In the age of missiles, the last place that a highly equipped fighter will want to be is the parking space. The essence of much of the day-to-day airpower of America in the Western Pacific is speed: well-known forward bases that can launch, recover, refuel, rearm, and repeat at a rhythm that is intended to compress distance. The same efficiency brings about a clean target set. Fixed airfields are mapable, observable, and also revisitable, providing an opponent with the channel through which to assault the process of sortie generation itself, instead of pursuing aircraft in the sky.
The principle of its functioning is brutally simple, the base should be suppressed, the aircraft will lose their relevance. The attacker can put fighters and bombers out of commission without a single conventional air-to-air kill, by cratering runways, tearing up taxiways, hitting the nodes that keep jets circulating, fuel storage, fuel distribution, weapons storage, maintenance areas, etc. Planes will be able to withstand the explosion and be out of commission even when they are not able to land on a strip of pavement. The clock is important even in situations where pavement damage is minimal, as runway repairs are made in anticipation that follow-on salvos are being launched, and that repetitive disruption can prove decisive than a single dramatic hit. Combine the compounding effects of uncertainty, reduced weapons loading rates, restricted movement of fuel, blocked taxi routes and the outcome will be a reduced rate of sortie which compounds each day. In such a setting, air superiority starts to resemble less like dogfighting, and more like which party could hold its launch-and-recover machine online.
This type of base-suppression issue is one that China has been developing over the years. An analytic work on Indo-Pacific basing is characterized as an open-source assessment of a typical conventional missile arsenal of the scale of 750 ballistic missile launchers and 2,500 missiles and 150 ground-launched cruise missile launchers and 300 missiles. Mass is not perfection, but density and repeatability capacity enough to be able to continue closing the runways, returning to fuel farms, and putting repair crews in a loop where repair time turns into a strategic variable.
Missile defense is useful, although it does not eliminate the math. Interceptors are limited, reloads are time consuming and saturation strategies are made to strain the inventory, not eliminate it at once. Hardening shelters are capable of saving aircraft, but can perform only a small part of what is being done to infrastructure to transform aircraft into sorties. The outcome is an unwanted division: platforms can still be there as access to them can fail all around.
This is what has elevated dispersion ideas into a niche to a necessity. The Agile Combat Employment (ACE) of the U.S. air force is designed to make things harder on the target by pushing the aircraft to more distant, small locations, followed by the dispersal of people, weapons, and fuel in a distributed manner. According to Undersecretary Matthew Lohmeier, “One of the greatest benefits to this scheme of maneuver is that it complicates targeting for adversaries.” But dispersal is not free. It pulls logistics into the foreground particularly airlift, refueling capacity and recent assessment has cautioned the U.S. airlift system that it might lack the capability and mix to maintain ACE by airfields that are short or shallow surfaced, citing the service as having not obtained large numbers of aircraft that are optimized with regard to that low-end access mission.
Even stealth is becoming a loser of its monopoly of surprise. The more and more low-frequency radar, infrared search-and-track, electronic intelligence, passive sensors, and satellites are incorporated into detection networks to provide fused tracks, allowing the reduction of the window stealth once purchased. Stealth is still useful in real-world application, but the biggest current basing problem is that a fifth-generation jet cannot launch and cannot get fuel or cannot land at all, since stealth will not help it.
The initial battle, in turn, has turned into a more of an engineering and logistics battle that will be waged against the precision fire. The decision on the amount of airpower that will be manifested tomorrow is made by rapid runway repair, redundant fuel distribution, splintered munitions handling, and robust mobility pipelines, not by the number of aircraft in the present.
