Any plans the Air Force might have for new hardened aircraft shelters or other physical defenses at bases are prominently absent from a new infrastructure modernization strategy. This is despite acknowledgments that the service’s facilities “can no longer be considered a sanctuary” and that those facilities need to be better prepared to support operations “even while under attack.” All of this comes amid a major debate that extends well beyond the Air Force about how best to defend key U.S. military infrastructure, especially from growing drone and missile threats, and with a particular eye toward a potential high-end fight with China.
The Department of the Air Force (DAF; which also includes the U.S. Space Force) unveiled what is formally called the Installation Infrastructure Action Plan (I2AP) yesterday. I2AP puts heavy emphasis on modernizing and right-sizing base infrastructure across the United States and abroad, as well as improving installation resiliency against hostile attacks and natural disasters, particularly when it comes to their electrical power requirements.
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“DAF installations can no longer be considered a sanctuary. To ensure competitiveness in a high-end conflict, DAF installations must be able to deliver combat power with enough speed and intensity to be decisive, even while under attack,” an introduction to I2AP says. “From hypersonic technology to unmanned aerial systems to advanced cyber capabilities, our installations must meet these new challenges and effectively generate combat power.”
“Resilient installation infrastructure possesses the capability to sustain combat power projection by protecting against, responding to, and recovering from deliberate, accidental, or natural events that impede all-domain operations,” the new installation plan also says. “They require an infrastructure foundation with near immediate ‘ability to recover’ timeframes and ensure that critical missions are capable of being carried out, despite facing threats or adversities.”
“In this current environment, the ability of our installations to be effective and project power is going to be the margin of victory in Great Power Competition. And we had better be ready,” Dr. Ravi Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, also said during a virtual talk yesterday on the I2AP rollout that the Air & Space Forces Association hosted. Great Power Competition is the term of art the U.S. military has used in recent years to refer to newly mounting national security challenges posed by near-peer (and even potentially peer) adversaries, particularly China.
“You take a look across our inventory, and you’re like, well, there’s a lot of concrete out there … Concrete scares our adversaries just as much as fifth-gen fighters [like the F-22 and F-35], because the ability to mobilize and the ability to move a force from point A to point B is going to require concrete,” Chaudhary added. “And so when you look at what we’re doing in Indo-Pacific … bringing all-new airfields like Tinian, couple other locations, and robusting places like JBER [Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson], places like Eielson [Air Force Base], that’s exactly what we need to do.”
JBER and Eielson are both in Alaska. Tinian is a U.S. territory in the western Pacific that is part of the larger Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). The War Zone has reported in the past on efforts to expand air base infrastructure at these locations. Work on Tinian is explicitly intended to provide critical additional capacity to project airpower in the event that the massive and highly strategic Andersen Air Force Base on the neighboring island of Guam is put out of action for any reason.
All of this makes the absence of any explicit mention of plans for new hardened infrastructure or other defensive capabilities more pronounced. As already noted, there is a major debate ongoing about the value of physical hardening as part of future base defense plans, which The War Zone has previously explored in detail. The Air Force has signaled some support for more hardened aircraft shelters and otherwise “robusting” infrastructure as Dr. Chaudhary put it yesterday. At the same time, the service has also called into question the value of major investments in physical defenses.
“We are looking at things … [that] increase the survivability of the bases from which we operate,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said at an event the American Enterprise Institute hosted back in October, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. “And then in the midst of a conflict, how we get the right equipment to the right place at the right time is not only a matter of protecting it with hardened shelters and maybe camouflage, concealment, and deception, but it’s also connectivity, to have that situational awareness.”
“There’s two classic schools of thought for resiliency. One is armor and harden the heck out of things. And the other is go with diversity and proliferation,” Tim Grayson, Special Assistant to Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, explained during a talk that the Air & Space Forces Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies hosted in July. “And it’s really the latter, you know, because what ends up happening is you can spend so much time and money and effort on hardening things that you start degrading your own capabilities. So without being able to go into the specifics, I think we’ve made huge strides of hitting resiliency, through tougher diversity and mass and quantity.”
“I’m not a big fan of hardening infrastructure,” Air Force Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, then head of Pacific Air Forces, the service’s, also said at a roundtable at the 2023 Air & Space Forces Association symposium. “The reason is because of the advent of precision-guided weapons… you saw what we did to the Iraqi Air Force and their hardened aircraft shelters. They’re not so hard when you put a 2,000-pound bomb right through the roof.”
Wilsbach is now head of Air Combat Command (ACC).
Congress has notably pushed back on these positions, including in an open letter from 13 Republican lawmakers earlier this year that warned that “in recent war games [conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank] simulating a conflict with China over Taiwan, 90 percent of U.S. aircraft losses occurred on the ground, rather than from air combat.” That missive did also acknowledge that “constructing hardened shelters for all our air assets may not be economically feasible or tactically sensible.”
The Air Force is also very actively invested in concepts of operations known collectively as Agile Combat Employment (ACE). ACE is centered on reducing vulnerability and increasing flexibility through the ability to deploy in irregular and unpredictable manners to a growing number of bases globally. New and improved Tactics, techniques, and procedures to camouflage those movements and otherwise deceive enemies are also part of the equation.
It is important to stress that hardened shelters and other physical infrastructure are not answers by themselves to the multi-faceted threat ecosystem facing the Air Force.
For the Department of the Air Force, broader base defense issues are also tied up in the 1948 Key West Agreement, which firmly delineated the service’s roles and missions from those of the U.S. Army that it had split off from. Per that deal, the Army is in charge of defending Air Force bases at home and abroad from aerial threats.
“We know that, doctrinally, the Army has taken responsibility since the 1940s for air base air defense. We may have some questions on that,” Dr. Chaudhary said yesterday. “We may want to enter in a broader discussion on what that’s going to look like going forward, because right now, the threats are so localized and so tactical that we may want to have a broader discussion … and take on some of those mission sets going forward.”
“Frankly, I would be comfortable with the Department of the Air Force taking on the total defense/local defense of air bases as an organic mission, if the needed resources – human and financial, etc – were made available,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall had also said during a keynote speech at the Airlift/Tanker Association’s (ATA) annual symposium in November.
As the I2AP strategy notes, all of this comes amid steadily expanding threats to bases across the U.S. military, at home and overseas, as well as to critical civilian infrastructure, especially from drones and missiles. Drones have become a particular hot-button issue amid a rash of worrisome and still-unexplained incidents, including incursions over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia last year and more recently multiple U.S. facilities in the United Kingdom, as well as sightings in the skies above New Jersey. The War Zone, which was the first to report on all of these events, has repeatedly pointed out over the years that the dangers posed by uncrewed aerial systems are hardly new and are still growing, and that the barrier to entry is low. The Pentagon just recently announced a new department-wide counter-drone strategy, which acknowledges these threats, but also underscores the U.S. military’s continued lag in addressing them, which you can read more about here.
It’s worth noting here that authorities at Langley, as well as Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, have already been looking into the possibility of erecting anti-drone nets or other passive defenses to help protect against uncrewed aerial threats.
New and improved cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as novel hypersonic weapons, also present particular concerns for U.S. military bases globally. These are threats not limited to Great Power Competition, with smaller nation-states and even non-state actors increasingly fielding more capable stand-off missiles.
“I think we’re going to start thinking more broadly about what contested homeland operations look like, and so look to something coming out,” Dr. Chaudhary did also say yesterday toward the end of his talk. “Our Secretary [Kendall] has made a few statements on that, that we may be open to taking that mission [base defense] on in the future. So we’re excited about this. We’re going to talk about it, but, so, to come in the future.”
So, more may be coming soon from the Air Force about its plans for physical hardening of bases and/or other defensive measures.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com