USAF Lessons from Ukraine
 

Skipping over the SAW/SAM parts (important but I think already well covered), I found the emphasis on FOB/dispersed operations interesting. The USMC already doing road trials with the F-35B* - maybe we need to be reinventing the RAFG Harrier model...

* https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...-coast-highway

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...nder-in-europe

Top Ukraine War Lessons From USAF’s Commander In Europe

With neither side in the now 542-day-old war in Ukraine able to achieve air superiority, the U.S. and NATO are gathering valuable lessons for how they may have to fight on the continent in the future, the general in charge of U.S. and NATO air operations in Europe said Friday.

The U.S. and NATO will have to improve methods to counter integrated air defenses, defend against incoming threats, communicate and move assets around the continent under the U.S. doctrine of Agile Combat Employment (ACE). Those were the conclusions delivered by U.S. Air Force Gen. James Hecker - head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), as well as NATO's Allied Air Command and U.S. Air Forces Africa (AFAFRICA) - Friday during a Defense Writers Group virtual briefing.....

.....One of the main reasons the Ukrainian Air Force has been able to stay in the fight is its ability to move its aircraft around the country and still have the enough airstrips with stocked supplies capable of sustaining air combat operations.

Hecker said that success shows the U.S. and NATO need to step up their ACE efforts.

ACE has been around “way before the Ukraine-Russian war started,” said Hecker. “And it was mainly in response to the situation in the Indo-Pacific, knowing that China had several cruise missiles, very capable cruise missiles and things like that, and we had to move or else - you know we don’t want to lose all our aircraft on the ground.”

“So enter Ukraine, and now we kind of see how they're doing and what's being effective for them by them moving their airplanes around against the threat that we’d most likely face - definitely face - if we go to Article Five [NATO collective defense agreement]. We need to make sure that we can do that as well.”

The U.S. and NATO employ ACE to some extent in Europe as well, said Hecker. But nowhere as much as Ukraine.

“We have to make sure we can be as proficient as they are,” he said of the Ukrainians, who employ their own version of ACE every day, throwing off Russia's ability to target their aircraft with standoff weapons.

“Now as weapons get a lot more accurate, etc, they can just hit every single aircraft even if it's dispersed,” said Hecker. “So what we have to do now is disperse our aircraft amongst different airfields and potentially even on highways and these kinds of things that Finland brings to the plate.”...

The U.S. had more of that capability during the Cold War, when there were more bases in Europe for U.S. combat aircraft to land, receive needed maintenance and rearm. Restoring that ability is a priority, said Hecker.

“We're going to start off with 20 to 25” such bases, said Hecker. “Of course, I'm not going to tell you where they're at. But they're in strategic locations around Europe.”

Those bases will be supplied with equipment common “to any aircraft,” said Hecker.

“We're going to work with the nations and their maintenance so that we can get interoperable on different kinds of aircraft like we were able to do 30-40 years ago.”

Last, but not least, the U.S. and NATO need more robust communications, Hecker said.

"How are we going to command and control all these units, especially if they're taking off and landing at other airfields using the ACE concept? How are we going to make that happen? And especially if we get denied communications, because that will cut off from that from a cyber attack, etc."....

We'll instead probably just close down a few more bases I suspect......:rolleyes:

Good practice then that some of the Brize fleet has been dispersed around Waddington, Stansted, Birmingham and East Mids this week

So....the UK is closing bases right and left....which seems contrarian to the strategic goal of NATO.

Can NATO or the USAF take possession of some of these bases being closed and run them on a Standby basis?

​​​​​​​Is the USAF closing bases of its own?

Inter-operability allowing for the sharing of "common" parts.....now there is a mouthful.

As the CH-47 is a very "common" aircraft.....operated by probably every NATO Member (no I did not google it)....just how "common" are the parts among the many versions of the Chinook being operated? (Just one example)

If you really for dispersal....how does one communicate reliably and maintain stockage of those common parts....and who pays for them?

Who pays for those "dispersed" locations (not necessarily "Bases" but perhaps preplanned roadside lagers or similar) and keeps them prepared for use?

Now...consider high performance FJ's, large Transport aircraft, and major repair facilities not to mention industrial capability to produce urgent repair parts.

Seems a daunting task for a multi-national force to iron out the wrinkles in the effort.

How can swarms of small drones be easily detected and destroyed? Only have to remember the "farce" at Gatwick a while back and that was just one small drone.

it was never proven to be a drone at all - it was a very windy day IIRC and people kept claiming they'd seen something but nothing was ever found

Dispersed Operaions …
 

Some 30 years ago my team in War Plans and Policy were looking into the subject. No idea whether any real progress has been made in UK. We looked at near off-base dispersal, decoys, camouflage, distant dispersal (Civil airfields and disused Mil) … and a whole load of other aspects including C3.. It all came down to the manpower, logistics, engineering and a host of rat-**** that makes these cute demos look great … until you start punching the numbers.

Are the days of big fixed bases over? Certainly CSTOL offers options, but most NATO air forces are, I suspect, decades behind where certain Nordic nations have been for ages.

Isn’t the main lesson the USAF is learning from Ukraine that air cover, CAS, and interdiction are not needed to support the ground war? Isn’t that why we have delayed providing F-16s for so long? Think of the money the USAF could save by downsizing it’s fighter force.

"until you start punching the numbers."

this is true in "normal" times - but in a real war - such as Ukraine - the numbers mean zero - it's can you keep the force active

the evidence shows that a few fixed bases are a shooting gallery for missiles and drones - you have to shoot and scoot

Punching the numbers can mean you find you need a lot more personnel and equipment to support deployed ops than you do you to run main base ops. If you haven't got the guys and gals or the kit to do it, you cannot make more out of thin air in anything like the required timescale and throwing money at the problem will not help.

What I find interesting about this is the quasi recognition that threatened and/or redundant airfields shouldn't necessarily be saved per se. Almost the contrary.

The ones which have already been turned into industrial estates and those thus threatened could quite reasonably be turned back into support facilities. Even if just for drones and missiles. With a rough operating strip masquerading as a truck parking area or access route.

Widened highways in the forest are still quite identifiable by satellite. But imagine having to go around every fenced off brown site, trying to figure out if its tractor parts or pointy things theyre producing. Or if its diesel or avgas they're storing.

Cooch

Biting commentary the GN.

Ouch.

The take-home was it is only Ukraine that doesn't warrant the protection of CAS and better air cover, or means to interdict arty nearby.

The munitions capable UAVs from within your own (RuSSia's) lines are going to make a fashion statement for the future, wherever there is a potential 5th column, bases, particularly the big, centralised ones will become ideal targets that are worth the effort to cause some mayhem with. There are systems that are in place to counter that, but the capability of the attacker is growing fast, and it is a distributed threat, gonna cause some sleepless nights.

Singapore has had the ability to decentralise their operations to highways all around the island for years, and they practice that routinely. The concept of retaining some capability at the airbases that may be closed for cost saving seems to be too obvious to get any support from the numpties that seem to be placed by the great unwashed into the positions responsible for the security of the realm. It is too sensible to survive the gestation period in the back pocket of the pollies we have empowered in most of our lands. Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, they actually have some pollies that are worth providing oxygen to, when they are not on fire. [Brexit, thanks for nuthin']

The KA-52 is a curiosity, has it taught us that the AH-64 is worth the effort, or is not? I doubt that the Apache is more survivable than the -52, and we have seen at least one ejector seat actually function correctly out of a 'gator, seems an expensive way to get an extra set of boots into the middle of a firefight. The concern the Ukrainians indicate on the anti tank work by the 'gator suggests that it has some merit in the field, good for the AH-64, and maybe even the AH-1, but maybe, just maybe, the lowly old Loach with a bunch of TOWs is a really tiny target and able to survive by not being seen, it appears that if targeted, a parachute is a handy thing to have, so not being targeted would be ups there in the to-do list.

Am a fan of the A-10, but, the Su-25's have taken a beating, and not in a good way. The FEBA has always been a difficult place to be, but the only thing that is surviving flying over it for any period of time at present are the DGI drone drivers.

The Switchblade series were outclassed in spectacular fashion by a bunch of enthusiasts with an intent to actually save their country from criminal invasion, and while the US's 250K a pop switchblade systems were getting all packaged up neatly, a couple of $500 3D printers and a few dollars of PET filament and some 40mm grenades were clipped to $500 quad copters and actually went and messed up with the Vlads sand pit, and seem to still do so. What happened to the share price of the Switchblade OEM? DGI is not the solution for the west, but there isn't much in out that cannot be picked up from Phidgets and applied by some resourceful types. If the operators have the ability to close to a target, they make for a compelling case.

The Iranian drones are adding... nothing much new, although they do make the case that swarm attacks will require responses by defenders, it took Ukraine a couple fo days to get on top of that, and since then, Vlad continues to waste much of his effort with proving that the Ukrainians have a fair solution to his bad temper. Adaptability is the strength that Ukraine has shown, just a bit behind ingenuity. RuSSia has made it easy for Ukraine to keep up morale, Vlad finds new and inventive ways to pour more gasoline onto the reputation of the Russian Empire Federation.

Lessons learned, most have been learnt before, and we habitually forget.

From the F-35 SI ...

And that's just one sqn [with 8 ac] going aboard QNLZ with all it's resources. Now try doing bare-base dispersal of assets in numerous locations. Where do the people [mainly engineers] come from, when 617 had to borrow from 207 to put their handful of jets on board.

The RAF is only configured for the deployed 'war of choice' type of operation, nothing more. There is nothing configured to defend the UK itself, should we endure that kind of conflict.

For those older ex-service members on this forum you can forget the days of 'survive to fight', defending bases, hardened facilities, dispersed operations, engineering bays (let alone the days of hardened bays), fleets of MT, military logistics or base defence. All of it was disposed of for the sake of 'political hope', albeit with a nod that we would be able to re-grow, should the need arise, within 10 years. The point being that we could regenerate faster than a threat could present itself.

Of course, we passed that 10-year tipping-point nearly 2 decades ago. We did not regenerate and the cuts continued. Some things have remained the same of course. Warfare still looks to target the adversary's ability to fight. In the case of the RAF that means that adversaries will not be targeting our military logistics, engineering, stockpiles and alike, hardened, dispersed or otherwise - we destroyed them ourselves. The targets the RAF provides for tomorrow are civilian contractor facilities such as those for Raytheon, Boeing, LM, BAE Systems, MBDA, Northrop Grumman et al. We know exactly how our adversaries can 'fight' the UK. Whilst whilst fleets of bombers, cruise missiles and alike do feature on the threat board they are probably less likely than techniques already used against the UK and others.

Want to impact the UK's ability to fight - direct message the social media of civilian contractors, telling them not to go to work. Dope a few more door handles and add additional warmth to some tea again to bolster the message. Clearly I am only posting publicly-known threats but be mindful that the UK used to include protection, resilience and redundancy of critical UK infrastructure, when it was still in public hands. That too has changed, beyond all recognition.

As in 9/11 when the US discovered it hadn't any means of deploying to find and intercept aircraft WITHIN its borders.
Move to having a viable small and economic drone force, able to swamp defences, as the V1 almost did even with RAF and USAAF fighters deployed all over the South of England.
Remember you only have to be lucky once, and your enemy unlucky only once.

Not just aircraft knocking down the V1. Once the guns were deployed to the coastal belt very high percentages were achieved, 60 plus? Defences were hard pushed but not overwhelmed.

Proximity fusing for the AA had a big effect on V1 interception rate, but they were some the biggest top secret and it only came out after the war

Not forgetting either that the US had double the crew, though they did have two more aircraft to add to the workload.

We fail to learn (think), or only change very slowly - see ref; 'Preface and Introduction, pages 19 - 30

And we rarely fight the war which we plan for.

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Por..._the_Pale_.pdf

notasmodnoradmin
In the not-too-distant future, I expect that the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be much sought after, in terms of offering training and lessons learned, by professional military organizations all over the world.

Another article on the above briefing.

What I find interesting here is the emphasis on conducting training during operational missions carrying live armed missions.

Good thing we don’t have any Jags or F-4s left in theatre…..

Second item is the renewed emphasis on exercises on how to penetrate enemy AD. I can remember doing that a few times back in the 80s: 400+ attackers in 10 minutes over a narrow front to punch a hole through the defences and fan out behind. How the wheel turns….

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/y...ics-in-europe/

Ukraine war prompts new US air tactics in Europe

…..No longer are allied air forces passively circling over Europe for the sake of visibility. U.S. pilots and their counterparts now use air policing missions to practice offensive and defensive maneuvers along NATO’s eastern border.

Struck by Russia’s inability to control Ukrainian airspace and Ukraine’s inability to fully secure it, NATO has begun working through the details of how it would maintain ownership of its own skies while breaking through enemy defenses to secure more airspac.

Hecker said his top priority has become figuring out how to counter air and missile defenses, electronic jamming and other anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, as they are known in military parlance, that would keep the U.S. out of Russian territory…..

“We did a lot of the tactical-level planning for that kind of mission,” Hecker said. “We will use that planning to actually do rehearsals and practices as we continue our enhanced air policing on [NATO’s] eastern border.”

U.S. airmen have begun honing those moves in training sorties with European aircraft on the eastern flank, he said. It’s one example of how allied airpower has evolved alongside the conflict across NATO’s border.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, armed NATO jets flew around-the-clock air patrols to discourage the conflict from spilling into other European nations. That kept Russian forces at bay but arguably left NATO airmen less ready for conflict, Hecker said.

“If you just do circles with missiles on board, you’re not actually practicing what you’re going to do in combat,” he said.

Once leaders were convinced that the alliance’s airspace was safe, airmen changed tack. Now pilots on patrol also take part in anti-access training along NATO’s border — pairing the deterrent value of an air patrol with the tactical value of real-world practice.

NATO will also put those tactics to the test at a major new training exercise, Ramstein Flag, in Greece at the end of 2024, Hecker said.

“We don’t want to go to war with Russia, and I don’t think they want to go to war with us either,” he said. “But we need to make sure that we have the forces capable of deterring them, so that nothing bad will happen.”

NATO will look for other opportunities to try out new tactics in large exercises, particularly those that combine multiple types of aircraft for more realism, Hecker said.

Those events could include Ukrainian pilots at the end of their training to fly the U.S.-built F-16 Fighting Falcon, he added…..

Hmm, this looks a lot like something I noted in the Ukraine War Thread (Mk 2) about electromagnetic spectrum superiority and air superiority going in hand and hand.
Thanks for the post ORAC, interesting read.

The Department of Defense announced today that the U.S. will:

“field attritable autonomous systems at a scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains, within the next 18-to-24 months.”

BREAKING: Poland asks Belarus to immediately expel the Wagner Group.

Poland's Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski warned that Poland will retaliate if Wagner causes an incident against it or on its border with Lithuania.

Unclear what he means by a "critical incident" but it could extend to the weaponization of migration given his other comments.

The most likely retaliation could be a complete closure of Poland and the Baltic States borders with Belarus

Poland also asked all illegal migrants to leave the border area.

​​​​​​​This crisis is worsening but still lags beyond the weaponization seen in the fall of 2021.

At the risk of severe thread drift, this announcement was included in a wide ranging keynote address by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technologies for Defense conference in Washington, the core message was countering the PRC threat.

IMO it's worth reading the full transcript: https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeche...ency-to-innov/

More on the above.

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon...te-with-china/

Pentagon unveils ‘Replicator’ drone program to compete with China

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon committed on Monday to fielding thousands of attritable, autonomous systems across multiple domains within the next two years as part of a new initiative to better compete with China.

The program, dubbed Replicator, was announced by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies conference here.

“Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” Hicks said.

Hicks and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady will oversee the program, with support from Doug Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit. Further details, Hicks said, will be released in the coming weeks………

House appropriators have backed that idea in their fiscal 2025 defense spending bill. The legislation would allocate $1 billion toward establishing a DIU-managed hedge portfolio made up of low-cost drones, agile communication and computing modes and AI capabilities.

The Department of Defense requested $1.8 billion for artificial intelligence for fiscal 2024 and was overseeing more than 685 related projects as of 2021. Replicator is intended to pull those investments together and further scale production, Hicks said.

Maybe so, but the one thing the Jag had in its favour was it could deploy with the minimum of Engineers away from base, It was reliable and relatively simple to operate and fix.
Technology has moved on since, I agree, but filling your latest aircraft with millions of pounds worth of Computer systems that are not as simple, nor an easy fix are not necessarily an advantage when deployed out into the field, after all what is the point of a VTOL F-35 if you cannot operate it in that environment in all weathers? Simplicity in numbers do have their advantages.

The arguments for "Grippen for Ukraine" seem to be grounded in this as an important feature. (Makes sense to me, even though the Viper is a great aircraft).

NutLoose,

My post seems to have gone over your head.

It was in reference to doing training with live armed jets and alluded to the incident where a live armed RAF F4 shot down a Jag when the weapons switches weren’t covered with tape and various other holes in the cheese lined up….

Gotcha, my ex Jag Sqn. :uhoh:

Thousands of drones coming.

Foot.ooze, see. #25 and #26 above…

Do you think they have let them out yet? it has been several months..

Some people never know when to STFU…………

Hardly a secret - 3 of those fields have a lot of commercial traffic through every day - and lots of spotters

Not strictly USAF, but another lesson learnt from the whole scale destruction of all resupply vehicles by battlefield drones. Note the timescale - evaluation during 2024 with a contract award at the end. As a bolt-on modification to existing vehicle fleets they could reach the front line as soon as 2025…

https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/20...mous-resupply/

GEARS of war: US Army picks 3 companies to advance autonomous resupply

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit selected three companies to help create heavy-duty vehicles capable of independently navigating rugged terrain and restocking soldiers in the field.

Neya Systems, Robotic Research Autonomous Industries and Carnegie Robotics bested dozens of other contenders to conduct autonomy prototyping for the Ground Expeditionary Autonomous Retrofit System project, or GEARS.

The initial arrangements, announced earlier this month, are worth millions of dollars. Future phases will yield additional work and payouts.

“The name of the game of this program isn’t developing something new and novel,” Neya’s Kurt Bruck said in an interview. “The name of the game of this is to field autonomy.”

The Defense Department is pouring money into artificial intelligence, autonomy, computer vision and similar capabilities to augment future fighting. Robots and other advanced machinery can introduce additional firepower to the battlefield or explore areas considered too risky for human travel.

In this case, the Army and DIU are looking to existing commercial experts to embed autonomy aboard the Oshkosh-made Palletized Load System, a popular logistics and freight truck. Doing so will keep troops safe while also streamlining the flow of supplies, representatives from each company said.

“Convoys are one of the hottest targets of an enemy. If you can take out a convoy, you can do a major disruption of a resupply mission,” Bruck said. “Driving these vehicles is one of the most dangerous jobs in the DoD right now. If we can make them autonomous, we’ll get the soldiers out of harm’s way, but also we’re able to increase uptime. Soldiers have to sleep.”

The Russia-Ukraine war shows as much. Clogged vehicle columns and lumbering logistics lines were battered in the opening days of the conflict, now approaching its third year. They continue to be targeted.

The Army’s thinking on the matter is distilled into its contested logistics concept — an understanding that an opposing force, like Russia or China, will try to hamstring production and harass resupply with the intent of starving U.S. troops. The service earlier this year established a cross-functional team to tackle the issue.

“In the global war on terror, for the last 20 years, a combat logistics patrol could be a 15-vehicle, 20-vehicle convoy with security, and that is a large, slow, soft, moving target,” Phil Cotter, with Robotic Research, told Defense News.

“In the next fight, against an adversary that has long-range precision fires capability and advanced target identification and recognition capability, we’re going to have to fight in a more dispersed and distributed manner,” he added.

The agreements awarded to Robotic Research, Neya and Carnegie this month call for the delivery of four autonomous prototypes. They will be evaluated throughout fiscal 2024.

One contractor will eventually be picked to furnish a total 41 prototypes, according to the Army. Soldier feedback will inform the process, much like any other tech-development effort.


“We’re ready to go. They’ve given us a pretty tight timeline,” Carnegie’s Eric Soderberg said. “We have familiarity with, of course, all the sensors, and we’ve done similar automation projects. Really, it comes down to pulling those together to make this particular project work the way the Army wants it.”

Vehicles beyond the Palletized Load System are also being considered for conversion. The service did not specify make or model in its announcement, though.

“If you solve this problem well on a PLS truck,” Soderberg said, “you’re probably at a 95% solution for almost any other vehicle you could think of.”

Actually what has surprised me most about Ukraine and Gaza is the effectiveness of GBADS. Kiev has faced regular heavy attacks from Drones, cruise missiles and even hyper-sonic missiles and yet claims to shoot down most of not all attacks. Likewise the Iron dome system in Israel seems to be able to very effectively keep its city's safe from mass attack. So maybe more investment and R&D in GBADS could keep large fixed bases safe ?

Hutch

Using $1M NSAM rounds against $10K drones isn’t a long term solution.

The US is rolling out laser equipped Strykers and other defences, it will take time to see which is most cost effective and capable.

Should the F35s be dispersed from the carriers if ever serious hostilities look like breaking out in Europe involving the UK ?

lot of eggs in 1 basket
and presumably the aircraft might be tracked returning to mother?

so move them from things that can move 250+nm every 24 hours to send them to well-founded static bases?