With eyes on Beijing, US Air Force shakes up future force priorities, tactics

Airpower has emerged as a cornerstone of modern warfare, offering unparalleled speed, reach, and precision across a variety of mission sets, including deterrence, defence, and humanitarian operations.

In the Indo-Pacific region – a vast expanse spanning key economic corridors, strategic chokepoints, and contested territories – airpower is particularly critical. As the epicentre of great power competition in the 21st century, the Indo-Pacific is characterised by its unique geography, complex security dynamics, and growing potential for conflict, making airpower indispensable in safeguarding stability and projecting influence.

The Indo-Pacific’s vast maritime domain, dotted with thousands of islands and archipelagic nations, presents significant operational challenges. Long distances between bases, limited forward-deployed infrastructure, and logistical constraints demand air forces that are highly flexible and capable of sustained operations.

The region’s diverse climates – from typhoon-prone waters to humid jungles – further complicate air operations, requiring advanced maintenance and robust adaptability. Despite these hurdles, airpower remains a vital enabler for regional security, as it can provide rapid response to crises, surveillance of disputed areas, and deterrence against aggression through the credible threat of precision strikes.

The increasing militarisation of the Indo-Pacific underscores airpower’s role in maintaining strategic balance. The South China Sea has become a focal point of tension, with overlapping territorial claims and the construction of militarised artificial islands by China beginning in earnest in the early-2010s.

Similarly, the Taiwan Strait continues to be a flashpoint with global ramifications. In such a contested environment, air superiority becomes a decisive factor, allowing nations to defend their interests and maintain freedom of navigation in international airspace and waters.

Modern airpower assets, such as fifth-generation fighter jets, long-range bombers, and unmanned aerial systems, play pivotal roles in ensuring situational awareness, force projection, and effective deterrence, these capabilities, are further enhanced by the addition of advanced airborne sensor suites and robust airlift platforms that provide rapid mobility and decision overmatch.

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Emerging technologies, including hypersonic weapons and integrated air defence systems, also shape the Indo-Pacific’s strategic landscape, posing new challenges to air operations. Nations within the region, notably China, are rapidly advancing their capabilities to contest air dominance, compelling others to innovate and adapt. In this high-stakes environment, investments in stealth technology, electronic warfare, and resilient logistics are essential to counter potential adversaries.

As the Indo-Pacific grows in geopolitical significance, the potential for future conflict looms large; competing national interests, resource scarcity, and the rise of revisionist powers contribute to a fragile security architecture.

Critically, in an era of renewed great power competition and rivalries, airpower will likely serve as a linchpin for any future military strategy in the region, enabling both deterrence and rapid escalation control. For nations seeking to navigate these turbulent waters, airpower is not merely a tool of war but a guarantor of peace, stability, and sovereignty in an increasingly volatile world.

Recognising these factors, the US Air Force has kicked off an initiative to modernise, restructure, re-equip and overhaul the force to better respond to the challenges posed by a peer competitor in China, with wide reaching implications for allies like Australia and its own air force capabilities over the next decade and beyond.

Unpacking these developments is Bill Sweetman, author of Trillion Dollar Trainwreck: How the F-35 hollowed out the US Air Force, in a piece for ASPI titled The US Air Force is redesigning itself in which he highlights the metamorphosis currently beginning to reshape the US Air Force and its ability to project combat airpower in the region.

A shifting balance of power

Sweetman begins his analysis with important context, particularly given the evolution of global power following the end of the Cold War which prompted, despite what many would believe, a withdrawal and scaling back of American presence across the globe.

This scaling back had a particular impact on US forces in the Indo-Pacific, with Sweetman explaining, “Since the end of the 1990s geopolitical unipolar moment, when the United States faced no real adversary, USAF Chief of Staff General David W Allvin notes, the air force has ‘crowdsourced the fight’ to support prolonged operations in low-threat environments, pulling small units from 93 locations ‘because we didn’t want to break the bases’.”

In response, we witnessed the vast arsenal of American military airpower focused on permissive and uncontested battle zones in the Middle East and Central Asia in support of the Global War on Terror, having significant impacts on the personnel, infrastructure, materiel and the stockpiles that have provided American military primacy since the end of the Cold War, which has only been compounded by the increasing capability and willingness of China to exert its influence and power over the region.

The rise of Beijing marks a major turning point for the global and regional balance of power and has placed increasing strain on the US Air Force to support the US Navy and its own air forces’ capacity to project American and allied airpower in the region.

At the core of the US Air Force’s response, Sweetman detailed the “Resolute Force Pacific (ReforPac) exercise will be the largest US Air Force non-combat deployment in many years, with more than 300 aircraft involved ... ReforPac will draw large forces from fewer units, to provide more intensive and realistic training. It’s a concept, he said, that was battle-tested in part when the USAF reinforced its Middle East strength after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.”

ReforPac is designed to learn the lessons of current air combat operations, particularly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, while also accounting for the increasing proliferation of advanced air combat platforms, integrated sensor suites, airlift capabilities and, of course, low-cost, commercially available autonomous systems that add critical mass and complicated adversarial decision-making processes.

Highlighting this, Sweetman added, “One lesson is already emerging: the US Air Force may not be able to afford to structure itself entirely around high-end (read: stealthy) aircraft and systems – and it may not need to. ‘If there are systems there that are less lethal,’ Allvin says, ‘they are there so that we don’t grind the others down facing a cost-imposition strategy’.”

Unpacking this further, he detailed, “An air force can use mass, with uncrewed systems, to impose cost, Allvin adds. ‘Mass may be about having assets that must be addressed, to deplete the adversary’s inventory.’ That’s the theory behind one new effort, a low-cost long-range missile named Project Franklin (because it must be respected) based on an Defence Innovation Unit platform design.”

This paradigm shift will have a major corresponding impact on the future force structure of the US Air Force as it, like the rest of the US Armed Forces, faces increasingly constrained budgets, recruitment shortfalls, ageing platforms (often many of the US front-line aircraft are of the Cold War-era) and constrained supply chains that impact the capacity to resupply, replace, upgrade and repair.

Force structure implications

Despite the technological advantages of next-generation aircraft, the advent of fifth-generation and now sixth-generation is placing increasing cost and time constraints on already constrained forces, including the US Air Force resulting in a shrinking of the number of platforms capable of being fielded, with corresponding impact on the application of airpower in the Indo-Pacific and increasingly, given America’s global responsibilities, across the globe.

Sweetman unpacks the impacts on the US Air Force’s future force structure, explaining, “This means big changes in future force structure and equipment plans: for 30 years, since the Desert Storm campaign against Iraq, the end of the Cold War, and the inception of the Joint Strike Fighter program, the USAF’s destination has been an all-stealth force – yet that is still decades away, the last F-35 delivery having slipped into the late 2040s.

“No conclusions have been reached – for an Air Force futures conference, the discussion was astonishingly NGAD-free – but Allvin set down some principles for force design. ‘This is a design for the changing character of war. New geostrategic patterns or a new national defence strategy can emerge, and I don’t want people to leave here thinking this is an Indo-Pacific force design’.”

At the core of delivering this, Sweetman, quoting General David W Allvin, detailed these central principles, “Take back the offensive. You can’t retreat to long range. You have to be able to fight close in, where the partners are. Speed is imperative. The adversary will put effects in immediately. There will not be an iron mountain” – the informal term for massive, centralised supply dumps – “and we need to disrupt and deny early. Solve for agility. We’ve shown too much hubris about our ability to predict the future, even in our own technology base.”

In order to deliver this step change, the US Air Force is currently undergoing major internal reform, focused on “mission area capabilities needed to respond to three threat bands, according to density, complexity and distance as mission areas” as Sweetman explained.

Unpacking the importance of these mission area capabilities and the subsequent impacts on the future US Air Force force structure, Sweetman detailed, “Mission Area 1 (MA1) capabilities can ‘live within and generate combat power from the dense threat area which will be under constant attack’ from missiles or drones. MA2 capabilities ‘operate from the defendable area of relative sanctuary beyond the umbrella of most adversary ballistic and cruise missiles … and project fires into highly contested environments.’ MA3 capabilities ‘create the flexibility and mass to span a range of potential future crises … with positions resilient to limited adversary attack.”

Final thoughts

In the Australian context, with the Australian government identifying in the 2024 Integrated Investment Program that it intends to keep the nation’s small fleet of F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets and E/A-18G Growlers in service well into the 2040s alongside the 72 F-35 Lightning IIs and an as yet undisclosed or perhaps unknown final number of MQ-28A Ghost Bat aircraft, it is time to think outside the box.

Air combat, air superiority and long-range strike as the direct applications of airpower, in particular, is only going to increase in importance over the coming decades and keeping the Royal Australian Air Force at the leading edge of that shift will require a more nuanced, bespoke approach that delivers Australian decisionmakers with a robust, focused, and balanced military capability and advantage of peer and near-peer competitors alike.

Yet little remains changed in the way of material difference for the Royal Australian Air Force. Ultimately, in the case of the Air Force, little remains changed from the earliest incarnations of the 2016 Defence White Paper and, arguably, even further back than that to the 2009 Defence White Paper.

In this case, it is hard to clearly see how, beyond a series of by now well “known knowns”, the Air Force is going to be materially in a significantly different place in five years’ time, let alone a decade’s time as is the proposed funding timeline for the 2024 Integrated Investment Program and the 2024 National Defence Strategy.

One can’t help but feel that this comes as a result of the Army being positioned as the “long-range strike” partner of choice for Defence via the acquisition of HIMARS and weapons systems like the Precision Strike Missile (at least until the arrival of our nuclear submarine fleet), leaving Air Force with a confused role and undefined sense of being beyond the “application of expeditionary air power”.

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