, fighter-like drones in US Air Force thinking

You only had to walk into the exhibit hall at last week’s Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) convention in Maryland to realise that US air power is having a moment.

A prime spot to the left of the entrance was occupied by the company Anduril. Now in its second year as an exhibitor, the startup’s exhibit was as large as any of the major defence companies. Anduril’s 32-year-old co-founder, Palmer Luckey, made his first billions from a gaming accessory, enjoys Twitter catfights and regards Hawaiian shirts as business attire.

That might seem far removed from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s commissioning of the bluest of blue-ribbon panels to rebuild the service’s modernisation plans. Members include three 21st century US Air Force chiefs of staff (John Jumper, Norton Schwartz and Steve Goldfein) but also General Joe Ralston, Paul Kaminski and Natalie Crawford—some of the people who steered the USAF’s adoption of stealth more than 40 years ago.

But Anduril, Luckey and Kendall’s council of elders could not be more closely interconnected. Their linkage was represented on the AFA show floor by two full-size aeroplane models and one real aircraft. The models represented designs that Anduril and General Atomics were selected to build in April for the air force’s program for collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs)—small, fighter-like uncrewed aeroplanes that would fly with and support piloted fighters. (Such aircraft were formerly called ‘loyal wingmen’.) The real aircraft on the show floor was General Atomics’ XQ-67A prototype, also uncrewed.

CCAs are the disruptive agent in USAF force planning, which has invested heavily in a structure that risks being overmatched in the Western Pacific. The expansion of Chinese counter-air forces—fighters, missiles, airborne radars and air-warfare ships—presents more threats than the projected US force can handle, regardless of quality or training.

Hence the watchwords for the CCA effort are ‘speed’ and ‘affordable mass’—the ability to generate credible threats for Chinese forces at a fraction of the cost of crewed aircraft and to start fielding in numbers by the late 2020s.

CCAs are part of the USAF’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program and are much of the reason why the manned element of NGAD is being rescoped under the guidance of Kendall’s expert panel. What was probably a large, exquisite and enormously expensive fighter concept has been scrapped. One reason: crewed fighter designed to operate with CCAs is not the same as one that fights without them and might be smaller and cheaper.

This presents a host of challenges and choices that must be addressed in short order. The Anduril and General Atomics aircraft—conventional high-subsonic aircraft, about the size of small jet trainers—are test platforms, as are the Boeing Ghost Bat in Australia and the Northrop Grumman Model 437 Vanguard in the US. They are designed to allow live evaluations of CCA concepts of operations (conops) to determine how the crewless aircraft will be controlled and operated alongside current and future combat aircraft and support assets.

A good deal of wargaming and simulation is being done. USAF Materiel Command chief General Duke Richardson, speaking at the convention, pointed to the value of the Joint Simulation Environment, a complex virtual battlespace developed to support the F-35, as a tool for virtual prototyping.

What emerges from wargaming (including a 2023 AFA Mitchell Institute game for which I was a lead author) is that adding capable uncrewed aircraft en masse to the force changes everything. For example, if CCAs are sufficiently cheap and if enough are available, the risk calculus changes dramatically. Major General Joe Kunkel, director of wargaming at USAF headquarters, summed up how a CCA could be treated: ‘We send it off and say, “good luck, little buddy”.’

For Increment 1 of the CCA program, the USAF selected General Atomics as an experienced uncrewed-aircraft contractor—after 20 years of production, it is hardly an upstart—and Anduril, the new kid.

Anduril has been putting in a lot of conops work over privately owned land, with a fleet of manned surrogate aircraft. The vice president of Anduril’s air dominance and strike division, Jason Levin, pointed to work that went well beyond the aircraft’s outer mould line. The company’s philosophy is that ‘people should not have to interact with the aircraft in order to turn it around’, meaning pre- and post-flight checks on the ground should be automated.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems president Dave Alexander, meanwhile, argued the need to ‘get rid of scheduled maintenance, and design it so you don’t touch it in the field’—pointing to one aircraft from the company that had logged 7000 flying hours in a year.

For the USAF, the purpose of early Increments in the CCA effort is to evaluate conops and tactics. Increment 1 will be aimed at air-to-air combat, Kunkel said, describing the CCA in that role as ‘a missile truck’ with ‘the greatest impact and speed to field.’ In the AFA’s wargame, mission planners sent CCAs armed with Amraam air-to-air missiles ahead of crewed aircraft, accepting increased risk but permitting closer, faster and more lethal missile engagements.

Increment 2 CCAs will be designed to support electronic attack and demonstrate a ‘resilient sensing grid’, according to Kunkel, together with an expanded weapon suite.

The second batch will evaluate ‘different styles of sustainment, and different modes of take-off and landing’. An emerging requirement is to operate CCAs in small, disaggregated units in the first island chain (from Japan to Indonesia) using shorter or improvised runways substantially shorter than the 8000-foot (2400-metre) military standard. This reduces the range requirement for the CCA, shortens response time and potentially increases sortie rates, but will require mobility, camouflage, concealment, deception and air defence to survive Chinese attacks.

Work on subsystems and even weapons is proceeding in parallel with the airframes. Raytheon showed mock-ups of small, light, air-cooled multifunction radio-frequency arrays, together with a small air-to-air missile. Named Peregrine, the missile is designed to occupy half as much space as an AIM-120 and is the outcome of 10 years of work in collaboration with the USAF. Anduril showed its Iris infra-red search and track (IRST) system, based on a long-wave staring array. Highly applicable to an air-to-air CCA, Iris is being pitched now for adversary training aircraft, given that almost all new Chinese fighters have IRSTs.

Engines are attracting attention. Efficient turbofans in the suitable category of 3,000 to 5,000 pounds (13 to 22 kilonewtons) of thrust exist, but they cost in the low millions each, a price the CCA model cannot support. GE Aerospace has teamed with new arrival Kratos to develop a family of engines combining GE’s technology with the smaller company’s experience in short-life, low-cost engines. Although the initial GEK800 product has less than 1000 pounds of thrust, the team has its sights on CCA.

The advent of CCAs and planned changes to NGAD came as a shock to the industry, against a background of contentious politics and rising world tension. Upstart companies add more uncertainty to the mix. But Kendall and senior Pentagon leaders seem to have made up their minds that the hour of the unmanned combat aircraft is upon us. Let’s hope they haven’t got it wrong.

Air force chief says RAAF ramping up preparations for ‘grey zone’ missions

While the Royal Australian Air Force must be prepared to fight in a high-level, state-on-state conflict, it must also be able to operate in an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific ‘grey zone’ where competing powers use influence and coercion.

RAAF chief Mel Hupfeld says in an interview with The Strategist that since strategic goals are being won and lost in ways that avoid force-on-force conflict, the air force cannot afford to ignore these tactics just because they fall short of all-out warfare. ‘Choosing not to engage simply accelerates an adversary’s chances of success’, Air Marshal Hupfeld says.

Australia’s 2020 defence strategic update found that the regional security environment had deteriorated far more rapidly and in ways that could not have been predicted four years ago when the last defence white paper was produced. The assumption that Australia would have a decade’s warning of a looming conflict was no longer valid, it said.

As the service chiefs put the measures outlined in the update and the accompanying force structure plan into effect, new weapons for the air force will include long-range anti-ship missiles.

To help guide the RAAF in its evolving role, Hupfeld has issued a strategy setting out how the air force must adapt to carry out operations in the grey zone as part of an integrated approach across the Australian Defence Force.

He says a simplistic model of ‘peace’ and ‘war’ no longer adequately describes the geostrategic environment and, in an environment of strategic competition, malign actors exploit the grey zone to avoid clear escalation points that legitimise a traditional military response.

While high-end warfighting remains a core function of air power, growing strategic competition means the RAAF must be ready to operate with the rest of the ADF to provide the maximum strategic effect across a spectrum ranging from cooperation to conflict.

Hupfeld says that historically the RAAF has focused on high-end, state-on-state warfare, but a disproportionate focus on that level of conflict may cause the force to miss critical opportunities to contribute strategically through air and space power.

‘It is therefore necessary to broaden air force’s strategic aperture to encompass much greater utility than merely contributing to high-end warfighting.’

Many emerging international security challenges will not be suited to force-on-force engagement, he says. Rather, they will require the RAAF to provide an enduring contribution to statecraft.

‘To do this, air force must provide a suite of capabilities and effects that present strategic off-ramps and opportunities for the joint force at the lower ends of the spectrum of conflict, cognisant of the subtleties of the current strategic environment.

‘In short, air force must be part of Australia’s ability to synchronise and mobilise all aspects of national power.’

This whole process will require creativity on the part of personnel, and the strategy identifies an underlying tension between the clear and rational guidance and measurable boundaries required by those on air and space operations and the less prescriptive guidance for those working in other areas of the grey zone.

Hupfeld says the air force will empower leaders at all levels to make decisions and to succeed by removing unnecessary administration and bureaucracy and providing the framework to curate and grow ideas that bring an intellectual edge over potential competitors.

‘Platforms obviously are important, but the people that operate them are the real soul of the air force and indeed, the joint force. Our greatest asset is our people. We will continue to develop a skilled and intelligent workforce, a generation of air and space power leaders, and people who understand air and space power and deliver that for the joint force. It’s not just about delivering it for air force.

‘We recognise that we are very strongly technology based, but without the people who know how and when to use this technology, who have strategic awareness and knowledge about the impacts of their actions at all times, this will come to nothing.’

The air force strategy sets the shape of Hupfeld’s intent as commander but it doesn’t tell personnel everything about how they’re going to enact it.

‘What I require them to do is to think about how we shape the air force to get it where we want it to be. A lot of the “how” will come from the people. I want them to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.’

A key goal, Hupfeld says, is for the RAAF to be organised in a manner that optimises effect while reducing administrative burden and unnecessary bureaucracy. ‘Air force provides the opportunity and space for members to curate leading-edge research, honing ideas through to realisation in a safe environment that is failure tolerant’, he says.

The strategy explains Australia’s ‘shape’, ‘deter’ and ‘respond’ defence objectives as areas that support the nation’s interests by maintaining and building national cooperation and military partnerships to engage with key regional decision-makers and partners from a position of trust, deterring behaviour that is counter to Australia’s interests by contributing to whole-of-government efforts to expose and discourage grey-zone tactics and political warfare, and responding to challenges to the national interest, which includes defeating acts of aggression from malign actors and contributing to humanitarian activities.

The strategy provides two accepted methods for achieving deterrence: ‘denial’ to make it physically difficult for an adversary to achieve an objective, and the ability to impose ‘costs’ if necessary to influence an adversary’s strategic calculus.

‘Working in the grey zone is about having presence in our immediate region on a daily basis rather than sending an aircraft after a disaster and saying, “We’re here to help and this is what we can do for you.” Another key to success will be how well our people know the region and how they deepen relationships with their counterparts to better understand what the region wants us to contribute.

‘We’d prefer to be able to operate there and, as we prepare and build for our security, we’re ready to assist and learn from and work with our partners in the region. That can help build security, prosperity and sovereignty across the whole region, which is good for all of us.’

Much of this is not new, says Hupfeld. The RAAF has for many years been sending aircraft out to do humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. ‘But we want to give people a greater sense of what they can contribute when they do that task, when they’re on the ground at work.

‘And if we go out to support an exercise or an activity anywhere in our region, our people need to know that they are part of that engagement strategy.’

The strategy warns that in the competitive emerging environment the air force can no longer afford to plan to use force without considering to how that fits in with Defence’s broader strategic objectives. ‘This will require a far more nuanced approach to the planning and execution of all activities.’

Hupfeld says the RAAF does not just shape, deter and then respond if the first two steps don’t work. ‘We’re responding every day. Every time we send an aircraft out to do a task and support our region, that’s a response, or if we’re responding to Covid or to bushfires we’re responding. We have to be ready to do that all day, every day, basically, and with all of our assets.’

Such missions include being in Japan to help monitor UN sanctions against North Korea and flying maritime surveillance missions to support Malaysia.

‘We engage in maritime domain awareness with partners in the region to help them identify activity that impacts on their security or prosperity so that they can respond appropriately to actions counter to their national interests’, Hupfeld says.

‘But we’ve got to work with them so that it’s what they want, not what we think they want. These are normal activities and while we’re doing them we watch out for any actions within the grey zone which are pushing up to, and just below, the level of conflict.

‘Our ultimate aim is to avoid moving into a conflict environment’, says Hupfeld.

‘So, in this era of competition, maintaining the right balance of keeping our awareness in place versus “shape”, “deter” and “respond” is what we will be doing all day and every day.’

Strategic strike, deterrence and the ghost of the F-111

Some confusion has emerged (see here and here, for example) over strategic strike, where a threat to an adversary’s key war-making assets produces a deterrent effect, and tactical strike, where an effect is sought on the battlefield. The provenance of the concepts in Australian strategic thinking is closely tied to the acquisition of the F-111 fighter bombers.

The Australian government’s decision to acquire 24 F-111s was made in the context of the 1963 federal election and was influenced by the need to replace the Canberra bombers, concerns about Indonesian President Sukarno, and Prime Minister Robert Menzies’s desire to further cement US–Australian relations. Nevertheless, the F-111’s range and operational characteristics made it much more than a Canberra bomber replacement and it introduced a capability that met a perceived strategic concern about communist powers gaining access to bases in the archipelago.

Following the F-111s’ entry into service in 1973, the 1976 ‘Strategic basis’ paper, Australian strategic analysis and defence policy objectives, set out dual force-structure requirements for ‘naval and air strike components capable of deterrence and effective action against maritime forces at sea and neighbouring operational bases’. One was for strategic strike against war-making potential, and one for interdiction. The state of military forces in the region at that time meant the F-111s could hit political targets, strategic headquarters and critical infrastructure with precision and impunity. While there was no credible prospect that this capability would actually be necessary, in the prevailing geostrategic circumstances it still provided a powerful deterrent.

For the next four decades, the F-111s retained their regional strategic strike potential. During that time, military threats from or through the archipelago continued to be regarded as remote. The 1976, 1987 and 1994 defence white papers continued to ritually stress a priority for strike capabilities. The F-111s were recognised as having a significant regional deterrent role, while at the same time there continued to be little sense that Australia would ever have to employ these forces in that way. The strategic strike role seemed justified because of the formidable strike assets in the inventory.

The 2000 white paper argued that strike assets needed to be able ‘to attack hostile forces in the territory of an adversary, in forward operating bases, and in transit to Australia’. The F-111s and the air-to-air refuelled F/A-18s would do the job, augmented by long-range missiles.

After the F-111s were retired, the 2009 white paper continued to describe the strike role as the ability ‘to conduct land strike operations against various strategic and operational military targets, such as an adversary’s operating bases, staging areas and critical military infrastructure’.

The geostrategic situation in East Asia was already changing when the 2016 white paper argued for the now traditional capability for ‘offensive strike operations against the military bases and in-transit forces of a potential adversary’. It added an additional requirement for strike capabilities that ‘allow Australia flexibility in rapidly responding to threats against Australia and providing military contributions to coalition operations in our region and globally’. The distinction between strategic strike and tactical or operational strike capabilities was becoming a little confused.

Initially, the F-111 was a genuine strategic deterrent because the aircraft gave Australia the capacity to degrade the national war-making potential of an adversary based in the archipelago at little cost. It was more potent because of the disparity in economic and military power between Australia and regional nations. Now, the concept of strategic strike has become detached from the means to achieve genuine deterrence and been merged with tactical strike. It’s a hangover from an era of no credible threat and joins ‘fitted for but not with’, ‘warning time’, and ‘expansion force’ as a redundant concept.

A 2018 RAND publication set out three important themes for approaching deterrence: understanding the larger geostrategic context, shaping the thinking of a potential aggressor, and recognising that deterrence happens in a complex decision-making process that unfolds gradually and is not characterised by a single decision point.

The problem for Australian policy with working off the RAND report as a playbook is that it’s written from the perspective of the US deterring major aggression in theatres a long way from North America. The presumptions are those of a great power. So, while three principles it sets out are relevant, the notions of deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial that the report’s authors address are beyond Australia where China is concerned.

Employing long-range missiles against a Chinese base in the Pacific, for example, is not strategic. The power relativities are reversed. Deterrence works better when the stronger power with more options is doing the deterring. RAND paints a more complex picture of effective deterrence than just a single tactical strike, noting that ‘the calculus of cost and risk across a range of possible alternatives’ needs to be changed, ‘causing the potential aggressor to prefer a different option from the one that we are trying to deter’.

China could more easily dissuade Australia from firing on its bases. A binary scenario posing a missile threat against a missile threat is unlikely to prove an effective deterrent when China would have many military means, as well as economic and other options, for achieving its objectives. Discouraging a particular military act doesn’t affect strategic relativities. The potential adversary would not be deterred from aggression more generally.

China’s options to deter Australia from acting seem vastly more persuasive than the reverse. China is the only one in this hypothetical contest that could effectively degrade the other nation’s war-making capacity.

It was the geostrategic situation that made the F-111s seem an effective strategic deterrent. As it never was credible that a major power would become established in the region, in practice only regional states could have been deterred. Now, without the ability to threaten, degrade or destroy China’s essential war-making ability, there’s no strategic deterrence. Strategic deterrence is a game for the nation with the preponderance of power and broad options.

‘Loyal Wingman’ to take Australia’s airpower into the next era

One of the hottest debates among airpower analysts is the role of unmanned systems in future air combat. Australia may have just staked a lead in capability development of unmanned systems with the unveiling of the locally designed and built ‘Loyal Wingman’ unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) that is at the core of the Boeing Air Teaming System. The Loyal Wingman was unveiled in front of Defence Minister Christopher Pyne at the 2019 Avalon Airshow and Defence Expo last week.

Although it’s a Boeing platform, it will be designed and built entirely in Australia. That has some pretty significant implications for the future of Australia’s defence industry. It drives home the point that there’s more to this realm than just naval shipbuilding. It’s also a capability that is being planned with an export market in mind, to Five Eyes partners, and beyond. Australia will be able to position itself as a leading defence exporter of this type of capability as a result of the Loyal Wingman project.

And with its first flight slated for 2020, this is a capability that is not way off in the future with decades-long acquisition cycles. With Loyal Wingman, the aim is to produce an operational capability quickly—within the next few years.

Let’s start with what the platform is and why it’s important. The Loyal Wingman is designed to act as a force multiplier for manned fighters like the F-35A, F/A-18F Super Hornet and E/A-18G Growler, and larger manned aircraft like the E-7A Wedgetail or KC-30A refueller. Its primary role is projecting power forward, while keeping manned platforms out of harm’s way. It also seeks to protect ‘combat enablers’ like the Wedgetail from an adversary’s long-range offensive counter-air capability.

Although the planned aircraft is relatively small, according to Boeing it will have a range of more than 3,700 kilometres. That’s sufficient to operate over the South China Sea flying from RAAF Tindal near Darwin. It will carry integrated sensor packages to support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions and electronic warfare (EW), and has an internal weapons bay that eventually could be armed with standoff weapons and precision bombs.

It will be able to fly autonomously, rather than being remotely piloted, which is vital. Exploiting trusted autonomy with the human ‘on the loop’ in an oversight role, rather than directly controlling the UCAV in every aspect of its mission ‘in the loop’, is a much more sensible approach to this sort of capability.

The Loyal Wingman can extend Australia’s air defence envelope much further north than would be possible using the F-35 alone. Imagine a swarm of Loyal Wingman UCAVs controlled by a four-ship formation of F-35s undertaking defensive counter-air tasks over the sea–air gap. The less stealthy UCAVs would be geographically located well away from the stealthy F-35s to avoid betraying their location, but close by in terms of being part of a resilient network. The F-35s in turn are networked to a Wedgetail to the rear. The UCAVs are the forward sensor in the ‘sensor to shooter’ link, but can also be a forward shooter, against an adversary equipped with long-range airpower, while the F-35s and Wedgetail can stay out of harm’s way.

Alternatively, in a role to support strike missions, the UCAVs could use their long-range ISR sensors and EW capabilities, and potentially precision-attack munitions, to identify and supress enemy integrated air defences. That would open up a path for the F-35s and fourth-generation aircraft like the Super Hornet and Growler to strike at high-value targets.

In both cases, long-range power projection and protection are of key importance. The Loyal Wingman could restore a significant amount of the long-range strike power the RAAF lost with the retirement of the F-111C in 2010. Although the Wingman is much smaller than the F-111C and carries a smaller payload, the emphasis on low-cost development means more UCAVs can be acquired. Local production will make it easier to keep on acquiring them as and when we need more. This will allow us to exploit combat mass and boost the potential of the RAAF’s future strike and air combat capability through swarming networks of autonomous shooters and sensors.

That’s a good move. One of the major challenges facing the RAAF is that by investing in very high-tech exquisite platforms like the F-35, which exploit technological overmatch against an opponent, the size of the air combat arm is constrained. It becomes a boutique force. In a future crisis against a major-power adversary, that would be a disadvantage—we can’t afford to lose any because we have too few fast jets in the sky. A larger force is better able to exploit Lanchester’s square law to the RAAF’s benefit. The Loyal Wingman begins that process of building a larger, more powerful RAAF, and that’s precisely the path Australia needs to take in preparing for the next war.

The Loyal Wingman will allow Australia to effectively exploit future air combat technology developments coming out of US programs like the US Air Force’s penetrating counter-air and the US Navy’s ‘F/A-XX’ (formerly known as ‘sixth-generation fighter’ projects), which will be based heavily on manned–unmanned teaming technologies. We are taking our first steps towards the types of platforms that could one day replace the F-35, and we are getting there faster than originally planned.

Learning to operate manned and unmanned systems as a network—a ‘system of systems’—is crucial. The key is not just resilient data links that maintain networks, but also the development of trusted autonomy so that platforms like Loyal Wingman don’t have to depend on human control.

That aspect may generate controversy. Advocates of a ban on lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) are sure to challenge this project. Australia must resist calls for projects like Loyal Wingman to be cancelled on ethical or legal grounds. The platforms will depend on trusted autonomy, with humans ‘on the loop’, and any use of force will be made with human oversight. Unlike our adversaries who don’t need to adhere to legal and ethical constraints on LAWs, Western liberal democracies will always need to operate systems like Loyal Wingman with the laws of armed conflict in mind.

Finally, there are the defence industry and export benefits. Boeing Australia is designing and building the Loyal Wingman locally, establishing a sophisticated aerospace design and production capability. This could see Australia energise a new sector of its defence industry, complementing shipbuilding and other high-technology sectors. It would add to our defence export portfolio to key allies, including the Five Eyes countries. It would establish Australia as the leader in a global supply and support chain for Loyal Wingman operators around the world.

Loyal Wingman was the biggest story coming out of Avalon, and it may even surpass the F-35’s blazing performance in the skies as the cutting edge of future Australian airpower.