The U.S. Air Force completed the eight-day Bamboo Eagle 24-3 exercise on Aug. 10, bringing over 3,000 service members and more than 150 aircraft together to operate in the Western United States and Eastern Pacific. The large-scale exercise paired important Agile Combat Employment (ACE) training with a Red Flag exercise designed to hone cutting-edge tactics for air warfare. This exercise, and future efforts like it, are critical to strengthening the U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) ability to operate in contested environments at all echelons, which is essential to deterring and defeating aggression in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.
By doctrinal definition, ACE is the “proactive and reactive operational scheme of maneuver executed within threat timelines to increase survivability while generating combat power.” In translation, this means air forces must be able to flex from major regional bases to smaller or non-traditional operating sites to survive and continue operations.
Such operations require a challenging reconceptualization of everything in the generative process for airpower, including command and control, maintenance, logistics, and air and missile defense for ground operations, to name a few considerations. Developments in the strategic environment underscore that reconceptualization is also essential.
The Commission on the National Defense Strategy report released on July 30 echoes longstanding concerns of USAF leadership that adversaries will aggressively target overseas air bases to prevent them from being used to launch and recover aircraft. Consider the growing threats in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and initial efforts to respond to challenges the services have not confronted in recent decades.
In the Pacific, Pentagon assessments note the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has the ballistic and cruise missiles to target regional air bases, ports, and ground infrastructure in Japan and the Philippines, as well as U.S. bases as far away as Guam. In a major contingency in the Taiwan Strait, the USAF must be able to sink ships and destroy adversary aircraft. It will be difficult to sustain that effort if American pilots have nowhere to land.
In Europe, Russian forces continue to use long-range fires, hypersonic missiles, and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to target Ukrainian air operations on the ground. Eyeing these developments, even the newest NATO members, Sweden and Finland, are developing low-footprint air operations by landing advanced fighters on highways to refuel and re-arm while rapidly relocating both between and within bases.
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Since August 2020, U.S. Air Forces Central Command has telegraphed episodes of its ACE implementation in the Middle East for deterrent effect against Tehran. ACE maneuvers increased in complexity over time and included hot-pit refueling at non-traditional sites, tactical munitions ferrying to forward locations, agile airlift, dynamic command and control, and the deployment of mobile long-range fires for organic forward operating location defense. Most recently, these maneuvers incorporated aircraft launching from U.S. Air Forces Europe for a coalition exercise in the Middle East.
Despite these early ACE-related advances, the USAF seeks to institutionalize ACE in the premier exercise for intensive air combat training: Red Flag. The massive resources invested in recurring Red Flag exercises and large numbers of participants, including coalition partners, create a perennial opportunity for increasingly complex ACE training to reach the largest number of airmen. Traditionally, Red Flag emphasizes aerial combat and is designed to test aircraft, aircrew, maintainers, and flightline-adjacent capabilities. But the incorporation of Bamboo Eagle into Red Flag was a stress test of the entire chain of command and the ability of Air Force wings to execute a kill chain when forced to disaggregate and re-aggregate across operating locations.
Bamboo Eagle also rehearsed the employment of advanced technologies that make such distributed operations and dynamic re-tasking possible. Those technologies included “an architecture where we can talk to any aircraft, any command post, any entity that plays a role in this system, anywhere in the world in real time,” USAF Warfare Center Commander Maj. Gen. Christopher Niemi stated in a media call on Aug. 1.
At a time of growing threats in multiple regions, ACE operations or exercises can be used as a signal to adversaries to bolster deterrence. Such operations cast doubt in the minds of military planners whether they can effectively target U.S. combat forces. That, in turn, will increase adversary concerns that the costs associated with any American response could exceed any benefits associated with prospective aggression. In other words, ACE can play a fundamental role in strengthening both deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment.
So, how can Congress and the State Department help? Congress should press the Air Force for its lessons learned from Bamboo Eagle, focusing on steps to improve future exercises as well as efforts to implement lessons learned and strengthen the necessary capabilities.
Congress should also provide the funding necessary to conduct increasingly large and complex exercises that span multiple combatant commands and are scripted specifically to improve the capability and capacity of the USAF to implement ACE doctrine in a contested environment in support of joint operations.
Meanwhile, the State Department should redouble efforts to gain host nation approval for Department of Defense access to a larger number of airfields and operating locations while also exploring opportunities to work with allied nations to develop plans and civilian infrastructure that could rapidly be converted for operational use. This could include maintenance of straight roads or highways, reservation of nondescript storage facilities, and even the clearance of terrain to meet landing zone or drop zone criteria. Encouraging their low-cost investments could prove vital in combined major combat operations.
Finally, Congress should press the Army and Marine Corps to redouble investments in, and maximize procurements of, portable air defense and counter-UAS solutions that the effective employment of ACE requires. Those solutions must be operable by the smallest teams possible, set up in minutes rather than hours, and fit in the cargo hold of a C-130 or smaller platforms designed to land in the most austere locations.
Adversary capabilities are growing, and serious new conflicts may be on the horizon. There is no time to waste to ensure the USAF can sustain progress in conducting disaggregated combat operations.
Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Dr. Lydia LaFavor is a research fellow.
