As forecast, the 2003 Paris Air Show revealed few entirely new developments. Some of what was on view, however, dramatized a continuing shift toward what the U.S. military calls network-centric warfare. Another way to characterize the shift is that it emphasizes sensors and sensor fusion over weapons and platforms. Better data can increase the value of each weapon. One conclusion would be that fewer weapons can do the same job. On the other hand, under current circumstances there will be many fewer weapons in place because operations increasingly will occur far from any long-standing base, and with little notice. There also will be relatively few platforms. Their effectiveness will depend on how well they can hit the right targets—and on how well they will survive.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to define a new style of operation in which an initial campaign is waged to eliminate the enemy's air defenses, after which aircraft can operate freely. To the extent that relatively few aircraft can service large numbers of targets, large numbers of aircraft are not needed. In Afghanistan, the campaign against air defenses preceded the main attacks. In Iraq, the years of policing "no-fly zones" constituted the bulk of the effort, which is why aircraft could operate freely from the beginning of the war.
Of course, the ability to hit targets precisely buys little unless the targets are properly identified, hence, the greatly increased interest in reconnaissance assets such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): for the first time, much of one hall at the Paris show was devoted to UAVs themselves. Conversely, an enemy unable to shoot down our aircraft can achieve "virtual" attrition by camouflage. Bombs dropped onto false targets cannot hit real ones. In the past, such camouflage was of limited value, because the sheer mass of bombs used would have covered both real and false targets. Now, with precision weapons dominant, there is much less margin for such errors.
The hallmark of a network-centric approach to warfare is that the act of sensing is separated from the act of attacking what the sensors reveal. Another way to look at this sort of operation is to imagine that the sensors create a map of the target area, showing where targets are located. The shooter then, in effect, mails weapons to the indicated addresses. Making such a scheme of operations work requires that the sensor-generated map be sufficiently accurate, and that weapons be addressable.
It was striking that many of the air-to-surf ace weapons on view in Paris were guided by the global positioning system (GPS). For example, Britain's Royal Air Force is buying new bombs in which GPS supplements or replaces laser guidance. France has a new GPS-guided bomb, first shown two years ago. Israel showed several GPS-guided weapons, apparently for the first time. Note that the weapons were by no means advertised as part of network-centric approaches to warfare. Once a country has GPS-guided weapons, however, the natural next step is to find addresses for them to hit, and that probably means adopting a network-centric approach.
Thales, the massive electronics and defense conglomerate, did show a network-centric approach to air-to-surface warfare. An animated sequence showed a mobile missile launcher that was detected by a UAV. The UAV linked its image to an air control center, where controllers decided that the target was the one to hit, and also identified which of several orbiting fighters was the appropriate attacker. In the video, the control center linked its instructions to an orbiting airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft serving as the command center for the fighters. The AWACS linked down to the fighters, which dropped GPS-guided bombs on the missile launcher. Although the process might seem laborious, in fact it was very quick, because virtually all the communication shown was computer-to-computer. U.S. forces call this type of operation "real time in the cockpit" (RTIC), and they have been doing it to some extent since the end of the war in Bosnia in 1996.
Making "real time in the cockpit" work requires both standardized data links and automatic navigation. The current link is the joint tactical information distribution system or Link 16. RTIC is why the U.S. Air Force hurriedly installed Link 16 receivers in its Strike Eagles before the war in Afghanistan. The key to the system is that Link 16 not only carries information about a tactical picture, but it also can reset the airplane's mission computer, which tells the pilot where to go and what to hit. Thales's version of RTIC was actually somewhat more advanced than what is currently in service. Because a UAV bounces around in the air, it is not always easy to calculate the coordinates of a target it sees. Current practice is to send a pilot a series of images by means of which he can orient himself in the target area and then recognize and hit the target. The concept of operating solely on the basis of target coordinates has been demonstrated, at least by the U.S. Navy.
These thoughts bring up the question of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). Several builders at Paris displayed model or full-scale UCAVs. Because they have no cockpits, UCAVs can be shaped more freely than conventional aircraft, and they thus can be stealthier. Consider, however, what network-centric air warfare will soon entail. The problem will be to deliver weapons to designated places. Sometimes targets will be designated by netted sensors; other times they may be close-support targets. In either case, pilot judgment in weapon delivery will be limited because the pilot simply will be releasing a weapon within a basket from which it can find its way to the pre-designated target. The most important virtues of the platform dropping the weapons may be sheer capacity and loitering endurance. If, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, enemy air defenses can be wiped out at the outset, then stealth might be far less important in such cases.
Indeed, the UCAV may come to be seen as the reusable first stage of a precision-guided weapon, the final stage of which is a GPS-guided munition. That may seem odd, but in fact it is the way UCAVs already are being used. The Hellfire-armed Predators that operated in Afghanistan and Yemen were long-endurance armed loiterers. Stealth has been advocated as a UCAV virtue on the theory that UCAVs should be used where pilots cannot lightly be risked, as in defense suppression. It can, however, be argued that such roles are exactly the ones in which a pilot's judgment is most vital. It might be that UCAVs will be more useful overcoming pilot fatigue to provide continuous air coverage of target areas.
Continuous or near-continuous coverage would have another important implication. The Navy is forming expeditionary strike groups (ESGs) built around major amphibious ships, which carry marine expeditionary units (MEUs). The ESGs thus have the Marines as their main batteries, in effect. The great question is how the ships of the ESG can somehow provide the Marines going ashore with extra leverage, since a MEU might face a larger enemy unit. The obvious answer is sea-based firepower because ships can carry far more weight than the Marines can land—particularly if they cannot easily land heavy equipment in the face of obstacles and mines.
To most observers, firepower has meant guided weapons, either missiles or guided gun projectiles fired from the new 155-mm gun. There is, however, a problem. Some years ago the Marines analyzed the requirement for fire support and decided that the maximum allowable time between an urgent request for fire and the arrival of shells was ten minutes. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the Marines will want fire support at ranges of 100-200 nautical miles. Ten minutes at 200 nautical miles requires a weapon with a speed considerably above Mach 2. It is not surprising that research is proceeding to develop hypersonic ship-launched missiles. It will be some considerable time, however, until those weapons are ready.
We need the ESG now, because it is part of a larger Navy concept of operations to spread U.S. sea power around the world, where crises can happen in many places more or less simultaneously. Any attempt to enlarge the ESG would be fruitless because we lack the resources to do so. We cannot draw on some reserve of existing ships to create new amphibious carriers, for example (at one time, in the 1960s, we could, because the fruits of the World War II building program still existed). The only way to make the ESG work is to provide existing types of ships with the necessary leveraging firepower.
Aircraft seem to solve that problem, as long as we can repeat the successes of the past in crushing enemy air-defense systems (which seems a reasonable expectation). It would seem to follow that the fixed-wing aircraft assigned to the ESG are crucial to the unit's success. They might also be used for some new kinds of missions. For example, if the MEU went ashore in very dispersed fashion (say, to limit losses to mines), aircraft or UCAVs might deliver vital supplies in canisters guided like bombs, to each subunit moving ashore. That leads back to the question: to what extent could a large-capacity UCAV make these ships even more effective? Adopting UCAVs would certainly cut required pilot numbers, and it might be stowed compactly. It might be that a UCAV can be designed to accept operating conditions a pilot might find marginal, and so might operate successfully from a shorter or smaller flight deck. Maintenance might be reduced if policy were to discard UCAVs, or most of their content, after some fixed number of missions.