What Is The Future Of The Airforce?

Transformation is one of the hot buzzwords. We all know the world is different than it was during the Cold War. For you youngsters, this was when the US and USSR were facing off and hoping that WWIII wasn’t next.

The world is more complex now. Many places kept the lid on out of fear that their local problems would be the spark that led to WWIII. Without that fear, many of those old issues were allowed to blaze into fire again. Improvements in communication can help a crisis somewhere rapidly spin into a crisis there and somewhere else also. These same improvements in communication allow the public to hear about these problems quickly, and demand an immediate response to a random selection of these.

For WWIII the US Army was built into a very powerful force of heavy armored units with firepower that outclasses the vaunted Panzer divisions of WWII by an order of magnitude.

Transformation is the process of turning those heavy armored forces, called the legacy force, and the more specialized units that worked with them, into something more suited to the current and future situation. Units in the intermediate force, such as the Stryker Brigades, are lighter and easier to move, and require fewer supplies in combat. The new units are less armor and more infantry centered and are more suitable for fighting in built up areas like towns and cities. These forces sacrifice firepower to get this increase in mobility and agility, and expect to use legacy forces and aircraft to provide that firepower when it is needed. Greater use of electronics and computers will increase the situational awareness of units, which is their ability to know the key facts about themselves, the terrain and enemy in real time.

Not all of this change is technological. A standard armored division of the 90s would have more than twenty thousand men and would require additional forces for support. Smaller units would not have all of the things needed to fight independently. The new organization is modular and brigades of a few thousand will have everything they need in order to operate by themselves.

Nor is all of this in the future. Concepts which were being developed for employment over the next decade have instead begun fielding in Iraq and units are currently reorganizing to change the mix of units, getting rid of types which are available in excessive numbers such as field artillery and air defense to allow the creation of more units such as military police, which are in short supply.

Some of the concepts have proven to be the wrong direction and are being dropped. Battery technology has not improved as was hoped; so much of the electronic gear that was to be on each soldier has been dropped. Other gear will be issued to only a percentage of soldiers instead of all.

The goal is to transition to the objective force, one which will use technologies which are being developed now to provide powerful advantages and allow even smaller forces to outmaneuver and destroy less capable enemy forces.

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