CHINA WATCHProtecting U.S. Overseas Air Bases

Published 24 January 2023

In January 2022, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned that the U.S. Air and Space Forces must move quickly to offset actions—mostly by China, but also by Russia—which have eroded the U.S. military advantage: “We cannot go forward with a presumption of superiority that our military dominance demonstrated in the first Gulf War… . A lot of things can change in 30 years and they have.”

In January 2022, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned that the U.S. Air and Space Forces must move quickly to offset actions—mostly by China, but also by Russia—which have eroded the U.S. military advantage: “We cannot go forward with a presumption of superiority that our military dominance demonstrated in the first Gulf War… . A lot of things can change in 30 years and they have.”

Kendall listed seven operational imperatives for reconfiguring the U.S. Air and Space Forces for the dramatically changed security environment. Kendall warned that “[t]hese problems are already upon us; they’re not future things we have to worry about at some time five or 10 or 15 years down the road. They’re here now. We have to address them with a strong sense of urgency.”

In a new report from RANDOperational Imperative: Investing Wisely to Bolster U.S. Air Bases Against Chinese and Russian AttacksRAND researchers write that:

One of those imperatives is what U.S. Air Force officials call resilient basing. To make air bases more resilient, Kendall aims to build on a concept known as Agile Combat Employment (ACE). ACE would move the U.S. Air Force from operating out of a small number of very large, fixed airfields to a more flexible posture of operating from constellations, or clusters, of locations that would enable greater movement and agility, theoretically making them more difficult for adversaries to target effectively. A successful ACE concept would both aid in combat power generation during its employment and protect aircraft for later use.

China has rapidly added weapon systems and tactics designed to damage or destroy large, fixed facilities. “ACE is designed to make that problem harder for an adversary,” said Kendall, who then hinted that ACE could be just one of many investment options. “That is a piece of the solution but we have to figure out exactly the investments we need to make in the mix of defenses, hardening, deception and proliferation. We’ve made some progress in that area but we need to be much more specific about the needed investments and allocate resources to them in a cost-effective manner” (Pope, 2022).