Iran's indoor airfield is fighting the last war. Here is how the US Air Force will fight the next one.
Hey, Iran, tell me you don't know anything about Agile Combat Employment without telling me you don't know anything about Agile Combat Employment.
I had a few people send me images this morning of Iran revealing a new underground airfield.
The English on the side of the wall says: “Our Response to Any Wicked Action Against the Iranian Nation Will be a Serious and Tough Response.”
I don’t know how many Iranian F-4 Phantoms remain, and this may be a display model for photos, but they sure took good care of this one - at least on the outside. The F-4 is still one of the most beautiful planes ever made.
The pictures above were sent to me by an Iranian Telegram user name Amir, who has sent me information from Iran about the protests. These pictures can also be found on Twitter.
Underground hangers, storage and maintenance facilities are nothing new. Switzerland uses them.
So does Sweden.
The USAF does not typically construct Hardened Aircraft Structures although they have made exceptions in Korea and Japan.
And some Air Force aircraft will always be kept inside of shelters, hardened or not to protect their exterior coatings.
But there is a problem with hardened shelters - your adversary often knows exactly were they are. And when they do, the bomb will always defeat the door.
Enter ACE - Agile Combat Employment.
The best place to destroy an enemy air force is on the ground, so what if you kept the adversary guessing as to where you were?
On 8 Dec 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was conducting a town hall for US troops in Iraq.
A soldier asked the following question:
"Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq [sic] for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north real soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We are are digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles go into combat. We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north."
And Secretary Rumsfeld replied:
“As you know, you go to war with the army you have not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
While Secretary Rumsfeld might have showed more compassion in his remarks, he wasn’t wrong. The delivery time for a Javelin missile system is 32 months.
So you go to war with the weapons you have and you probably won’t get a replacement. Not with the long supply chain involved in producing modern weapons.
That means that you can’t afford to lose a single aircraft, but it also means that the adversary isn’t getting another ballistic missile either.
Every ballistic missile fired by the adversary is precious. Ballistic missiles have a monetary value assigned to them and you won’t get another for the duration of the conflict. Constantly moving your forces gives the adversary a dilemma, not a problem.
Do you fire a missile that won’t get replaced at an airfield where there may or may not be aircraft to destroy?
The critical concept behind the Air Force’s desire to push ACE as a doctrine is that if you are agile enough to keep your aircraft moving, your adversary won’t know where to target and they will keep up this indecision until its too late.
Let’s look at the Survivability Onion that I spoke about in my video about the Bradley.
The first layer in the Survivability onion is “Don’t be there.”
But building an entire base complex that will eventually be penetrated cedes 5 layers of the survivability onion to your adversary until only one remains.
So why doesn’t Iran take the US Air Force’s principles of ACE and apply them to its Air Force? Iran is a big country. They could almost certainly have enough room to practice ACE principles when under threat of attack.
But they don’t because building bunkers is cheaper.
Underground shelters like this don’t add much to the survivability onion. But they are no more complex to build than a tunnel, create jobs, and give the illusion of security to people who don’t know anything about the military.
But a doctrine like ACE will keep the US Air Force moving around the adversary like Mohammed Ali.
Building hangers is easy. Building multi-capable airmen who understand ACE is hard, But only one of these strategies will win the next war.
If you want to read the ACE whitepaper, it is available below.
You are really good at this Ryan. This is an excellent paper. They should hire you to teach at the war College at fort McNair.
What they've done is more about currying favor with their own people and for propaganda than anything... Unless they believe their own BS, in which case there's no helping them... Well written piece Sir!