The first decade of the 21st century will be a period of tremendous change for the U.S. military. The exploding exploitation of innovative information technologies is driving the nature of warfare as well as sociological, economic, and political developments. A revolution in military affairs is occurring, one whose central characteristics are long-range precision strike, stealth, mobility, and information dominance. Consequently, all the armed services are changing the way they "do business."
The Air Force has been transforming itself from a garrison-based Cold War force to an expeditionary, precision-strike aerospace force. This metamorphosis has given our nation—and the Free World—a force capable of working with the joint team in fighting and winning new kinds of conflicts. Our nation must maintain this capability by fully exploiting aerospace capabilities to guarantee our military remains the world's preeminent power in the 21st century.
The transformation of the Air Force and aerospace power is based on orders-of-magnitude increases in effectiveness. This new capability is the product of a series of overlapping and reinforcing technological improvements, development of new concepts of operations that fully exploit new and existing capabilities, and concrete organizational changes designed to enable units to effectively execute those new concepts of operation in response to national needs. The combination of laser-guided weapons, GPS-assisted navigation, stealth, all-weather sensors, integrated information collection and dissemination systems, and similar advances provides new capabilities for the nation to employ. Linking systems such as unmanned aerospace vehicles (UAVs) capable of target designation to manned strike aircraft via satellite communications provides the means for pervasive and rapidly responsive precision strike.
But new capabilities can be misused if they are simply offered to improve marginally the old way of doing things. The characteristics of this new "American way of war" are the avoidance of massive, force-on-force engagements and attrition warfare in favor of agility and the conduct of concurrent operations across the entire theater and against the full range of enemy targets. Aerospace dominance allows the United States to exert strategic control, destroying the cohesion and structure of the opponent's plan, forces, and infrastructure, and denying to the adversary his objectives while imposing our will on him.
Nowhere is this new way of war more clearly in evidence than in the Kosovo conflict. In the Gulf War, only 4% of the weapons employed were precision-guided. By the time of Kosovo, that number skyrocketed to 80%. Building on the role of aerospace forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Allied aerospace forces flying in Kosovo were able to seize the initiative from Serbian forces, dominate the course of hostilities, impose increasing costs on the adversary at no increase in costs to Allied forces, and eventually impose NATO's will on Belgrade.
The Air Force has developed new doctrine and structures to go with new capabilities and strategy for exploiting what aerospace power offers. The Air Force has restructured itself into ten Aerospace Expeditionary Wings (AEWs) and two crisis-- response AEWs. The concept behind this reorganization calls for the Air Force to be an Expeditionary Aerospace Force to recognize the new character of conflict in the post-Cold War era.
The successful and continuing transformation of the Air Force opens new possibilities for the joint team. Many of the new operational concepts and improved aerospace capabilities are increasingly important to the transformation of the other services (e.g., the Navy's Network-Centric Warfare; the Army's Objective Force; and the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Maneuver Initiatives). Properly employed improvements to the capabilities of modern US aerospace forces will enable the joint team to be a decisive instrument of national will. Of course, change is never easy. Answering the call to meet today's demands while developing tomorrow's capabilities on a limited budget has led to continual cuts in modernization and infrastructure funding.
Despite heavy operational pressures, the Air Force has been making tough choices that have enabled it to transform itself to meet the demands of 21st century. This transformation has opened new possibilities and options for our nation's political leadership to achieve national security objectives. But the toughest decisions are yet to come and will have to be made by the national leadership.
In the coming months the new administration will be required to formulate a new national security strategy. This strategy will form the basis for the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review. The heart of this review will be resource allocation. The big question will be whether the administration will be willing to allocate resources in programs that have demonstrated the highest potential for application in the security environment of the opening decades of 21st century.
General Fogleman was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force from 1994 to 1997. On 7-8 February, transformation of all services will be a key topic in the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Strategic Planning-sponsored symposium entitled “Unified Aerospace Power in the New Millennium.”