Lessons From the Ukraine War Could Have Limited Relevance in a Conflict With Communist China

The United States military’s senior echelons think constantly about a no-longer-unthinkable subject: being prepared to deter, or win, a protracted, high-intensity war against a near-peer adversary, Communist China. Generals are often disparaged for preparing to fight the last war. Today’s danger, however, is that we will overlearn dubious lessons from Ukraine concerning the role of small, inexpensive, unmanned weapon systems.Ukraine’s drones have been extraordinarily effective, especially on defense, in a slow-moving, small-unit infantry conflict contesting acres at a time. And because of inexpensive countermeasures, Russia’s air force, Europe’s largest, has been unable to operate effectively over Ukraine.Yet a fight with China would be utterly unlike this in tempo and variety, and in all domains — land, sea, below the sea, in the air, and in space. Hence the salience of the argument about the F-35.John G. Ferrari and Dillon Prochnicki, writing for the War on the Rocks website, recently termed that fighter a “masterpiece,” but “a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars.”In Iran, the authors say, the F-35 “performed brilliantly” the tasks it was designed for: penetrating contested airspaces, and using sensors to find, track and deliver strikes against targets inside an integrated air defense system. Yet, they say, war games concerning the Western Pacific have repeatedly concluded that most aircraft losses would happen on the ground. Most American aircraft sit within range of Chinese missiles where American air and missile defenses “cannot reliably defeat salvos at the scales China can generate.”F-35s, Messrs. Ferrari and Prochnicki stress, have a “heavy ground footprint.” They depend on maintenance facilities, diagnostic systems, spare parts and fuel and munitions inventories, and skilled maintainers. “Destroy any piece of that support infrastructure, and you degrade sortie generation as effectively as destroying the aircraft themselves.”They continue: In Iran, F-35s chose the time and tempo of attacks against fixed targets “with the luxury of an operational pause between sorties.” War with China “would demand continuous, reactive operations at adversary-imposed tempo across thousands of miles, against a vast and mobile target set.” Messrs. Ferrari and Prochnicki favor many fewer F-35s than currently planned, reserving these for missions requiring penetrating stealth, and spending the saved resources on “cheaper, replaceable systems.”A rejoinder to the authors from a retired Air Force Lieutenant General, David Deptula, in a memo to this columnist, acknowledges the wisdom of their advocacy of more uncrewed systems, and more hardened and dispersed basing. Yet he says Ukraine and Iran teach opposite lessons.Ukraine shows that absent air superiority, war becomes attritional — slower and bloodier. Iran shows the utility of advanced stealth, electronic capabilities, precision strikes and integrated air operations to “break open a defended battlespace”: The attacker imposes tempo, suppresses air defenses and shortens the conflict.Drones generally cannot fly long distances, and do not communicate, penetrate defended airspace, carry substantial payloads or serve as a command-and-control platform. F-35s can and should be the center of a “full airpower ecosystem,” General Deptula says, penetrating defended battlespaces, striking adversary centers of gravity and enabling other American forces.By denying Russia air superiority, Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses have produced an outcome that F-35s exist to prevent: a bloody slog. The authors, General Deptula says, reverse cause and effect in Iran: The campaign was short because integrated airpower made it so. They treat drones “as a substitute for air superiority, but they are mostly a symptom of its absence.”In the first days or weeks of a war with China, a smaller-than-planned F-35 fleet would be unable to generate sufficient sorties, absorb losses and support allies in several theaters. If the necessity of a substantial support infrastructure is an argument against the F-35, what of an aircraft carrier’s large enveloping group of support vessels?The estimated $2 trillion price of the F-35 program is in “then-year dollars” over a decades-long program, allowing for inflation, sustainment, and modernizations, involving multiple services. The question, General Deptula says, is not whether the F-35 is expensive, but “what is the cost of not having enough penetrating airpower in a war with China, Russia, Iran, or another advanced air-defense state?”This is the most turbulent, menacing era since 1945. It is less stable than the Cold War’s frozen confrontation. The Air Force’s mission of securing air superiority encompasses most other military missions. Wherever a fight occurs, airpower will be presupposed for projecting unmatched combat power, from the long-range strike capability of strategic bombing, to support for ground combat. We have moved far from when airpower’s primary mission was supporting an 18-year-old with a rifle.The Washington Post

Lessons From the Ukraine War Could Have Limited Relevance in a Conflict With Communist China

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