Irregular Warfare Podcast - Airpower in Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: April 10, 2021

Aviation has played an important role in irregular warfare, from its use by the British against rebellious tribesmen in Iraq and Transjordan in the interwar period to the era of the unblinking eye and precision strike in Afghanistan. Our guests in this episode—retired US Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Trask and Dr. James Kiras—discuss this evolution in the use of airpower to support ground forces. As they explain, rapid technological advances have helped perfect the employment of airpower, and yet the role of aviation in war has not significantly changed to this point. However, that with the transition to more distributed operations across the globe, it will no longer be possible to provide the level of responsive support to which the US military has become accustomed. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

And so the idea that if it doesn't operate against the Chinese penetrating Chinese air defenses, then we can't waste our time on it. That's not where we're going to have most likelihood of conflict going forward. Where we end up supporting proxies and allies and partners may be determined by how we compete with the Chinese and the Russians. But a lot of it's going to end up being the same places where violent extremists continue to recruit and continue to work. So you're still going to be looking at places like Africa.

You're still going to be looking in the Middle East. You're still going to be looking at areas of the Southern Pacific region. And it takes a lot of assets to cover all that, even if it is the main focus of our conventional forces going forward. The understanding that air assets aren't going to be there as quickly, I call it the Benghazi effect. So our calculations of risk and our understanding of the relationship between survivability and expendability, I think is going to have to change. AFSOC aviators, as well as the American public, as well as members of Congress, that if we are losing pilots, we're losing pilots. Welcome to Episode 24 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today, along with Shauna Sinnott. Today's episode

looks at the role of air power in irregular warfare, past, present, and future. Our guests today are both experts in their fields, each looking at this topic from different but complementary perspectives. One is a practitioner with decades of experience in the use of air power, from the cockpit to the halls of the Pentagon. The other is an historian and academic, renowned for his expertise not only on the topic of air power, but also irregular warfare and special operations. Together, they provide a

critical and highly informative dialogue on a topic that is at the pinnacle of current national security issues. Lieutenant General Thomas Trask transitioned from the Air Force in 2017 after 33 years of service, retiring as the Vice Commander of United States Special Operations Command. During his career, Tom flew rescue and special operations helicopters, accumulating more than 3,200 hours in over 50 combat missions. Dr. James Kyrus teaches at the U.S. Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. In addition to his knowledge of aviation history, his other areas of expertise include irregular warfare, international terrorism, and special operations. He is the author of the

critically acclaimed Special Operations and Strategy from World War II to the War on Terrorism. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, and Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Tom and James. Tom and James, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. It's a real pleasure having you on today.

Great to be here, Andy. Great to be here. To kick this off, I'd like to hear from both of you, your perspective on the role of airpower in irregular warfare. And most recently, what has changed? Well, I was going to allow Tom to have the mic first, because you should never preface a question to me with, talk to me about historically. To cut really to the chase here, rather than going through a bunch of examples, I'm going to draw from a framework that was developed by Jim Corm and Ray Johnson in their book Air Power and Small Wars, because I think they've really identified historically four

of the key functions that air power provides. The first is mobility. And by mobility, they're really kind of encompassing everything that has to do with troop movement and resupply. The second function is really kind of encompassing everything that has to do with troop movement and resupply. The second function is really kind of light strike. The third is what we would kind of classify as intelligence surveillance or reconnaissance in the modern nomenclature. And then the fourth function they identify is casualty evacuation or CASAVAC. And really these functions that they're talking about are air

power functions in support of ground forces. That's functionally. Operationally and strategically, I can at least identify a few. The first is air power can operate in support of a host nation government, first of all, by kind of bolstering the government's presence. Secondly, by improving morale and confidence by both the population and indigenous forces. And then third, really kind of improving the legitimacy of that host nation government. Really, all of these functions of air power operationally and strategically for host nation government are designed to gain and maintain the support of different populations. But that's the positive side. There's a negative side to it too. And as we've seen in the case of Syria, both in putting down the revolution in the 1980s, as well as more recently, regimes can use air power for another

function, which is to punish, punish their populations, selected groups or tribes for misbehavior. So there's really kind of a positive and negative functions for each. One more that I'll add to this conversation is, so we've talked about kind of the functions of air power in support of ground operations. We've talked about air power used by host nation governments, but it's also what effect does air power have on an enemy, on an adversary? And really, I'd like to claim credit for this, but I'm going to give it to what the originators of it, Adam Grissom and his co-authors in a RAND study called Air Power in the New Counterinsurgency Era, I think phrased it better than almost anybody else, which is air power really denies

irregular opponents' options. So they might want to mass, they might want to maneuver, they might want to maintain the initiative and the like. But what it really does is sort of offset those. And more recently, the AFSOC commander and the AFSOC command structure, and their strategic guidance labeled this creating dilemmas for an enemy, for an opponent. And so as we can see historically, whether it's the 1972 Easter offensive, the spring offensive in Afghanistan after the Taliban regrouped, or more recently with ISIS in 2015,

really denying the enemy those options that they might want to pursue and shifting the initiative to a large degree to host nation or friendly forces. So that kind of in a nutshell, at least, is my take on the roles of air power historically. Okay, Tom, over to you. Yeah, well, I'm glad to hear that. I was going to say some of the same things, which means I remember my regular warfare class from SAS when Dr. Cornum was teaching it. The book we used, I was going to ask you, James, if you still use Pilots and Rebels by Philip Anthony Tell. I actually still have my copy here from my SAS class.

Alas, we do not. And alas, it was just the first three of those things. It was strike, mobility, and reconnaissance. And, you know, so we studied the – one of the first story in that book is the use by the British in Iraq and Jordan in the very early days of biplanes. But it was all reconnaissance. that was being able to react quicker than what was happening by tribal groups on the ground, using an airplane to see what was happening and then be able to react quickly than the adversary. And the reaction wasn't always purely military. The reaction could have been something that more fits in what we kind of categorize as irregular warfare today that may be providing food. It may be a diplomatic effort that reacted based on the use of an airplane to do reconnaissance. And I think largely those three mission sets still fit.

Reconnaissance, I think, is still the main one. As we get into this, I think we'll talk about how reconnaissance has evolved. We talk about ISR, all the different types of ISR, COCO ISR, you've got active duty ISR, you have man duty ISR, you have manned ISR, you have unmanned ISR. Really, it's reconnaissance or surveillance that turns into intelligence. And what's the process that we turn it into intelligence today? I think that's the thing that has changed the most. So how have the challenges of the modern battlefield and some of these advances in technology changed the ways in which air power is used today? Realistically, technology hasn't changed the role so much. So it hasn't changed the what so much as it's changed the how. And I think Tom nailed this

right on the head, which is it's changed the processes by which we do it. And I'd say, arguably what it's done is both ISR and the level of persistence that we have now allows us to sort of maintain an overhead presence for periods of time that we just couldn't conceive of 10 or 15 years ago. That combined with precision targeting and precision strike are really kind of the two biggest changes in the how we go about using air power today. The challenge is this has both created, I would say, good effects and bad effects. And so those good effects is we can be so much more precise. We can reduce collateral damage. The effects that we were able to generate, for example, in our campaign against ISIS

by targeteering, and this is an open source reference, being able to evaporate money inside a building and limit civilian casualties within that building by having a weapon detonate with a certain effect in certain rooms speaks to the level of precision that we have today. The bad side or the downside of this, I would argue, is that in some cases we've become a lot more risk averse. We hold ourselves sometimes to too high a standard. There's not a great deal of a common agreement between us and some of our very necessary coalition partners about what constitutes some key terms that are related to rules of engagement. And then there's also the public perception. Unfortunately, the public perception is driven sometimes by persistent coverage, that a cloud, for example, moving between you and the target would allow you to lose coverage for a critical period, just seems completely inconceivable to them. And the other element is we look at the cost in terms of collateral damage and civilian casualties, but we don't look at the cost of munition and the ability to produce.

So the expectation is that air power will be able to deliver precise effects. But if you look at almost every modern air campaign involving irregular war, very rapidly either our allies or we started running out of precision guided munitions very quickly. I mean, they become the norm now. Somewhere in the neighborhood of about 85 to 90% of munitions that are used, that are dropped from fixed wing aircraft are precision. And there's an issue with the ability of the defense industrial base to be able to keep up with demand and surge demand of those. So if that's the expectation, perhaps, you know, we should build a little bit more of a reserve of kits or whatever else in the expectation that we will end up having to use them. It's tough because right now, when you try to do that,

Congress will immediately go, well, what's your use rate today? I'm only using 25 of these a month. So how are you justifying buying six months of these when you're only using this many today and trying to get in this environment where we've gotten so used to measuring things and how the battle's going today instead of the way we used to in the Cold War, think about how are we going to be prepared to fight in the future, whatever we think that situation's going to be, that you've got to have that stockpile there. And precision munitions, because of their expense, have become a very tough thing to argue to be able to buy enough to have on the shelf for what you might need in the future. That's a great point because we're going to discuss your thoughts on what changes and

requirements you do anticipate going ahead. But before we do, I'd like to hear from both of you on why you anticipate new requirements. So what has changed and what continues to change in the operating environments where we expect to be using these types of air power? Yeah, that's a great question because there's an assumption that as we shift all the emphasis to great power competition and if we're not focused on fighting China and Russia, that we're not focused in the right area, I think is a real fallacy that can lead us down a path that makes us who we're not prepared to continue to operate everywhere we need to be. You look at the worst case fight is a conventional fight against the Chinese probably right now, which probably the odds of that happening are

very, very small. The most likely thing that's going to happen is we're going to continue to compete with the Chinese everywhere on the planet. And in most places on the planet, you can still operate air power assets in a low to moderate threat environment. And so the idea that if it doesn't operate against the Chinese penetrating Chinese air defenses, then we can't waste our time on it. That's not where we're going to have most likelihood of conflict going forward. The reasons that we have conflict of where we end up supporting proxies and allies and partners may be determined by how we compete with the Chinese and the Russians, but a lot of it's going to end up being the same places we've been doing counter VEO. So the same places where

violent extremists continue to recruit and continue to work, a lot of those same places are the places that are going to reach out for either the Chinese or the United States to come and help them deal with those problems inside their areas. So you're still going to be looking at places like Africa. You're still going to be looking in the Middle East. You're still going to be looking at areas of the Southern Pacific region where the air threat is still moderate to low. of the Southern Pacific region where the air threat is still moderate to low.

And it takes a lot of assets to cover all that, even if it is not the main focus of our conventional forces going forward. So we did get used to using CAS in a rather luxurious way in Iraq and Afghanistan, relying on a stack extending heavenwards for several thousand feet, loads of aircraft just waiting to deliver precision munitions onto target at the behest of the ground force commander, an abundance of resources. Is this though a luxury that ground forces will still be able to rely on going ahead? conventional air capabilities and you'd refocus those on the Chinese and Russian threat and you refocus on rebuilding readiness for those forces, which are still in those environments, the bare minimums that we would need to be able to operate there. You're taking all of that away

from those places where SOF are going to continue to operate. So what you've got to look for is how do you operate without the stack? We built the stack of airplanes so that either the guy on the ground or the guy that's controlling the stack from the air has infinite number of options into one or two assets that you have that can do a little bit of all of those things going forward, because that's what you're going to need. I think even in Afghanistan or Iraq, which I predict we're not going to be going away from anytime soon, and then all across Africa, other places in the South Pacific and South America, we're going to have that same requirement. So you're going to need to be able to provide those three basic air power missions to those

very separated, small, soft teams that continue to hold the line on VEOs or are working with or against proxies in those areas in our competition with Russia and China. Yeah. And I would add to that, I'll cast something that you're saying, Tom, in a slightly different way, which is we've become familiar with our operating environments over the last 20 years. And to an extent, we've become over familiar with them to the degree that we want to export templates of behavior and patterns of operations to separate theaters without necessarily taking into account the differences that exist in them. I know it's rather shocking for people to learn that Africa is a much larger place than Afghanistan or Iraq. Now, our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have allowed us to really kind of use those as petri dishes, battle labs, if you want to call

them that, to hone and refine our close air support, our emergency close air support, our deliberate and dynamic targeting processes. But then you try to take those processes and move them elsewhere. And suddenly you're dealing with some geographic realities. The Air Force is really still trying to grapple with how do you solve the tyranny of distance equation, trying to project forces from Hawaii, Guam, and continental United States, really anywhere into the Pacific region. And some of those similar problems exist in Africa as well. I think the other point that you alluded to that's kind of fascinating is because we're going to have smaller teams more distributed, there's a need for armed overwatch, but also there's going

to have to be a commensurate, a concomitant acceptance of political risks. The understanding that air assets aren't going to be there as quickly, I call it the Benghazi effect, if you want to. What do you mean we didn't have a UAV overhead of the compound almost immediately? In looking at where assets were at that time, there was no way anything could have gotten there in anything under four hours. So our calculations of risk and our understanding of the relationship between survivability and expendability, I think is going to have to change. There was a fascinating interview that I read of the General Slife gave about maybe the the armed overwatch platform may not have an ejection seat. And that's really designed to save money. I mean, to to get the lowest cost platform possible. But that's going to be a rather tectonic shift for both AFSOC aviators, as well as the American public, as well as members of Congress, that if we are losing pilots, we're losing pilots.

Well, the threshold for risk right now is high even for unmanned ISR. For instance, in Yemen, there have been times when we've been unwilling to fly ISR because of the SA-6 threat. So it's almost as though we've lost perspective on that risk calculus. What procedural and indeed cultural changes do you envision having to take place within the US military before we can take this new approach that you've been talking about? Yeah, I think the difference is going to be the forces is realizing now that they're going to have to have a lot of different skills in a small unit or small package or even in individuals. And you're going to need to have platforms and people ready to do any of the potential air power missions, just like the ground teams now are having to rapidly shift gears between different types of missions that they're doing there. types of missions that they're doing there. If you do it right, you can still have whatever the critical piece of air power you need for that moment can still be there through multi-role

platforms with people that are trained to understand the ground part of the operation better. So when you think about that stack of airplanes over Afghanistan for years, and perhaps the U-28, which was controlling that stack, had some good idea of what was happening on the ground. Or perhaps they were using a MQ-1 or MQ-9 with a crew back in New Mexico or Las Vegas somewhere that had some understanding, but they didn't go through the planning session with the team. That's the thing that's going to have to change culturally. The air has got to be built in through the planning at the very beginning so that they have the same understanding and they can predict in their own minds when they're going to need to shift from being a reconnaissance platform that's developing an intelligence immediately into a CASAVAC platform or immediately into a strike platform and be able to handle all those. and be able to handle all those.

It's funny, Tom, because as you were talking about that, the first thing that leapt almost immediately to my mind was the jungle gym construct for Operation Farmgate that the Air Commandos developed in their initial deployment to Vietnam. The organization was very much structured in a way that, I won't say mirrored, but was very similar to an Army Special Forces operational detachment alpha. And so there were similarities in structure, but there was also this cohabitation and sharing of perspectives in the planning process to be able to enable unconventional warfare operations as they were labeled then. We used to do joint unconventional warfare task

force operations in the early 1960s that were designed to exercise these sorts of muscles that you were mentioning. So I had a smile come to my face as you were talking about it. James, earlier you commented that the role of aviation in regular warfare is to put the enemy on the horns of a dilemma. Now, that might not be the way that the typical ground force commander looks at aviation based on his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, as we mentioned, air power was on call to support the ground schema maneuver. And typically, a ground force commander hadn't supported an abundance of aviation assets in close proximity, and he didn't have to give

much thought to using each airframe in accordance with its full capabilities. So we're still on the topic of culture. How do you see this changing? I would love to be the one to be able to tell you that joint all domain command and control, if I've got the acronym correct, is going to solve all of this as will hypersonics or anything else. But unfortunately, taking a slightly longer view, this is a perennial tension between ground operators and air operators. The issue of apportionment, the issue of ownership, it's too rooted culturally and too deeply rooted culturally. It goes all the way back to the first use of air power and the first writing of the doctrinal manual, Field Manual 100-23, that came out of the close air support issues and the apportionment of air issues,

the Battle of Kasserine Pass in North Africa, the debates that occurred over who owned what and who was going to have what. And the irony was I was reading a recent RAND report on the air war against the Islamic State that just came out a couple of weeks ago. And these exact same issues came up and specifically related to the low density, high demand asset that everybody wants, which is overhead unmanned ISR. With signals intelligence. With signals intelligence and everything else. And so there's a great example of one case where in Ramadi, tactical army controllers or tactical ground force controllers had control over seven UAVs over a very small town for really no understandable

purpose other than we had them to provide this persistent stare when those assets could have been allocated elsewhere in the theater. And so the question is really, it's also a function of scale. And so ground force operators are always going to look based on terrain and based on a certain scale of map, whereas air operators who are looking at a limited number of air assets are always going to look at what's the best, what's the most effective apportionment relative to the task at hand. This discussion has been really helpful in framing the environmental changes that generate a requirement for a different role of air power. And of course, the cultural changes all have to take place in the U.S. military in order to adapt.

But Tom, you mentioned earlier that the emerging requirement is for a platform or capability that's commonly referred to as armed overwatch. Can you explain what this is and how that requirement has evolved? Shana, this is a great discussion because there's a lot of people that think this just popped out of nowhere in the last year. This really has grown out of many years of this problem set existing through an experiment with some old OV-10s that happened with SOCOMs, whenever that was, seven, eight years ago when I was the J-8 at SOCOM. Then the light strike experiment, and there were lessons learned in all of those pieces that have kind of evolved to the place where we are now,

where a few years ago, the commander of SOCOM and the chief of staff of the Air Force looked at the light strike experiment, looked at some of the things that were learned there and decided that this was better suited to be a SOCOM mission set to support special operators on the ground. And then it evolved from that initial idea of an inexpensive close air support platform into a multi-role platform that could pick up some of the missions that SOF was already doing that they were going to have to do in a different way without all of that conventional support in the future. And provide that strike capability to protect and provide close air support for these very small elements of special operations forces on the ground. And that is kind of where it began in armed overwatch. So what they came up with was we need something that is affordable, that's easy to maintain, that can operate from very austere and remote areas, that can live with the team, that doesn't

require typical, you know, the Air Force is looking at agile combat support issues right now. And how do we, how does the Air Force, big Air Force, you know, operate a squadron of fighters without 500 people on a, on an airfield and getting it down to a much more manageable number. We'll take that to an extreme. This airplane's got to be able to operate with a handful of people. Each of them will have multi-role skills that they'll need to do, whether it's maintenance, weapons loading, fueling, all of those things have to be in a handful of people. The crew will have to be part of that so that you can operate with a very, very small footprint. You don't need a major airfield because you've got to be close. As James was saying, you talk about the ranges in Africa, two hours response

is not enough. And that's what it takes when you have a high-speed fighter that's in the perfect position in Africa to get to all the different places where it's software operating. There's places where there's really nothing that's immediately available. And you remember the issue with the ambush that happened to the special forces guys in Niger a few years ago. And it was, hey, in a few hours, we can swing some air power in there if they ever get in a jam. And you make your best call on what the risk is and what the likelihood that they would need it and get to that situation. But that's just proof that you're never going to get that right. And so not only does it

protect them to have that capability right there with them, but it makes them more effective in the job that they're doing if they have that capability and they can them, but it makes them more effective in the job that they're doing if they have that capability and they can use it. So Armed Overwatch will be a combination of an ISR platform that can also provide significant strike capability that has really long endurance and can live right with them, even if it's operating from a road or a very small airstrip somewhere or just off the dirt.

That flexibility that they have now allows that team to be much more capable, much more functional at accomplishing the different mission sets that they're trying to do there. So would a platform such as the one that's being proposed for Armed Overwatch help with the problem of risk calculus? Well, interestingly, if it was an unmanned platform, I think that that would change the risk calculations considerably. If it's a manned platform, I hate to say it, but we're really going to have to see what happens the first time one of

those ends up being downed and what happens to the pilot. Unfortunately, you know, I can envision a situation much like happened to the Jordanian aviator that was captured by ISIS. And I know, you know, most AFSOC aviators that I've talked to understand that those are the risks and they're willing to accept those. The comma, however, is I'm not sure politically we are able to do so, that we're at a place where we're comfortable understanding that that's the risk of operating at distances. Yeah, I mean, that risk is definitely going to be something that's considered. And I think there's ways to build it. SOCOM, I think, is going to try to look for a platform that can do all of

those things and to include even potentially picking up their own wingman in a shoot down situation. So that little bit of mobility capability in the airplane they decide to pick up will just be a benefit. But if you look at it from a perspective of decreasing the risk on the ground element by having this capability overhead, it's a balance that you have to maintain the risk to the air crew, but the reduced risk to the team on the ground so that they can continue to function. Because I think the result is we'll just decide some of those missions that are really important will be too high risk to continue based on situations like what happened in Niger in 2017. So what you're talking about is a mutually supporting relationship between ground forces and aviation. You use the example where SOF develops a network that will mitigate risk for AFSOC assets to provide support. But is this a capability that is exclusive to SOF, or will the other services also have a similar requirement?

Yeah, I think they will be when they see how the system is developed. Not only the other services, particularly the Marines, but I think some of the Army missions that are being considered to pick up some of the areas that SOF has been doing, and SOF has been stretched too thin, and so there's this whole move that the conventional Army can be picking up some of these training missions. So a platform like this would be very applicable there also with a lot of the partner nations. And again, that's one of the reasons why the idea at the beginning was this should be an affordable capability that a lot of our partners can afford to buy for themselves as well. But I can certainly see it wherever you're operating in the similar environments, a platform like this is going to be useful and I think the Marines and Army will both be interested in it. We too often sort of overlook the advisory mission sort of the developing host

nation capabilities in this part of the equation for some strange reason when we Americans and we in the West talk about air power it's our ability to deliver the capabilities we have, not doing the sorts of things like T.E. Lawrence was advocating with the Arabs, which is better they do it poorly, then we have to do it for them. So a platform that is both survivable but maintainable by host nation forces that we can train them, that we can train their maintainers to be able to use is absolutely critical. And it would hopefully, hopefully we would be able to learn some of the lessons. And we have these lessons captured out of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, where in Afghanistan, in particular, you take a look at the current state of the Afghan National Army Air Force. you take a look at the current state of the Afghan National Army Air Force. And according to some assessments, if we end up pulling out or if we end up removing much more of our air advisory effort there, that's going to collapse in the same way that it did after the Soviets pulled out their support in 1993. I think when you talk real quick, Andy, when you talk about how SOF is going to be used in GPC and how we in great power competition against the Chinese, everybody thinks, well, SOF is sabotage and behind the lines against China. That's not it. It's in my mind, the large amount of that effort is going to go toward training and developing partners in order to compete with Chinese influence in places like Africa and South America.

in order to compete with Chinese influence in places like Africa and South America. That's going to be the role for SOF, in my mind, the biggest role in great power competition for special operations. Irregular warfare is not just about SOF. There's a conventional role here, and I think in the great power competition, which I would sort of relabel as great power conflict fever, that's sort of gripped us over the past two or three years, we've kind of lost sight of the role that conventional forces like the Army, SFABs, like the Marine Corps, and like others are going to have to play because simply there's just not enough soft to go around. It's a capacity versus requirement issue. And there's just simply not

enough to meet all of our global requirements. Tom, on your point earlier about the requirements for other services, you mentioned the Marine Corps as an example. And as Marine Corps develops its concept for expeditory advanced-based operations, which relies on widely distributed units spread across island chains in the Pacific, its leadership is realizing that its current doctrine for close air support is going to have to change drastically. As currently, marine doctrine relies on relatively few high-performance aircraft, and that's going to have to change to a wider fleet of expendable, more robust platforms, blue collar assets, if you like, able to fill multiple

roles and the jack of all trades. Isn't that a very similar requirement to the one that you have just described for SOCON? Yeah. If you look at the marine concept, Andy, and how they've struggled with how do they use an F-35 and have enough F-35s to do the types of things they're going to do. There's a big discussion, even in the Air Force right now, of going back to more Gen 4.5, because in most cases, you don't need that F-35 capability. It's so expensive to operate, so expensive to buy. You need it for that high-end fight against the Chinese, but most of the time, we're not going to be in that situation. So we're looking at Gen 4 fighters when really we could be looking at Gen 3 or Gen 2 capability for a lot of the mission sets and then have a whole lot more. It goes back to Joe Mattis's original

idea for Light Strike when he was the CENTCOM commander that I need, you know, five very deep light airplanes that I can operate in this environment instead of one of these high-end fancy fighters that you used to like to complain about. Tom, isn't that near blasphemy for an Air Force officer to say that we don't need more high-performance manned aircraft? Well, I mean, you heard General Brown just this week, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, talking about buying more F-16s and more Gen 4. And he's calling them Gen 4.5. So you can continue to take, you could probably take even older fighters than that and put some of the equipment that we have available today, like the test we did on the OV-10.

We took a 1960s era propeller-driven airplane and put modern-day avionics on this thing. And we're able to operate it on the air battlefield in ways that no other airplanes have ever been able to do. So the platform isn't as critical as how you operate it and what you put on it. So if the Air Force Chief of Staff is willing to consider taking a step back from the pursuit of cutting edge technology, where's the pushback coming from? That's a good question. The pushback right now is from Congress. Congress does not want SOCOM to buy a new airplane when they think they've got lots of old planes. One of the challenges always is that Congress will always challenge

the services to cut budgets, but they never want them to give up any platforms or force structure. And so you can't do this unless you give up something else. All of the senior leaders are saying this. It's about reducing the number of legacy platforms so that you can't do this unless you give up something else. All of the senior leaders are saying this. It's about reducing the number of legacy platforms so that you can have the right, a smaller amount of more current, more up-to-date platforms. And even though you're buying an airplane that is not high tech and it's not supersonic, it's not fancy, it's going to have capabilities that no other airplanes have had before. So it is a new technology and a new way of doing business that you got to look at. And

that's just a normal challenge that DoD goes through on the Hill, working through that. I'm confident they're going to get through that in this case. But it's also an issue related to the social understanding of air power. And what I mean by that is, you know, air power is sort of the ultimate manifestation of air power. And what I mean by that is, you know, air power is sort of the ultimate manifestation of technological progress. And so any step backward is perceived to be almost failure to a degree. So why would I ever consider doing that? How do we see an evolution like this being implemented by ground forces and actualized in the planning process? Do we think that having a capability like this would make it a little more intuitive

for those ground forces to plan to employ it to the best of its capabilities? I'll be the heretic and say, no, unfortunately, it will reinforce it. And what I mean by reinforcing it is the ground elements will only ever see it as close strike, near strike capability, and they won't think about using that platform for further operations, either interdiction or deeper strike. Deeper strike or deeper reconnaissance, for that matter, a service cultural aspect. If I can see it overhead, if I have it overhead, that is a level of comfort. That is a level of comfort. Part of that also has to do with getting rid many, many years ago of a lot of our sort of organic anti-air defense systems.

And so the thought that I have something in the air over me that will protect me from other things in the air is sort of just naturally ingrained within the service culture. I think there's an element of that. And certainly any airplane that's overhead that has armament on it, I think the ground element is still going to first think of that thing as a shooter. The intent on Armed Overwatch, I think, is for this to replace an ISR platform. So imagine the U-28, which we bought PC-12s out of airplane traders 12, 14 years ago. That's how we built the U-28 capability. Literally, when I was the A-3 at AFSOC, we were buying these airplanes from rock stars and doctors and people like that, and they were flying them in with fancy paint.

We had one came in that was all purple with stars on it, had shag carpeting in it, which we vacuumed really, really well in case the dogs hit on that airplane before we cleaned it out and made it into this ISR platform. And so it was done really, really fast. It was not the perfect airplane. It was the airplane that there was enough of them available that you could go buy commercially out of people's personal hangars to get enough airplanes to do the job. And then we developed this whole idea of the U-28 controlling a stack of fighters. But the intent was, what if you could take that U-28 with everything we learned about

how to use sensor operators, how to incorporate all this information in, and then disseminate real intelligence from it really quickly, and also have it be able to provide close air support protection on those few occasions would have been really useful. So I think when they get into it, this is going to be an ISR platform most of the time that can act to do command and control, and if needed, can be a shooter. And then really, if needed, some of the platforms I think they're looking at would have some mobility capability, and that could be used potentially as CASVAC or something

else. But primarily, I would think ISR primarily 80%, you know, 18% shooter and 2% mobility is kind of the thought process I think that they're looking for. When you think about A-teams in Africa, they've got a B-team working at a base somewhere. They've got four or five disparate A-teams that are separated by 60 to 100 miles. And now you have a little detachment of these airplanes that can move to any of them as needed, can actually go live with one of those elements and land on the dirt next to them for a couple of days when they have a specific operation and be right over top of them when needed, but still can react at airplane speed to some other part of that area. So as we near the end of this discussion, let's take a step back from talking just about air power to address the wider implications for the joint force, and especially SOCOM, of the current focus on great power competition.

There's questions for both of you. What's the role that you envision for special operations forces looking ahead? I think the focus for SOF is going to be how does SOF operate more independently than they have in the past with their own assets and doing it in a budgetary environment that's going to be significantly constrained. Hopefully not terribly constrained or terribly reduced, but still constrained, even if we assume the best case, which is level budgets for SOCOM. So the challenge is, one, to define what the soft role is as we go forward and focusing on China and Russia, probably more China going forward. I think that's what I'm hearing around town is that as the new administration looks at a national security strategy, it's going to be even more focused

on China. What is the SOCOM role? And therefore, how does SOCOM do that independently? Because the services, the other services are going to be more focused on China, even than they have over the last couple of years. And there's an assumption that a lot of the rest of the problem set will get left to special operations forces. And hopefully that will happen in a way that a lot of budget folks on the Hill don't think, well, we can now cut all of that SOCOM investment that we made over the last 20 years, because now the focus is elsewhere. When in fact, the mission set for SOCOM is going to increase, not decrease, as they pick up that responsibility in all of those other places, which is still, as I said earlier, still part of competing with China and probably the part that is most likely to have armed conflict. Com has always said every special operation has to have conventional support to it. And that will still be true. That conventional sport will change from conventional airlift and conventional fighter support into

cyber support and into intelligence development and processing of intelligence. Those things from the conventional force are still going to be critical to successful soft, but the platforms and the people are going to have to be critical to successful SOF, but the platforms and the people are going to have to be more independent and able to operate organically going forward. And I think that's why the armed overwatch platform is going to be to it. Really the question to my mind is one of what does integration between SOF and general, more general purpose or conventional forces look like in future conflicts? And really for SOF, the question is going to be, do they want to align themselves more with

the conventional forces, knowing how difficult those problem sets are going to be, knowing that they're going to play a very valuable supporting role, or do they want to really sort of double down on their supported role as the irregular warfare force of choice? I don't see a very good answer to trying to hedge those two bookends. And I don't know whether it's more of a cost or capabilities issue at this point, but I would argue to some degree it has to do with what is soft best optimized for. Because to a point Tom made a little bit earlier in looking at some of the very difficult problem sets in power projection and force projection, particularly in the Pacific theater. I can't tell you the number of times that I have heard a conventional commander say about a very vexing problem set.

Well, soft's got that. And you look at the projection aspects of it, the distances, the sustainment, the resupply in a anti-access area denial environment. And I won't say it's a non-starter, but it's incredibly difficult. So if SOF is going to be able to play and provide value to the conventional forces, that's going to require an alignment of soft capabilities in a different direction, and it's going to involve a major recapitalization. For Tom, as one of our concluding questions, how do you recommend academics contribute to practitioner understanding of this problem set? I think to me that the thing that's lacking out there is a really well-articulated description of what competition with China looks like and how irregular warfare, meaning much more than special operations, when you take irregular warfare into

the much bigger perspective of everything from economic competition to cyber warfare to all of those other things where soft has a connection to it, but it's not just special operations or conventional operations. It's all of those bigger pieces of IW that I think need to be considered to describe what competition looks like. Because until then, we're just going to keep arguing about budgets inside the beltway here and in the Pentagon about how much of this type of platform, how much for this service, more money for the Air Force and the Navy, less money for the Army, which is kind of one of the trends right now. And of course, we don't need special ops anymore because they were doing counterterrorism stuff, and now that's not as important. And that's where we just kind of get back into that circular argument. We don't have a great articulated strategy of what does competition with the Chinese mean for the next 50 years? And what are the areas where we need a defense department that's prepared

to help the nation do that? And from there, determine what the roles for each piece of the military are going to be going forward. Just a little problem set there. I have nothing big. If you guys could work that out, James, that'd be great. Well, Tom, is that an academic issue or is that a policy issue? Because the delineation I make in my mind is, those who study problems longer term and provide a longer term perspective on things versus a national security enterprise that in some cases generates terms and doesn't define them specifically, which leads to a whole lot of, you know, sort of confusion. And even worse, you alluded to this a little bit more. It allows each beholder to conceptualize it as they see fit. It's kind of the realization of either a service set of dreams or something else.

Well, it certainly needs to become policy, but I think hopefully good policy starts with kind of an academic rigor looking at problem sets and defining problems. A lot of the reason that a lot of the policymakers go to think tanks when their party's not in power and then they come back, hopefully they're thinking about those kinds of things and providing the food that becomes that policy later on, at least from my perspective, that's how it seems. Tom and James, before we finish the discussion, is there anything that we should have asked you about air power and irregular warfare? And I'm thinking about, for instance, the topic of adversary drones, since this is the first time that US military personnel have had to be concerned about adversary air power since the

Korean War. Is that a topic that perhaps we should have dwelled on a little bit more? To my mind, I think one of the more interesting questions right now is not are non-state actors or proxy force use of UASs so much as it is, what does this democratization of air power mean for the future use of air power, particularly in irregular warfare environments. It was a fascinating reminder to us in Iraq of this gap that existed. Our irregular opponents are clever because they have to be. They have to find some seam or gap to exploit. And they found a beauty in terms of our ability to defend from very small aerial vehicles. And the subsequent debate that occurred after the first munitions that were

dropped off of a modified DGI Phantom drone, the shockwaves that that sent through the Department of Defense community were incredible. And yet, you know, realistically, we didn't keep that in perspective, which is ISIS was really looking for a propaganda victory. They were they were looking to score political points in a political competition. that we did with IEDs, which is a boatload of money trying to find solutions to the counter UAS problem that go everything from a bazooka shot net all the way up to directed energy warfare. But then also looking at the flip side of that coin and saying, how can we leverage commercial off-the-shelf technology to make these distributed ground forces that Tom was

talking about more effective. General Thomas Trask and Dr. James Kyrus, thank you very much for being on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We really enjoyed having you on today's great discussion. Thanks very much, Andy. I really enjoyed the podcast and I think it's great what you guys are doing. Keep it up. This was a great time. Thanks for having us. Thanks again for listening to Episode 24 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

In our next episode, Daphne and Nick will discuss stabilization operations. And the following week, Andy and Kyle will discuss the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq with General Robert Neller and Dr. Carter Malkajian. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants and don't represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.