Fifth Generation Aircraft and Disruptive Change

U.S. air power is at a crucial turning point.  In a stringent budgetary environment and with a demand to shape a post-Afghan military, the crucial requirement is to invest in the future not the past.  President Obama is calling for a Sputnik moment in the investment in future technologies.  There is little reason to exclude the Department of Defense from such an effort.

Yet this is exactly what is happening.  After cancelling the F-22 without ever understanding what the F-22 brings to the joint warfighter, the Administration is slowing its investment in the F-35 and investing in legacy aircraft. Amazingly, policy makers have not taken on what the Indians grasped: why buy 40 year old airframes?

But is not just about airframes or stuffing as much as you can in legacy aircraft.  The new aircraft represent a sea change with significant savings in terms of fleet costs and overall capability at the same time. The sustainability of the new aircraft are in a world significantly different from legacy aircraft. Digital maintenance is part of the revolution in sustainability.

The cost of maintaining 4th generation aircraft is an oft-overlooked aspect of looking at cost of keeping the old and introducing the new. Here are some comments from a blog by an F-22 maintainer who sounds like the Maytag repairman.

The sustainability revolution enables a significant increase in the sortie generation rates for the new combat aircraft.  And in addition to this core capability, there is a significant transition in combat approaches facilitated by the new aircraft.

The aircraft can shape disruptive change by enabling distributed operations.  The shift is from linear to simultaneous operations; it is a shift from fighters needing reach back to large aircraft command and control and ISR platforms to 360 dominance by deployed decision makers operating not in a network but a honeycomb.

Fifth generation aircraft both generate disruptive change and live off of disruptive change.  Taking a fleet approach, rather than simply focusing on the platforms themselves highlights their potential for disruptive change.  Properly connected or interoperable with one another, the new aircraft can work together to operate like a marauding motorcycle gang in an adversary’s battlespace.

Rather than operating as a linear force, the marauding motorcycle gang creates chaos within the OODA (observe, orient, decide, and act) loop of the adversary.  And by having an onboard combat systems enterprise able to respond in real time to the impacts, which the aircraft are creating in the battlespace, they can respond to the fractual consequences of the battle itself.  Rather than going in with a pre-set battle plan, the new aircraft can work together to disrupt, destroy, and defeat adversary forces within the battlespace. It is about on the fly (literally) combat system processing power which enables the pilots to act like members of a marauding motorcycle gang.

For the United States to have an effective military role in the new setting of regional networking, a key requirement will be effective and assured combined command, control, and communications, linked by advanced computing capabilities to global, regional, and local intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance assets (C4ISR). The services will need to ensure that there is broad synergy among U.S. global forces fully exploiting new military technologies and the more modest capabilities of regional allies and partners. Indeed, C4ISR is evolving to become C4ISR D, whereby the purpose of C4ISR is to shape effective combined and Joint decision-making.

A key element of this new capability is the F-35 which functions as a flying combat system able to operate across the spectrum of warfare.  It is the first plane, which can manage 360 space and has the combat system to manage that space.  Deployed as a force, it enables distributed air operations, an approach crucial to the survival of our pilots in the period ahead.