ACE Gets Real
How USAF is evolving Agile Combat Employment informed by insights from Ukraine and Israel.
By David Roza
As the head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa and NATO Allied Air Command, Gen. James B. Hecker chats with the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force every few weeks, gaining unique insight into how they’re fighting and surviving against Russia using techniques comparable to the evolving U.S. tactic known as Agile Combat Employment, or ACE.
“They’ve been very successful in not getting their aircraft hit on the ground,” Hecker said at the AFA Warfare Symposium in March. “And I asked him, ‘How is that? What do you do?’ And he goes, ‘Well, we never take off and land at the same airfield.’”
The Air Force has promoted ACE for years, hosting large-scale exercises around the world in which Airmen practice working in ever-smaller teams at expeditionary airfields, separated from large-scale logistics, maintenance, and other support. Now the war in Ukraine, along with hostilities between Israel and Iran, is providing real-world examples of how ACE might work in a future U.S. conflict, also revealing in some cases how the Air Force concept may come up short.
So Many Airfields, So Little Time
For field commanders, Europe is an almost ideal ACE environment. Distances across the continent are comparatively short, there are hundreds of allied airfields available, and allied aircraft can land and take off from almost all of them thanks to the close bonds of the NATO alliance.
Last summer, for example, fighter units from all across NATO gathered at Ramstein Air Base, Germany—not normally a fighter hub—to practice air-to-air combat; Airmen from the 52nd Fighter Wing meanwhile dispersed to a makeshift tent city from their home at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, a standard ACE tactic to keep adversaries guessing.
One clear lesson: It doesn’t matter how many bases one can disperse to if the bases themselves cannot be protected.
“I’ve got tons of airfields from tons of allies,” Hecker said. “The problem is I can only protect a few of them.”
Israel’s defense against a salvo of hundreds of missiles and drones in April 2024, while successful, was a highly coordinated defense where the scale of the target set was also very centralized in the state of Israel. But if units spread out in a wider area, defending those bases against attack gets harder.
“We can’t have that layered [air defense] for thousands of air bases,” Hecker said.
Instead, USAFE will have to pick a few main operating bases to fortify with defensive measures and rapid runway repair teams. From there, aircraft will fan out to smaller air bases to refit and rearm on their way to and from hostile airspace, but they can’t stay long.
“Over the last three years of conflict, the targeting cycle on the Russian side has decreased significantly,” Hecker said. “So to think you are going to land in another airfield and hang out there for a week with no defense, you’re going to get shwacked. … We’re not talking weeks anymore. We’re talking days, and sometimes we’re talking hours, if you want to be survivable.”
The head of Air Mobility Command, Gen. John D. Lamontagne, is tracking the same lesson.
“KC-135s have habitually operated out of one fixed location, went forward, done what they need to do at range, come back, regenerate, and do it again on another day,” Lamontagne said at the AFA Warfare Symposium. That might not work in a modern conflict. “I think they’re going to need to fly multiple times in the same day,” he said, touching down at multiple locations.
But moving fast takes practice, especially with foreign partners. Hecker preached interoperability, where Airmen from different countries can quickly refuel and rearm each other’s aircraft. Last spring, American and Norwegian F-35 maintainers practiced servicing each other’s jets, a crucial allied benefit from having so many NATO partners flying F-35s. Across Europe, where experts expect to see more than 600 F-35s operating in the 2030s, only 10 percent of those will be American.
Beyond training together, true interoperability will require policy changes, Hecker said. For example, last spring, Maj. Gen. Paul D. Moga, commander of the Ramstein-based 3rd Air Force, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that NATO partners continue to wrestle with data security challenges over sharing F-35 mission data files, which gather sensor data on potential threats, geography, and more.
“It’s bureaucratic for a reason, because the mission data files are extraordinarily important to the F-35,” Moga said. But not all nations are treated equally; Five-Eye partners like the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia can share anything, but NATO members and partners all have different levels of access due to intelligence sharing and related agreements that complicate everything from command and control to mission rehearsal and simulation. “A lot of it is intelligence and information-sharing barriers that we need to get past,” Moga said.
Operators, mission planners, policymakers, and even systems architects all have a piece of this complicated puzzle. Overcoming those obstacles could pay off with a fully compatible air fleet.
“What if a four-ship from the Netherlands landed at Lakenheath and one of the pilots got sick?” Hecker asked. “Why shouldn’t a U.S. pilot be able to jump in the Netherlands’ aircraft and go ahead and take off? We’re several years away from that, but that’s what we need to strive for.”
Putting Airmen Through Their PACES
Meanwhile, building up the skills needed so that Airmen can be effective ACE practitioners is no longer a job just for regional commanders. Air Education and Training Command is injecting new elements into the training pipeline to better prepare Airmen for ACE operations. PACER FORGE, which began in 2022 as a 36-hour exercise at Basic Military Training (BMT), is now expanding to 57 hours. The exercise challenges small teams under stress to overcome obstacles through creativity, flexibility, and teamwork. Extending the exercise by 21 hours will give Airmen “more extensive operational training,” said a spokesperson for the 37th Training Wing, which oversees BMT. Trainees could find themselves building and defending operating locations, recovering high-value assets, retrieving supply drops, and providing tactical combat casualty care. “Instead of being overly prescriptive by [Military Training Instructors], what happens now is, ‘Here are the objectives you’re set to achieve, here are the resources available to you … you have 57 hours to solve this problem and try to achieve the objective,’” AETC commander Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson said at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “You spent five weeks with what I call ‘conform, conform, conform,’ and now you’re in a place where we want you to understand [that] you need to be able to be agile, flexible, accountable, show initiative, and solve problems,” he added. Similar exercises will follow at specialty technical training, with the intent that, by the time they arrive at their operational unit, newly minted Airmen have already practiced ACE skill sets multiple times. Aircrew students are doing the same thing, recovering and operating out of auxiliary airfields where the logistics support is not so robust. “It’s an exciting time,” Robinson said. That front-end training will help with the ultimate ACE skill: being prepared at any moment.“Readiness is not just about preparing for the future,” PACAF Command Chief Master Sgt. Kathleen McCool said. “It’s knowing that anywhere in the globe, at any moment, you could be called to respond.”
Water Everywhere
Where Europe appears to be an ACE haven, the Pacific Ocean region is the opposite. There, the vast distances between airfields make air base defense and logistics support far more challenging.
Hecker said European bases could use fighters and laser-guided rockets to defend against slower-moving cruise missiles and one-way attack drones, like the ones Israel and the U.S. defended against in April 2024. But it’s more difficult to defend against ballistic missiles like the ones Israel and U.S. forces defended against six months later, in October 2024.
“I’m more focused on the October attack because I think that probably has the greatest application, or the greatest lessons learned for application in the Indo-Pacific theater,” said Pacific Air Forces Commander Gen. Kevin B. Schneider at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “When I look at what the People’s Liberation Army is capable of doing, that’s the focus.”
Ballistic missiles can be defeated with Patriot missiles, ship-based interceptors, and other high-end weapons, but the PACAF boss said the Israeli Air Force’s example of how to disperse and continue operations provided a role model of operational flexibility.
“Clearly, the Israelis were prepared. They had trained for that. They recognized and certainly lived every day inside a weapons engagement zone,” Schneider said. “They had a plan for dispersal. They had a plan for moving aircraft out. They had a plan for how their Airmen were going to react. They had a plan for how they were going to repair.”
Airmen stationed at air bases in Japan, Korea, and Guam should take note, Schneider said, because they all live within China’s weapons engagement zone.
“Continued training and continued proficiency in skill sets will allow us to be effective under fire and be able to disaggregate when we need to and then aggregate to take the fight back to the enemy,” Schneider said.
PACAF Airmen are practicing those techniques. In August, the 90th Fighter Squadron executed the fastest-ever F-22 deployment, flying combat sorties over the Middle East within 72 hours of their departure from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.
“It gave us an opportunity to remind our Airmen that this could happen at any moment,” said PACAF Command Chief Master Sgt. Kathleen McCool. “It also gave us an opportunity to work our ACE concepts by sending a small contingent team of F-22s with maintainers and equipment to our partners within the region.”
Like in Europe, Airmen in the Pacific need both defended hubs and austere spokes, but airfields in the Pacific are far more spread out and often more austere than their European counterparts. That is a challenge for a service struggling to pay for a long list of modernization programs at once.
“We in the Air Force have to make internal trades, certainly in the Indo-Pacific,” Schneider said. “Do we put that dollar toward, you know, fixing the infrastructure at Kadena, or do we put that dollar toward restoring an airfield in Tinian in the second island chain?”
Pacific allies may be able to help. Australia and Japan operate F-35s, while South Korea and Singapore plan to in the future, but even more important than having the same equipment is having a shared understanding.
“We don’t all have to have the same kit, but we have to have the same vernacular, we have to have the same or similar tactics, techniques and procedures, and we have to have an ability to communicate,” Schneider said. “It puts a big onus on all of us, especially for our command and control systems. We cannot just bolt on this capability.”
There may be more chances to practice in the future, as recent U.S. bomber deployments to Australia, combined with Pentagon investments in base infrastructure there, could help establish Australia as a key power projection area.