A New Type of Fight: The Air Force
is working with its sister services and coalition partners on a study called “Effective Warfighting in a Contested Environment.” The ultimate goal is to focus the overall discussion on what it takes to operate in a contested environment, recommend new strategies, tactics, and approaches to operating in such an environment, and come up with a list of materiel solutions that can be implemented in the next three to five years, said Randall Walden, director of information dominance programs in the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Office for Acquisition. Speaking at AFA’s Air & Space Conference Sept. 18, Walden said most Air Force operators have never operated in a non-permissive environment. So, officials need to figure out “what capabilities we believe have been degraded and how we can adjust our tactics and/or materiel solutions to allow us to buy back some of that in a contested environment.” The study kicked off in July and is expected to be completed in February.
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…