Championing The Agile Air Force Officer Career

Author : Dustin Bagnall
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (134 download)

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Download or read book Mobility Air Force and Agile Combat Employment written by Dustin Bagnall and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For three decades, the United States Military has been committed to combating the threat of Violent Extremist Organizations (VEOs) and counter insurgencies. The campaign against radical extremists has committed the U.S. to several overseas locations and necessitated the need for a specific type of warfighting; one that emphasized sustainable rotational deployments at strategic geographic areas of interest for continued deterrence known as “Stability Operations". However, ever since the drawdown of troops began in earnest, the United States has had the strategic bandwidth to shift its focus away from the threat of non-state terrorist groups and focus instead on the threat of peer/near-peer adversaries. During Operations Iraqi Freedom (OIF) to Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS), our adversaries' warfighting capability had evolved. The operating environment (OE) had significantly transformed. The USAF found itself ill-equipped to combat Russia and China's existential threat with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) inherited from decades battling small non-state actors operating within ill-defined borders. The Air Force’s maneuverability had atrophied as supply chains organized themselves around steady-state operations at fixed locations. In December 2020, Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF), General Charles Q. Brown Jr., put it bluntly when he said the Air Force needs to “accelerate change or lose.” One such line of effort put forth in the National Defense Strategy (NDS) is to “Build a More Lethal Force” by prioritizing investments in “air and space forces that can deploy, survive, operate, maneuver, and regenerate in all domains while under attack. Transitioning from large, centralized, unhardened infrastructure to smaller, dispersed, resilient, adaptive basing that include active and passive defenses will also be prioritized.” This type of operation, which former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis outlined, has had many names and parts, including 2 Adaptive Operations in Contested Environments (AOiCE), Logistics under attack (LUA), Agile Operations. In this paper, it will be referred to as Agile Combat Employment (ACE). At its heart, ACE is about mission survivability in contested environments through the disaggregation of operations. Joint air doctrine, Annex 3-99, describes ACE as: “dispersal and alert operations increases the survivability of friendly capabilities, decreasing time and distance problems faced in large theaters, allowing forces to attack and defend quickly.” The Air Force, along with private research groups like the RAND Corporation, has written extensively on ACE. The threat of an overwhelming offensive campaign by Russia or China and the impact of disaggregated operations on their targeting systems and cost of war has thus been well-argued. The next step would therefore be to galvanize action at the highest echelon of the military. However, looking at Gen. Brown’s call to change, the NDS’s investments priorities, and Air Mobility Command’s (AMC’s) current objective too, “advance Global Air Mobility Support System (GAMSS) agility, lethality, resiliency, and survivability, to generate combat power in contested environments,” it is clear the message has been heard at the appropriate levels. Previous documents have highlighted why we conduct ACE, but this paper's focus will be on the “how.” At present, most MAJCOMs have already developed their own ACE Concept of Operations (CONOPS). Each unique to its respective functional or geographic mission set. However, at the time of this paper, AMC is in the process of codifying its CONOPS, which puts Mobility Air Force (MAF) units in a unique position to provide tactical inputs to help shape the operational picture. This paper's focus lies within this decision space where AMC and Expeditionary Center (EC) seek inputs from the unit level to inform what will eventually become COAs or updated Tasks within more extensive support plans."--Introduction.