Wargaming the South China Sea

[slapout9]

I fear people, even here, don't realize the deeply dangerous straits the ongoing failure that is the F-35 is getting us into. People here are mostly ground guys who know about war but I think maybe many have the same blithe attitude toward having air supremacy the general public has. We have had it all our own way since 1943 but it can change. It really can. It is not like the sun coming up in the east.

Air fighting is fighting with machines. If your machine is inferior to his machine, you lose. Pilot quality (boy we love to talk about how great our pilots are, but great depends on flying so check out how much our guys fly nowadays) and better tactics will help only so much if the other guys machine is better. That is even more so nowadays. We don't have tens of thousands P-51s and Hellcats contesting tens of thousands of FW-190s and Zeros. We have handfuls of machines contesting the sky. When there are only few machines their quality is that much more important.

We have a very big, potentially fatal problem.

Since the end of WW2 the Air Force has always won, people seem to forget that point. They also forget that it is our land forces that keep loosing!!!!!and cannot even face that fact..... but we keep hammering the Air Force as being unable to Win.
We have had complete Air Dominance for so long we just assume we will have it. We will have a big shock one day if we don't wake up.

In general the Air Force is way to small!

[Bill Moore]

Since the end of WW2 the Air Force has always won, people seem to forget that point. They also forget that it is our land forces that keep loosing!!!!!and cannot even face that fact..... but we keep hammering the Air Force as being unable to Win.
We have had complete Air Dominance for so long we just assume we will have it. We will have a big shock one day if we don't wake up.

In general the Air Force is way to small!

We either win or lose as a nation, so it is impossible for one service to win and the other to lose.

[carl]

We either win or lose as a nation, so it is impossible for one service to win and the other to lose.

In absolute terms yes. But in this case if control of the air is lost by our air forces everybody else will be defeated in turn but their defeat will result from the air forces losing. And our air forces are all betting on one airplane design and one engine type. That bet isn't looking so good.

[Bill Moore]

In absolute terms yes. But in this case if control of the air is lost by our air forces everybody else will be defeated in turn but their defeat will result from the air forces losing. And our air forces are all betting on one airplane design and one engine type. That bet isn't looking so good.

Carl,

If you take a conventional view of war, the way the U.S. prefers to fight, then a more accurate way to put it is we can't win with acceptable casualty levels. Of course that is speculation, there are a lot factors that will influence our national will to endure or fail to endure high casualties.

North Vietnam defeated us even though we owned the air (we greatly over estimated the effect of air power on a nation's will, just as Germany did, and just as we did when we started our strategic bombing of Germany). The Taliban continues to challenge us in the land domain with no air power whatsoever.

Air superiority is no guarantee that we'll win or lose, but failure to maintain it will certainly result in a need for new doctrine and approaches to warfare. Based on your comment that we can't assume we'll always have it, maybe we should be working on that doctrine now? We have no idea what disruptive technology will emerge in the future, to include technology that could greatly reduce the effectiveness of our air power. On a smaller scale we saw the impact that Stingers had on the USSR in Afghanistan.

[carl]

Bill:

I am not talking about small wars. I am talking about big ones, or even medium ones like Korea. We could tolerate a level of casualties comparable to that suffered by Paraguay in 1864-1870 and without control of the air such that guys like you didn't have airplanes like A-10s on your back ALL THE TIME and that our cargo airplanes could fly, we could not win. Imagine fighting a war across the sea with no C-17s, C-130s nor C-5s. I can't because we couldn't. A fight in the western Pacific means controlling the sea, and you can't control the sea without controlling the air. It can't be done. So it isn't a matter of gritting our teeth and accepting more spilled blood, it is a matter of losing because our losing control of the air means they won it and if they have it we're finished.

[Bill Moore]

Carl, I also mentioned WWII, not a small war in anyone's book. Your point is understood, but I still think we would find alternatives if we lost air superiority assuming it was a critical national interest to win the war.

You can laugh now, but we have no ideas what technologies will be decisive in the future. Submarines, cyber, space capabilities, dominating the human domain through various means, UAV swarms, long range missiles, etc. I'm not willing to propose rolling over #### up and quit because we lose air superiority. The Brits didn't roll over and quit when the Germans had superiority, nor the Germans roll over and quit when we had it. Assuming one side has air superiority they still have to use that superiority in a way that contributes to a decisive victory, and despite the claims my Warden and others that the Air Force can win by themselves, history suggests otherwise.

[carl]

Bill:

WWII is a good example of loss of control of the air=loss of the war.

The Germans never had control of the air over Britain. Never. They were always contested. There was a brief time where they were able to operate at night relatively unhindered. That didn't last long and eventually they could not operate at all over Britain unless on veritable suicide runs.

The Germans indeed didn't roll over and quit. They fought on until they were totally defeated. The Japanese had the good sense to surrender before their country was invaded.

No we won't roll over and quit because control of the air is lost. We will fight on hoping for a miracle, because that is what it will take.

Our basic disagreement is this. I believe we cannot win without control of the air, especially in a theatre that is mostly ocean like the western Pacific. You believe we can. I think history is on my side quite definitively. We have never ever won a war in the air age without controlling the air. Never. And since all of our experience, practice and plans depend on control of the air, I don't see us learning to do without on the fly. Now that presupposes we are going to do our major fighting over on the other side of the oceans. If they (whoever they are) manage to invade North America, then yeah, maybe we can find a way. But short of that, if we don't control the air, by whatever means, we lose.

Now maybe in the future we will develop new ways to do things like militarizing flying red ants, but for the moment we have to depend on things like fighters and fighter bombers. Machines. And those machines are now F-35s, which don't work. We are in trouble.