2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Ukraine, Russia War: A Prelude to Future Conflict

The panel “Ukraine, Russia War: A Prelude to Future Conflict,” at AFA’s 2024 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, featured Air Marshal Allan Marshall, Air & Space Commander of the Royal Air Force; Lt. Gen. Dave A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.), Dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies; Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, USAF (Ret.), Former commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa; and Maj. Gen. Charles Corcoran, USAF (Ret.), Former Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. The panel, held on September 18, was moderated by David A. Ochmanek, Senior International/Defense Researcher at RAND. Watch the video below:

David A. Ochmanek, Senior International/ Defense Researcher at RAND:

And so, we are very privileged to have with us more than 130 years of professional experience in air operations. Do exactly that. I’ll first introduce air Marshall, Alan Marshall from the RAF. He is the senior Royal Air Force fighter, warfighter, responsible for the conduct of air operations in the UK and beyond. He oversees the generation and employment of air power in all environments, to include overseas intervention operations, air defense of the United Kingdom, and humanitarian and relief operations. With us also is General Jeffrey Harrigian, former commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, Air Forces Africa, who also served as Commander of AFCENT, the Air Force’s Central Command, responsible for air operations across the Middle East. He was the first director of the F-35 Integration Office and is a veteran pilot who have having flown the F-22 the F-15C, the OA-37 and the MQ-1, and by the way, Air Marshall, Marshall flew the 88 and several manned ISR platforms. Lieutenant General David Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute, I know needs very little introduction to this audience. General Deptula has been a pioneer in the planning and conduct of air operations going back to when he was the attack planner in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 he also directed the air campaign over Afghanistan in 2001 was twice a joint task force commander, and was the air Commander for the large scale tsunami relief operations that took place in the Pacific in 2005. He’s a fighter pilot with more than 3000 flying hours, 400 of which were in combat in the F-15. Finally, Major General Charles Corcoran, former Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for operations on the air staff through the F-15 and the F-22 also logging more than 3,200 total hours, and 440 combat hours.

Gentlemen, please, with your deep expertise in air operations, to get us started, would you please give us the one or two most important takeaways that you see from our air operations in the Ukraine and what it might mean for the for the future of our air forces? Air Marshall can lead us off.

Air Marshal Allan Marshall, Air & Space Commander (ASC) Royal Air Force:

Yeah, thank you very much. It’s a real pleasure to be here. It’s my first experience of an AFA conference in terms of Ukraine. You know, being a European, you’d appreciate we spent quite a lot of time thinking about that, and you know what lessons it gives us. But my first reflection is, we need to be we need to be cautious about the lessons we take. Many people would leap very quickly to saying, oh, we need to get more one way, attack drone capabilities, more county is first person video in order to fight that Battlefield, fight, I think that would be wrong. I think for me, I describe it as either a limited or a constrained conflict. Indeed, Russia describes it as only a special operation, and it is very specific and bespoke and has been mentioned. So therefore, we need to be cautious for the lessons. And there’s three factors, for me that gives us that caution. One is capability. You know, it is not being fought with the capabilities, certainly the high-end capabilities that are our nations possess. Secondly, in terms of policy, particularly geography. It’s geographically constrained Russia is, and we’re quite grateful for this not striking Ukrainian deep logistics, which is are in NATO territory. And similarly, Ukraine, due to capability and some policy permissions, can’t strike effectively deep into Russia. And then finally, by the way of war. You know, they don’t operate the way we do, the Western way of war. They don’t integrate their operations. So, for those three reasons, I think we just need to be really cautious what we take away from it. You know, there are definitely things to take away. And we’re going to discuss control of the air superiority, obviously integrated air and missile defense, rapid technology, electronic warfare and clearly the use of use of drones going forward. But we do need to be really, really cautious about what we take away, because the thing we need to prepare, design and develop ourselves to never find ourselves in the situation of fighting a conflict like that.

David A. Ochmanek:

Thank you, sir. Dave Deptula?

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.) Dean, AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies:

Yeah, I’ve got three quick ones for you. The first one will come as no surprise. That’s the absolute imperative of air superiority in order to achieve a decisive advantage. Otherwise, you’ll see what we’ve seen, and that’s a devolution of operations into attrition-based trench warfare, not unlike what we saw in World War I. Number two, the limitations on Ukraine to employ us provided weapons in Russia have ceded a sanctuary to Russia. That’s absolutely incredible and provides them a disproportionate advantage. Look, this is a David versus Goliath fight. And this administration’s policy has tied one of David’s hands behind his back. Number three, some of you might find this a surprise, but it’s absolutely true, and that’s the value of joint operations. This is not Ukrainian doctrine. Remember, they grew up under the Soviet system, so they’re highly stove pipe, and if they put together an integrated air ground campaign, they could achieve some synergies that could give them some advantages in the battle space. I’ve got more. I published a position paper on this when I came back from Ukraine in May. It’s out there at the Mitchell Institute booth, so I encourage you to pick that up after this.

David A. Ochmanek:

Thanks. Harrigian, please.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.) Former Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa:

Yeah, thanks. So if I could step back to the couple months prior and then the initial invasion, I would offer collectively, particularly for this group here in the DC AOR, don’t forget the importance of information sharing, and what we did at the beginning to bring together the team that was able to facilitate at least the deterrence on the Eastern Front, the eastern flank for NATO, those policies, and the way we were able to share information at speed to the right People from the strategics to the tactical level, built trust and confidence across the force, and without that, you’re never going to be able to win. And so, figuring out how you sustain those types of policies, and for you folks that work in the Intel field, remember how we did that, and be unafraid to continue those types of habit patterns, because that’s how those folks that are going to go fight with us will trust us to give them the data they need to be prepared. So that would be one thing I would offer to you. Additionally, I think you know you covered a little bit the joint ops that I was going to talk about, but I would also say that from our understanding of the threat, as David highlighted. I’d come from two years of dealing with the Russians in AFCENT over Syria, and there are plenty of Intel folks out there that did. We debated how good the Russians were going to be, what they were going to be able to do, and their ability to synchronize campaign work as a joint force. And I think we all know the answer to that. So as we continue to understand China and how they operate and what they do, recognize what are the areas that we can exploit better understand how they do business, and they’ll go train against that to the best of our ability, which I know where the Air Force is going, because that will allow us to have a better understanding and better prepared to operate in the environments that we’re going to need to operate in. Thanks.

Maj. Gen. Charles Corcoran, USAF (Ret.) Former Assistant Deputy Air Force Chief of Staff, Operations:

Thank you. If I had to pick two key areas that I think are important for us to deep dive into on the Ukraine conflict, I would say deterrence and air superiority, starting with deterrence, it failed in the case of Ukraine, and it’s holding up in the case of NATO. Why? Why? I had a great, great explanation of deterrence given to me a few months ago by a friend of mine. He’s, he was a former captain of the Ireland national rugby team from what 1989 to 2002 he’s six four. He weighs about 17 stones, which is 240 plus pounds or something. And my teenage daughter was getting ready to start dating, and he goes, oh, here’s what I did. The young lad came up to the door to pick her up, and he said, Have a great night. Just remember, whatever you do to her, I’m going to do you. That’s deterrence. It works.

So seriously, what? Why is it working for us with NATO? Why didn’t it work in Ukraine? We should really deep dive into that. We’ve talked a lot about it. There have been papers in on but as we, as we move forward to, look at China or look at what’s going on the Middle East. Where is it failing? Where is it working? Why and how do we make it work? Because ultimately, we want to deter, right? We don’t want to fight. We want to deter. That leads me to the second point, air superiority. So, we sit here on the 77th birthday of our nation’s air force. Happy birthday, Air Force.

And my son just turned 17 today. More importantly, but air superiority.

I’m going to paraphrase one of our senior leaders who recently said something to the effect of the notion of air superiority has changed. Hey, look, the Earth is round, water’s wet, and air superiority is air superiority. You can’t change the definition of it, just because you might not be able to do it as well as you used to. We were formed as an Air Force 77 years ago for the sole primary purpose of controlling the air for our nation. So we have freedom from attack, freedom to attack, freedom to maneuver for. Air Force for our joint force, for our allies and partners, and it’s our J, O, B, to figure out how to do it. If we can’t figure it out.

Here we sit on our birthday. You got to question why we don’t have an Air Force. We have got to figure that out. Neither side has it, as was mentioned in Ukraine, and look what’s going on. I’ll stop there.

David A. Ochmanek:

Thank you all. Let’s, if we can drill down on that point a little bit on their superiority we’re seeing on this battlefield, a nation, Ukraine, which for all intents and purposes, does not have an Air Force and yet has shown itself repeatedly able to do things that typically you need air superiority to do specifically observe and strike targets in the enemy rear. I’m wondering how well our Air Force today and, in the future, is organized, trained and equipped to provide air superiority to the joint and combined force in the presence of this proliferated threat of autonomous, one-way attack drones. I don’t think we designed the F 35 to shoot down $20,000 drones. So, so we’re stepping into a world with new challenges to the Airmen. I wonder if any of you have thoughts about what that means for us going forward. Please.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian USAF (Ret.):

That’s my question. Okay, let me answer that. So first off, the collective team has done a whole bunch of work on what layered defense looks like with respect to these types of threats. But David, I guess I got to go back, you know, we jump quickly to what it looks like today. And for me, I go, hey, let’s not remember if the Russians had gained air security, this discussion would not even be happening, right? Gotta acknowledges that it would be a whole different discussion. But here we are taking it to the next level of, you know, what do we kind of call it counter, small UAS, or, you know, massive numbers of drones. It’s a problem we’ve got to deal with. And you can’t say there’s going to be one specific platform that’s going to solve that problem. It needs to be, I think, a discussion about how you layer the defense, how you integrate it across the force and then ensure that we’re not spending, you know, massive amounts of money to shoot down a $20,000 drone with a million dollar missile, and we know how to do that, and there are lessons being gathered every day, but I don’t think we take that as the Hey, this is what it’s always going to be like in the future. It’s a part of the puzzle, but it’s something that we need to fix into the broader discussions going forward.

Maj. Gen. Charles Corocoran, USAF (Ret.):

I’ll pile on the we’re tying our airman’s hands. We’re tying our joint forces hands from a policy perspective. Look, we know when drones are being shipped from Iran to Russia. We know when missiles are being shipped from Iran to Russia. We know when weapons are being shipped from Iran to the Houthis and we watch it and we report it in the news, and then we wonder why ships get shot. We wonder why Kyiv gets attacked, etc. So, if you want to sit back and complain about drones and do nothing about it from a policy perspective, you’re not going to solve the problem.

So, this is not an air superiority issue, as much as it is a policy issue, you’ve got to give the operators the tools they need to take care of the problem. We have exquisite intelligence. We’re blessed with that we know when things are happening and we’re not doing anything about it from a policy perspective,

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, hey, and let me add on here. We live this in the early part 2016, 2017 against ISIS when it started. And we did exactly that. There are people in this crowd that worked with me, that did all the mapping of where they were coming from, and then we went after them before they even launched them. We can’t forget that. And it’s followed on to your policy piece.

Air Marshal Allan Marshall:

I think, you know, for me, it just comes back to that limited or constrained conflict, you know, if those policy constraints go away, we would quickly unlock the, you know, the stasis that’s on the battlefield now. So I absolutely agree with the comments, you know, we shouldn’t focus on systems. To defeat drones when they turn up. You’ve got to go after the whole system right, right from the very start in order to prevent it in the first place.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

I’ll just go back, Dave, to what you open this in your opening comments. We got to be careful that we don’t project what is occurring in this particular theater and associated with some of the responsibilities that the United States have, which are very different. So, there’s a great big difference between a quad copter carrying a hand grenade being able to or unable to cross thousands of miles of ocean to get to and accomplish a particular mission objective. Yeah, they’ve introduced some quad. Is but these are differences in the character of war which can be countered with the right perspective, and that’s what gentlemen on my left here addressed.

David A. Ochmanek:

Thank you very much. Getting another layer down, I think both Ukrainians and the Russians on the ground are learning some painful lessons about what I’m going to call loosely, the ubiquity of sensing and targeting. Yes, there are ways to counter space-based sensors. There are ways to counter airborne sensors at all levels, but it seems to me on this battlefield at least that if you want to survive, you’ve got to be dispersed, you’ve got to be mobile, you’ve got to be hidden. And I wonder to what extent we can extrapolate that trend forward, and what that might mean for how we base and operate our air forces going forward.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, let me jump in there. First, I agree completely with your conclusions with respect to sensing and precision. In a short anecdote, one of the issues that was raised by the senior officials in the Ministry of Defense and Air Force back when Corky and I visited Kyiv was would you, can you help us please figure out a way to deny commercial satellite coverage that the Russians are using to see what we’re doing here in Ukraine. So yeah, sensing has been become ubiquitous. Now. How do we deal with that? I’ll share with you. Several years ago, I came up with a phrase that in the 21st century, intelligence is operations, and that posed a quandary to my op’s buddies. They go, what the hell are you talking about? I go, well, look, you can’t conduct effective operations unless you understand and the complete and have not complete but the appropriate situational awareness of what’s going on. That’s fundamental. And we see that today unfolding in that battle space, and it’s going to be with us, everyone everywhere else, with respect to precision. We all know the evolution of precision. You know, we use 6% of the munitions in Desert Storm Operation Inherent Resolve over 95% ammunition. So bottom line, if there’s anything bigger than a bread box that you’re interested in, it’s going to be targeted with respect to knowledge. And how does this apply? And what’s the Air Force doing with it? I think they’ve embraced a whole notion of distributed operations evidenced by the embracing of the concept of agile combat employment. That’s great to embrace that concept. Now what there has to be is follow up and to hop onto a theme that the Secretary emphasized is you need the resources to be able to supply with fuel, munitions, command and control, sustainment. We’ve got over 200 air bases in South Pacific that we can do that with, but we need to prepare them to be able to execute that concept. The other part, I’ll add on here, and then hand it over to my partners here on the panel is we also have to remember, and Corky mentioned it earlier, we have to keep and embrace that offensive counter air mindset and not default to the notion that we’re going to allow our adversaries to shoot thousands of missiles at us. We have to take that capability away, and we have to take it away up front. So that’s a key part of what the Air Force needs to embrace and its plans and processes in the future.

Maj. Gen. Charles Corocoran, USAF (Ret.):

I’ll pile on really quickly. It’s the ubiquity of sensing is actually something, if you move the whole discussion left, that we could use to our advantage, right? Because if you deter and you want to be seen, it’s when you fight that you want to hide, and we’d rather be deterring. So, we have to be present. We have to be there. And it’s wonderful. The things that are going on, whether it’s across Europe and general hackers, they are general Schneiders. They are in Pacific. The more Airmen we put out there, the more work we do with allies and partners. The more forward we are, the more we have the police in the neighborhood, the more likely we are to deter and then, with the application, the proper application, of the principles of war, should a fight kick off, we can figure out how to hide. But right now, we want to be seen. We want to be seen to prevent the fight from ever kicking off.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian USAF (Ret.):

And I’ll just add on to that. And I think General Deptula said this time and time before, but that requires capacity and capability numbers and numbers that can be seen. And so, working through what that right mix looks like, understand that that’s a challenge. But if the. The enemy, the adversary is not visualizing that as something that they’ve got to deal with. They will make decisions based on how they see that picture.

David A. Ochmanek:

General Deptula is a veteran of the Scud hunt. Wasn’t easy. We weren’t successful. Fortunately, those were crappy missiles in limited numbers that couldn’t really hurt us when we look at China scenarios in particular, I just, I’m just going to raise the question, but leave it there, our ability to actually effectively suppress that threat, the mobile ballistic missile threat, is, I think that question, and I think that has pretty profound implications for how we base and operate in the future.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

I agree wholeheartedly. So, let’s not just throw our hands up and say, oh my gosh, we can’t do that. It’s too hard. It’s not too hard. We can affect those mobile missiles. We can affect the leadership. We can affect the command and control. And back to the Scud hunt. It would have been worse if we didn’t…

David A. Ochmanek:

Oh, of course.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Negate and suppress their ability to communicate with one another or to issue orders in a timely fashion. So, we’ve got to take all these parts and pieces into consideration, which goes back to the point of building those capabilities ultimately achieves the goal of deterrence in inducing sufficient uncertainty into the adversary’s mind to make sure that they don’t make the decision to attack in the first place. So, I’d suggest that’s where we push the throttles up in terms of being able to put together the capabilities to prevent them from accomplishing what they aim to do in the first place.

David A. Ochmanek:

I’m guilty of this. Many of us are guilty of this. We all want to go to the kinetics, but we’ve certainly seen that the electromagnetic spectrum is a really important part of warfare in many, many scenarios. Ukraine is no exception. Our forces have been used to operating now for many decades in a fairly benign, ew environment. Ukraine has shown that that has that would not be the case in a fight against Russia. Harrigian, you’ve had some thoughts. I’m sorry. Chair Marshall, you’ve had some thoughts about this. Please share those with us. Yeah.

Air Marshal Allan Marshall:

Thank you. So, in terms of electronic warfare or the electromagnetic spectrum, and use, use of that? Yeah, you know, it’s fascinating observing what’s going on. I think most people argue that it’s the densest environment that has ever been seen in terms of operating in. And both sides are really struggling to keep their navigation systems, online communication systems, get their radars to do the sensing that we need to do. And you know, and deception and decoys are very much alive in the EM environment there. So, I think, you know, there’s quite a lot of stuff we can learn technically from what’s going on at the tactical level. I think that’s important. I think higher up, though, there’s no surprise here. This just reminds us of what we already knew. It probably guilds us into prioritizing a little bit more than we should, because, you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to be able to operate in that spectrum. You know, it’s vital ground for your operations to be to be able to do that going forward. And you know, just so we need to be able to control and operate in the spectrum at a time and place in your choosing, just in the same way you put an airplane in the air at the place, time and place of your choosing. So, we do need to focus on it. I think, in terms of, are we adequately, adequately prepared, I think, I think probably not, over for the scale of the fight that we need. We need to look ahead to and, you know, it’s a competitive there. It’s sort of, everybody’s advancing progressively. So, it does need some focus as to, you know, where we should prioritize, maybe, maybe the focus, I think, I think for me, you know, the fact that you, you know, you need radars and systems and emitters to play. I think that’s fairly obvious. But for me, it’s the, it’s the understand and the intelligence function. In advance of the fight, you’ve really got to know what the enemy is capable of doing and what they are doing, and then in the fight itself, on a real time basis, you need to know what’s going on so you can react. So, I think that’s the fundamental you’ve got to focus on understanding real time and in advance the EM environment, I think next, what we’ve seen, again, no surprise in Ukraine, is really rapid adaptation for both sides in terms of frequencies, techniques and equipment. And again, we just got to get used to that really fast pace of adaptation in this environment. And then, and I guess the final one I’ll sort of leave us with is, again, resilience. I think no matter how good we are, there will be times when you know you can’t communicate you can’t get your navigation or data link data as well. So, I think we just need to sort of redouble our efforts, as well as trying to get better in both space and air and protect our EM systems and our ability to operate and. We do need to make sure we can operate without and it’s interesting in terms of some of the one-way attack systems that are being developed. You know, they’re using this reversion renavigation methods now, of C matching and elevation matching, rather than relying on GPS, which is becoming increasingly denied.

David A. Ochmanek:

Is GPS an Achilles heel? And are there steps we should be taking now to robust up that capability.

Air Marshal Allan Marshall:

Yeah, I think, you know, it’s so ubiquitous we can’t throw it out wherever you can. You need to be able to clearly focus the signal and protect you protect your receivers against that. But I think progressive development of alternatives to give you some more as well. You know, for years we’ve had GPS and ins going forward, and perhaps, you know, we need a few more alternatives as we go forward.

David A. Ochmanek:

Thank you. Let’s turn to the industrial base. I know there are people in this audience who are interested in that, who are part of that. History is full of national leaders who believed when they went to war that the boys would be home by Christmas, or sentiments to that effect, I think Vladimir Putin has already been added to that list. We’ve seen that at least portions of NATO’s industrial defense industrial base have not been prepared to support protracted, high end military operations, at least with respect to some parts of the of the inventory that our forces would need. We’ve read that that many of the NATO members, including the United States, are taking steps to remedy that problem. In your view, have these steps been adequate? And our other steps that you would advocate going forward?

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thanks, David. I take that on. And I’m reminded one time when we were working in the Middle East and we were dropping a lot of bombs, and I had to do an interview, and the reporter asked me so general Regan, do you think your industrial base can provide you enough weapons? And I said, we are the United States of America. Yes, I will get the weapons and they will deliver. And in fact, that’s what happened now, having said that, as we look at the environment and what we’re seeing not only in Ukraine, but across the globe, our industrial base is fragile, we need to acknowledge that, arguably, it was built for peacetime, not war. And we need to think our way through from a global sustainment perspective, how do we do the right pre-positioning? How do we set ourselves in a position that we’re prepared to execute the concepts of operations that are being developed, whether that be agile combat employment from a deterrent perspective or at war further, I think as we look at the specifics of what it’s going to take, we’ve got to diversify the supply chain, leverage our partners, those that are helping us, and I know across industry, that is an important part, particularly as we work with allies that are buying new capabilities to ensure that those supply chains are diversified and leveraged in a way that allows us to get the most out of them. Further from a procurement perspective, looking at multi-year constant, consistent and stable funding will allow the long lead items that are required to support the warfighter across all domains is absolutely necessary, and I know the Secretary and the collective team is working hard on that, but that is an issue that needs to be worked consistently, and that message and narrative communicated such that industry can plan appropriately to meet the requirements that the war fighters have.

David A. Ochmanek:

Very good. Dave?

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

That’s great. But all that said we need as a military writ large, and I’m not just talking about the Air Force, mountains of stuff, okay? Short war story during Desert Storm, no one came to me and said, hey, throttle back on the number of munitions that you’re using, which in essence, you know, we were dropping well over or attacking well over 12, 150 desired mean points of impact per day. Multiply those times four or five, and you get the numbers of weapons. Fast forward to Operation Enduring Freedom, 10 years forward, after less than a month, I’m getting notifications to throttle back. We’re running low on JDAMs, and we’re dropping 70, 80, 100 weapons a day, and to fast forward to Inherent Resolve. Yeah, you got the weapons from America, but you’re only hitting 20 targets a day, which ought to be a wakeup call from Ukraine when the Russians are launching, you know, 60,000 artillery shells a day, just in time. Delivery might work great for FedEx, but it’s not what we want in the United States military. I want stockpiles of stock. Up in every theater, so I don’t have to call and ask for just in time delivery. I’ve got an insatiable supply of ammunition that I can use to kick the enemy’s ass with.

David A. Ochmanek:

Very good on that on that note. The broader point is this, since 1991 in the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve implicitly adopted an expeditionary approach to large scale power projection. The bulk of the force we use to defeat Iraq twice, to defeat Serbia, to defeat Afghanistan, came from somewhere else after a decision to intervene. People forget that during the Cold War, we had 365,000 American Soldiers and Airmen in Europe. 24/7/365, and piles of stuff with which to fight the war. We have to go back to that model to credibly deter aggression by China and Russia, because these are not Junior Varsity adversaries, and we were just at the beginning stages of thinking what a future posture vis a vis China, for instance, would look like that’s not so reliant on unspooling a tip fit over a period of weeks and months prior to the commencement of hostilities, which brings me to my next question. The US national defense strategy, at least unambiguously labels China as the pacing threat, the threat against which we are to place the highest priority for preparing China’s military capabilities today outstrip those of Russia in many characteristics, particularly long range strike, but also robust ISR and their navy in a variety of other ways, and certainly fighting in the Pacific imposes greater constraints on basing and operations than we would experience in Europe, Particularly the availability of 8,000-foot runways, intratheater, mobility and other things. For the Americans on the panel, are you satisfied that the Department of Air Force is on a trajectory to field forces and capabilities adequate to address the Chinese threat over the let’s say the next five years?

Maj. Gen. Charles Corocoran, USAF (Ret.):

I’ll go back to my two takeaways from Ukraine, deterrence and air superiority. Start with deterrence. I already mentioned it. But what you see general Schneider doing with the forces, with the limited forces he has, are exactly what need to be doing. You need to be present. He needs to show up throughout the AOR to show the Chinese are there, to work with allies and partners to have skin in the game. If you look at General Hecker’s AOR, the enhanced forward presence brigades that we have up in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, 1,000 strong or so, each from about 16 different partner nations. They’re basically tethered goats.

They’re well within range of all the Russian munitions, right? But what NATO is doing there is making a strong statement of Putin, if you attack one, you attack all, and you’re going to have to fight NATO. How do we do that? Similarly to Xi, how do we get inside of his cranium to let him know that if you, if you attack any of these nations around here, you’re going to face the full force of the US and all of our allies and partners in that in their area to try to deter him, the exquisite intelligence we have that was mentioned that you know, leading up to the Ukraine invasion, that’s all very important to to maintain and invest in that. And then if a fight, God forbid, kicks off air superiority, what are we investing in?

And I contend that you don’t want your police outside the neighborhood with long range weapons. You want them in the neighborhood. And guess what? We’re going to take some losses, but you got to take risks. You got to be there.

And I bring up the D-Day invasion sometimes.

What if those boys hadn’t got off the boats because the German rifles shot. You know, they stayed outside the range of the German rifles. We are going to take losses in a pure fight, but we’re going to have to take losses if we expect to go in there and do our job and win and again. Backing it up, by the way, if we, if we show that we’re willing to do that, hopefully we actually deter the fight from ever kicking off.

David A. Ochmanek:

Thank you, Joe Corcoran.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, let me jump in there. The short answer your question is yes, I think we’re on the right trajectory, because I think there’s a realization of the importance of deterring to the point that we don’t have to fight in the Pacific. Two points I want to make. The first one is the importance of allies and partners. You know, we’ve said that at least for 40, 50, 60, 70, years, but I go back to Desert Storm. Hey, we could have done that all on our own. We had 32 partners. They contributed, yes, but we had the capacity to do that on our own. That’s not the case today. In any theater. General Hecker yesterday made the point of, in I don’t know, a couple years we’re going to have our allies. We’re going to have 700 F-35s in Europe. That’s a big statement. We can’t do this on our own anymore. We have to rely on allies and partners.

Okay, second part of the answer is we have to start building more combat aircraft, period. I said this yesterday. You all know this. We’re the oldest, the smallest and the least ready Air Force in our history. That’s not a criticism, but it’s a fact. At the same time, the People’s Republic of China’s air force is the newest, the biggest, and the most ready in history. So, we have to build. We have to recapitalize, because we’ve been in a four-structure nosedive, and we’ve got to recover. That means we’ve got to build more stuff.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian USAF (Ret.):

I just want to pile on on the allies and partners. And I know many of you would probably see me as someone, as a zealot on this, but my point has been, if we don’t export the right capabilities, the United States will always be out front. Your sons and daughters will always be out front, and our partners and allies want to be with us. So for those that work in the policy arena and the export arena, work to get to yes, we need them. They need us. Without them, it’s always going to be us, and that’s not a winning formula, so we got to continue to work that aggressively.

David A. Ochmanek:

Last question, the Commission on the national defense strategy just came out with its report. It’s a very robust report. It’s a very, I think, let’s say depressing is one word for it, a frank assessment of where we stand today. And it’s a very clear call for increased commitment on the part of this nation to national defense, to include a substantial increase in the top line of the budget. And if the Treasury of the United States could write a check for $10 billion to the United States Air Force, and we’ll apply this to the RAF as well. It would be in pounds, not dollars. What would be the one capability area that you would be most interested in investing in? I think General Deptula gave us his answer to that combat aircraft for the Air Force. Other views on that, gentlemen?

Air Marshal Allan Marshall:

I’ll just give a very quick one that also comes back to my em answer. You’ve got to make sure you’ve got the understanding. You’ve got to make sure you get the indicators of mornings early so that ideally, you can keep those combat aircraft on the ground until you need them. So, I think you’ve got to satisfy yourself you’ve got your warnings and intelligence, and then. Absolutely agree into the number’s aircraft and the mass and the stockpiles that you need, combat aircraft and the associated Airmen.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian USAF (Ret.):

Combat aircraft and the associated Airmen. People.

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This transcript was auto-generated, and may not be 100 percent accurate. The source audio and video can be accessed above.