Pouring concrete to make hardened shelters for aircraft on the ground may not be as sexy as building next-generation fighter jets, but it may be just as important for the U.S. in a potential conflict with China, according to airpower scholars.
While China’s military has built hundreds of hardened shelters in the past decade or so to protect its air force on the ground in the Western Pacific theater, the U.S. has built only a handful, a strategic imbalance that creates a destabilizing first-mover advantage for the People’s Liberation Army, which could cripple American air power on the ground in a surprise attack, said the authors of a new report from the Hudson Institute.
“Regardless of how capable U.S. aircraft may be in the air, unless the Department of the Air Force, and DOD more broadly, rapidly enhances the resilience of its airfields, it is reasonable to expect that they will be crushed on the ramp,” co-author and Hudson scholar Timothy Walton told Air & Space Forces Magazine. In Air Force parlance, the ramp refers to the paved area at an airbase where aircraft are parked, loaded, and refueled.
To protect its aircraft on the ground from Chinese missiles, the Air Force has developed its Agile Combat Employment (ACE) concept, whereby small teams of Airmen and airframes spread out from central hubs to multiple remote or austere bases. But this “dispersion-heavy, hardening-light” approach is “inappropriate” in the light of Chinese surveillance and other capabilities, Walton said.
The problem, said Walton, is that Chinese surveillance, targeting and engagement capabilities would overwhelm the effort. “Dispersal isn’t enough. .. If you just disperse, the Chinese can track you and just shoot you in those other places.”
Worse, the dispersal might take U.S. assets to places that are poorly defended. “Depending on how you disperse, you might just disperse to places that have even fewer defenses, which in turn, are easier targets to defeat,” he said
“We’re not saying don’t disperse,” said Shugart. “ACE is a great idea, but hardening and other passive defenses have got to be part of the equation.”
Air Force leaders have recognized for years that more needs to be done to protect airbases in the Indo-Pacific theatre, especially those closest to the adversary. Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin told a Senate subcommittee last year the Air Force was “committed to building forward basing resilient enough to enable continued sortie generation, even while under attack.”
Nonetheless, J. Michael Dahm, a senior resident fellow at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, concluded last July in a research paper that “the current capabilities and capacities of both active and passive air defenses are inadequate to sufficiently protect U.S. air bases and other critical facilities on adversary target lists.”
That’s concerning because China has built a military force capable of a devastating one-two punch against the U.S and its allies in the Western Pacific, said Thomas Shugart, a co-author on the Hudson Institute report and a former Naval officer who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment prior to his retirement in 2020.
“The crown jewel in the Chinese military that makes this scary … is the PLA Rocket Force,” Shugart said. In the past five years, he explained, the number of PLA medium-range ballistic missiles grew from a few hundred to 1,300, and the numbers of longer-range intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S. territory of Guam have grown from a few dozen to 500.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Shugart said.
Open-source commercial imagery in 2021 offered a hint of how the Chinese military could use those ballistic missiles, showing targets built to resemble U.S. and Japanese airborne early warning and control aircraft.
While the PLA Air Force can deliver as much kinetic power in a single day as the whole Rocket Force, the missiles are important as the first punch of the one-two because they’re much harder to stop than aircraft, Shugart explained.
In a sneak attack scenario, the Rocket Force “would hit ships at the pier before they could get away. It would crater runways, trapping aircraft on the ground,” Shugart warned. “And then it would hit command centers with the battle staffs on board. It would take out ballistic missile defenses and air defenses. Once you’ve done that and essentially paralyzed the force, now the much greater volume of [PLA Air Force] munitions is able to sweep in and then clear the ramps at every air base in the western Pacific.”
The idea of sudden or surprise attack is something that’s woven through Chinese military doctrine, he added.
“So they’ve got the doctrine that talks about it,” he said. “They’ve built a force that appears to be designed to do it, and then they seem to be practicing doing it on a regular basis.”
U.S. officials have also highlighted efforts by Chinese hackers to preposition malware in the IT networks of U.S. critical infrastructure providers like water and power suppliers, another sign that China might be preparing a surprise attack.
At the same time, Shugart pointed out, “China has engaged in a very substantial, deliberate campaign to make significant upgrades to the degree of hardening and the capacity of its air bases,” especially around Taiwan. Dozens of these hardened shelters in the Western Pacific don’t seem to have any permanently assigned aircraft, probably because they would be occupied by forward deployed squadrons in a conflict, he said. By contrast, the U.S. has built only a handful of hardened shelters in the last five years.
Hardened shelters are only one kind of passive defense. Other techniques include camouflage, concealment, and deception. Rebuilding capabilities such as rapid runway repair are also counted as passive defense capabilities. Passive defenses are among the most cost-effective and sustainable ways to protect airbases, according to the RAND Corp.
Passive defenses don’t necessarily prevent planes from being destroyed, but they do make it more costly for the enemy to target them, said Walton. A base with hardened shelters might require dozens of missiles to be taken out of commission, while all of the aircraft on a similarly sized base without any hardened shelters could easily be destroyed by a half-dozen missiles.
Because of Chinese hardening, the PLA would only have to fire about three-quarters as many munitions to neutralize U.S. and allied airfields as U.S. and allied forces will have to fire to neutralize PLA airbases, Walton estimated.
That imbalance creates the destabilizing first-mover advantage, he said, a flaw in U.S. deterrence, because it incentives the adversary to attack first.
The U.S. has neglected base hardening for a complex set of reasons, Shugart said, including cultural factors in the Air Force. “I think the Air Force would rather spend money on combat aircraft than on concrete,” he said. Moreover, military construction funds are approved by Congress separate from the rest of the Air Force budget in a bill that also funds the Department of Veterans Affairs. The politics of the so-called MILCON-VA bill tend to revolve around base housing and big construction projects in the homeland that “make people happy,” he said.
“It’s a tough sell to explain to people that precious taxpayer dollars need to go to pouring concrete in Japan,” he said.
In an emailed response to questions, Pacific Air Forces said they were leveraging almost $1 billion in funding from the FY24 Pacific Defense Initiative, “investing in infrastructure and technology to enhance the resilience and survivability of our bases and facilities including hardening our airfields and buildings to withstand natural disasters and potential attacks.”
This story was updated Jan. 14 to include comments from Pacific Air Forces.