Conclusions
The requirement to base fighters within 1,000 to 1,500 nautical miles of an adversary raises three key issues:
- Can the United States count on getting access to forward bases? Trends here appear negative. The US peacetime, foreign basing posture has declined precipitously since the Cold War. US long-term presence has stimulated indigenous opposition, and access constraints continue to bedevil combat operations. Predicting the attitude of host nations regarding access in a future crisis remains difficult.
- Will adversaries deploy sufficient numbers of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles to threaten forward bases? Longer-range weapons are more expensive than shorter-range variants, which raises an adversary’s cost of fielding large numbers. But ignoring this threat does not seem acceptable. Over the long-term, the United States would be placing a significant portion of its combat capability at risk. Analysis of potential counters to make forward bases less vulnerable—hardening, dispersal, and missile defense—indicates that these may be imperfect and possibly unaffordable solutions. The USAF reached a similar conclusion at the end of the Cold War regarding air base survivability in Europe. Perhaps the USAF’s Global Strike Task Force in combination with maritime forces will prove successful in neutralizing an adversary’s deep strike systems, but the small size of the USAF’s access insensitive force combined with the magnitude of the operational tasks it must achieve causes concern. It also raises some difficult problems regarding logic for the USAF. If these small forces can succeed in this most difficult and challenging set of tasks, what is the justification for the rest of the force? Why not simply increase the size of the access insensitive force to increase the chances of success and use these for the duration of the campaign?
- What will be the effect of adversaries possessing WMD? The threat of WMD strikes would appear to reduce both allied willingness to host US forces and US decision-makers’ willingness to risk deploying forces.
To project power, US forces relying on forward bases require success in four areas: an adequate base infrastructure, responsive logistical support, political approval from host nations, and effective counters to enemy threats. If one of these factors is missing, US power-projection capabilities will be compromised. The problem facing the United States is that even a high probability of success in each factor results in an overall low probability of success. For example, with a 90 percent chance of succeeding in each area, only a 65 percent overall probability of success results (90 percent X 90 percent X 90 percent X 90 percent = 65 percent). In short, these combined uncertainties suggest that over the long term, the land-based fighter force could be significantly constrained in supporting US power projection operations.
In the 2001 QDR, the Defense Department noted the importance of “hedging” strategies to cope with assumption failures or unanticipated developments. Over the past 30 years, the USAF “hedged” by allocating on average two-thirds of each modernization dollar to short-range combat aircraft and one-third to long-range combat aircraft. Current plans, however, change these ratios from 2:1 to 30:1 in favor of short-range forces more dependent upon forward bases. The political problems, logistical issues, and military threats posed to forward air bases individually raise challenges, but the uncertainties and risks induced by all these factors together in future conflicts suggest that the Defense Department leadership should re-evaluate these plans to meet the goal of projecting decisive power promptly in future anti-access environments.