Guerrilla networks such as the Vietcong and al Qaeda long have used combat units and dispersed cells to threaten the national security of the United States. Yet, for decades, the United States has lacked a systematic means to evolve the air-ground communications, command-and-control organizations, and technologies needed to destroy these foes. Improvements instead have come by trial and error on the battlefield, often at high risk.
There is a better way.
A series of two-day, low-risk field experiments could improve U.S. air-ground cooperation and combat capabilities. Using reserve forces and existing equipment, the experiments quickly could develop, test, discard, mature, and deploy a variety of air-ground communications, command-and-control organizations, and technologies. Let's call this method Hunter Battalion Experimental (HBX).
Initial HBX experiments would focus on five goals:
- Improve air-ground combat communications, competence, cooperation, and trust
- Develop acceptable rules of engagement that decentralize kill authority
- Establish performance standards that distill the information shooters need to make quick and accurate kill decisions
- Create a mobile, instrumented "playground" where air-ground units can compete daily
- Test and evaluate those organizations that best integrate these elements into deployable combat teams
There is a precedent for HBX. Published in 1969, the 480-page Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review (later dubbed the Ault Report) began, "Almost 600 air-to-air missiles have been fired by the Navy and Air Force pilots in about 360 engagements in Southeast Asia between 17 June 1965 and 19 September 1968. Only about one in ten had any probability of achieving a kill. This well below expected or desired levels." In response, the U.S. Navy established Top Gun.
How Daily Competition Achieved Combat Excellence
Navy Captain Frank W. Ault concluded that the Navy "had grown into a combat philosophy where we were placing more reliance on the machine (with its black boxes and missiles) than on the man.... Worse, we had not verified the performance of our missiles in the high-G dog-- fight environment and then translated that into tactics and training." The Ault Report contained 242 recommendations, including that the service create a school where fighter pilots could get postgraduate education and training in air-to-air combat. In 1969, the Navy adapted the Fleet Air Gunnery Unit into an experimental command—ultimately Top Gun—as part of the existing F-4 fleet training squadron, VF-121.
Top Gun's first commanding officer was a lieutenant commander, in charge of a group of other aggressive, risk-taking junior officers. Daily competitions—enhanced by instructors drawn from combat pilots who had shot down a MiG—started simply: two aircraft (1v1), a friendly (blue) fighter and an enemy (red) fighter. By design, the exercises grew systematically more difficult, using four aircraft (2v2), eight aircraft (4v4), and then dozens of aircraft in force-on-force competitions. Through daily trial and error, instructors and students discovered and tested the best maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, discarding the bad and refining the good. The cream rose to the top.
Throughout the engagements, critical information flowed over a single two-way radio frequency called "fighter common." This was a fluid, flexible, and scalable communication network for blue combatants comprised of fighter groups and a variety of sea-, air-, and ground-based radar stations. Red combatants used a similar communications network, "bogie common." An outgrowth of communicating under stress and time compression, a precise tactical vocabulary developed (and was codified into a communications brevity handbook) that significantly increased the signal-to-noise ratio on fighter common.
The real centerpiece of Top Gun, however, was the new instrumented air-to-air range, a deadly serious playground that enabled post-engagement self-analysis. All participants could see, reconstruct, and learn from their mistakes within minutes after landing. Like coaches and players reviewing a scrimmage film, instructors and students could review 20 minutes of aerial engagement, often followed by hours in the classroom replaying and assessing the dogfights in minute detail—to understand what worked, what did not work, and why.
All that investment in Top Gun's daily competitions created cycle of experimentation, execution, and learning tha6 produced increasing aerial combat competence, cooperation, and trust throughout naval aviation; acceptable rules of engagement that decentralized kill authority; performance standards that distilled timely information shooters needed to make more accurate kill decisions; and a precise tactical vocabulary for fighter common.
Through what Ault called "constant, critical, fearless, self-analysis" Top Gun achieved radically asymmetric outcomes and helped transform air-to-air combat forever. In 1968, combat kill ratios, though still in favor of U.S. aircraft, were the worst in the history of U.S. aerial warfare. The Navy's overall kill ratio was slightly more than 2:1. Worse, the exchange rates involving the $4 million, two-crew Phantom versus the single-pilot $1 million MiG-21 favored the enemy. By 1972, the U.S. Navy's fighter combat kill ratio increased to more than 12: 1, with credit going to Top Gun. This success offers three lessons for improving air-ground combat performance:
- Create a school where shooters compete in daily engagements on mobile, instrumented ranges, where positive feedback reinforces good maneuvers and negative feedback chokes off the bad.
- Create direct two-way radio communications—a "shooter common" frequency—between air-ground units engaging an experienced opposition force to produce the tactical vocabulary needed for quicker, more accurate kill decisions under stress and time compression.
- Introduce lethal maneuvers and counter-maneuvers rapidly into theater combat operations.
A Proposal
The U.S. Joint Forces Command, the Department of the Navy, or the Department of the Army should consider a series of brief air-ground field experiments and a mobile instrumented range analogous to Top Gun—a Hunter Battalion Experimental. Its missions would be to maximize shots on the enemy; minimize shots on civilians and friends; and provide other support—water, medical, etc.—essential to the combat effectiveness of air-ground teams.
HBX could consist of 12 ten-person cells:
- One command cell—comprised of battalion commanders, rotary- and fixed-wing commanders, and other personnel qualified in special operations, intelligence, logistics, and administration. Explicit tasks would include designing, conducting, overseeing, and evaluating experiments and providing leadership and allocating resources. The command cell would be responsible to the Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command, or the service chiefs for accomplishing the mission.
- Ten competitive cells—comprised of shooters, spooks, anthropologists, military historians, and engineers.
- One communications cell—would support the other cells with communication and information technologies and develop an air-ground communications brevity handbook.
HBX Experiments: Capture the Flag
Perhaps surprisingly, initial HBX experiments could include as few as 20 people (one red cell of 10 HBX instructors and one blue cell of 10 HBX students) using a technology as simple as paint-ball guns and playing a variation of capture the flag. Experiments could be guided by the five rules of thumb developed by Navy Captain Rob Carnes during his tenure at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
These simple engagements would allow the initial HBX combatants to focus on developing collective insights, documentation, and an initial tactical vocabulary for the fundamentals of 21st-century air-ground cooperation. Approximately half of the team could be drawn from the uniformed reserves. The other half could be hand-picked designers, engineers, analysts, anthropologists, and military historians from renowned universities and institutions—Northwestern, Tufts, Ohio State, Duke, MIT, Santa Fe Institute—and selected industries.
As participants gained experience, HBX could add an aviation dimension. It could build on the lessons from air-ground field experiments conducted by the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab from 1997 to 1998 in which Marine Corps and Army reserves used civilian infrastructure—roads, airspace, a small airstrip—on Virginia's Northern Neck Peninsula to conduct a series of experiments using light armored vehicles and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft.
With growing experience and scale, HBX could increase complexity by introducing critical variables such as urban terrain and neutral agents (e.g., civilians and noncombatants) into the exercises. Such an engagement might include, as an example, 10 HBX cells split into a red and a blue team of 50 people each plus 100 neutral, green agents whose quick transition from neutral to combatant (red or blue) could win or lose an engagement. Large numbers of green agents would add an important, real-world dimension. HBX commanders would have to assess how their forces affect noncombatants. As U.S. combat forces in the streets of Mogadishu in October 1993 learned, noncombatants quickly can become part of enemy force. Overlooking them might be perilous.
HBX could make significant, rapid contributions to the U.S. air-ground cooperation needed to destroy decentralized guerrilla networks or combat units distributed across large geographic regions. Given a learn-by-doing environment, HBX could increase air-ground combat competence, cooperation, and trust; develop acceptable rules of engagement decentralizing kill authority; improve direct two-way communications between air-ground units; distill the information shooters need to make quick and accurate kill decisions; establish performance standards for shooter proficiency; and test and evaluate those organizations that best integrate these elements into deployable combat teams.
In the 1960s, uniformed leaders—junior and senior—found a way to create an experimental organization and in the process changed the face of air combat. From the ranges of Top Gun and the crucible of the Vietnam War came innovations in aerial combat organization, technology, tactics, and strategy.
The services can build on the rapid-response lessons of Top Gun by establishing a new series of competitive experiments to institutionalize organizations and tools of counter-guerrilla combat engagements. In the battle at Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif in late 2001, U.S. forces adapted, learned from local soldiers, and deployed innovative strategies with deadly precision. Yet this ad hoc battlefield approach is high risk, compounding perils to brave U.S. forces and civilians alike. Why not instead undertake a series of low-risk, systematic, continuous field experiments? There is good reason to expect that deployable innovations in combat organizations, technology, tactics, and strategy will emerge from HBX's daily field competitions and classroom analyses. There is good reason to expect this tactical expertise will be essential in this war and the conflicts to follow.
In the civilized world's war on decentralized enemy networks, Hunter Battalion Experimental offers air-ground teams a place to train as they expect to fight and to subject air-ground systems, tactics, and readiness to Captain Ault's constant, critical, fearless self-analysis.
Captain Moore is military assistant for Naval Aviation Systems in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Operational Test & Evaluation). Mr. Perkaus is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.