“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson used to say. In the high-stakes world of contemporary air warfare, this truism has become horrifyingly applicable. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has invested over a quarter-century honing tactics and technologies specifically engineered to punch the U.S. military’s command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems in the mouth cutting the very ties that have supported American air supremacy since Operation Desert Storm. The U.S. Air Force’s response is a new doctrine: Distributed Collaborative Air Operations (DCAO), a strategy that flips the PLA’s concept on its head by making disconnectedness a conscious advantage.
At the center of DCAO is a simple yet profound change. Rather than depending on a sprawling, centralized C4ISR network exposed to kinetic and electronic threats, DCAO enables fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 and F-22 to fly as independent, tactical-edge command centers. These planes, with Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) and Block 4 enhancements, have core processors embedded 25 times the capacity of earlier models, greatly expanded memory, and highly sophisticated electronic sensing and protection packages. The F-35’s AN/APG-85 radar has been said to double that of its predecessor, and its Distributed Aperture System (DAS) and new Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) provide pilots with unrivaled passive situational awareness and distant target detection without giving away their position through emissions.
This technological advancement is not incremental. As Air Vice-Marshal Paul Godfrey put it, “The data from the various sensors around the airplane are fused in the fusion engine. The radar might think that there’s a 70% chance it is x. Another sensor might indicate that it is 100% chance, or 99.9% chance that it’s x. And data fusion then can present the pilot with that answer that it is 98% certain that it is x.” This extent of onboard, AI-based sensor fusion allows pilots to make well-informed decisions in real time, even while isolated from higher command a requirement in an arena where “if not done correctly, you emit and you die” electronic warfare is the standard.
DCAO is meant to make PLA’s attack on U.S. C4ISR moot. Through the decentralisation of information collection, processing, and battle control, DCAO allows “inside forces” constituted by fifth- and fourth-generation fighters and unmanned collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) to strike deep inside contested airspace. These groups employ low-power or optical communication, which reduces the risk of detection while still coordinating offensive and defense operations. In subsequent generations, vehicles such as the B-21 Raider and F-47 Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) aircraft will extend this function further, combining next-generation stealth, sensor fusion, and long-range strike features.
The PLA’s own doctrine, based on U.S. thinking in effects-based operations and parallel warfare, seeks to “disaggregate an enemy force by attacking its C4ISR system-of-systems and then target and strike the disaggregated and disconnected enemy force with long-range precision fires.” But as DCAO illustrates, the U.S. is now applying this reasoning to its adversaries. By breaking forces apart and disconnecting them from the very beginning, DCAO prevents the PLA from making American forces “deaf, dumb, and blind.”
Electronic warfare is at the heart of this competition. The F-35, for instance, was designed from the ground up with hardened and redundant electronic warfare capabilities. Its systems can detect and jam adversary emissions, while safeguarding its own signals via sophisticated countermeasures. This means that F-35 pilots can “see” and act over a 1,200-kilometre battlespace, publishing fused data to other aircraft, ships, and unmanned systems at the speed of light across domains.
The integration of CCAs and UAV swarms adds further complexity and resilience. Uninhabited platforms like the MQ-28 Ghost Bat present unique engineering challenges, particularly in designing internal weapon bays that balance stealth, payload, and aerodynamic stability. As one discussion points out, “there is a high dependence for overall weapon-system performance on a well-designed payload bay, or bays getting the most out of limited loadouts.” This promotes a shift toward “distributed lethality” in which several CCAs, each with a limited complement of missiles, work together to saturate enemy defences with flexibility.
Recent conflicts have given us a glimpse of DCAO in practice. Israeli F-35s led attacks against Iranian infrastructure during 2024 and 2025, piercing sophisticated air defenses, scanning out threats, and facilitating rapid targeting by follow-on forces. These operations were virtually surprise-free and effective, showing the capability of DCAO to “fight in the dark, thrive in chaos, and leave adversaries chasing shadows.”
Finally, air combat’s future might not depend on massed formations or numbers, but on deciding when the lights go down. As the U.S. Air Force transforms toward a battlespace characterised by contested information and degraded communications, DCAO is a resilience blueprint that uses the full range of fifth-generation and next-generation technologies to outperform the competition in the most hostile environments.
