Toward a New Understanding of Air Dominance

Back in the day when I was an Air Force Special Operations pilot flying missions over Afghanistan, I belonged to what we called a “stack” of aerial assets that orbited over a target location both prior to and during an operation. To support a raid on a terrorist hideout in the Hindu Kush, we might have fighters or strike aircraft orbiting overhead, as well as unmanned and manned ISR platforms. We’d also have tankers flying tracks somewhere nearby, offering aerial refueling options to those who needed it, as well as airborne battle management platforms monitoring the whole shebang.

With all this iron in the air, we could monitor a target location (typically a walled-in Taliban compound) for many hours prior to a special operations raid. Different aircraft would tag in and out of the stack, maintaining constant overwatch. We’d observe patterns of life and update the inbound American special operators about the enemy force they’d face.

Once combat began, we were the eyes in the sky for our teams on the ground. Using our advanced sensors, we called out play-by-play updates on what the enemy militants were doing, and where they might be hiding. If one fled the target compound, we’d label them a “squirter” and keep tabs. Sometimes, a clever “squirter” would bring along a wet blanket to use as a form of thermal concealment from our sensors — some ran to a nearby wadi where, if it had recently rained, they’d try to conceal their body heat with water or mud, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the movie Predator.

Years later, we now see Ukrainian and Russian soldiers attempting similar tactics to evade detection by small drones equipped with thermal sensors.

The stacks we flew over Afghanistan were impressive operations. Perhaps a bit overkill, at times, considering our enemies were often holed up in fortress compounds that Alexander the Great would have found familiar. But that kind of aerial overkill is the privilege of nations that enjoy air dominance, as America did in the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan during the GWOT era. This air dominance empowered and informed our ground forces to consistently outmatch our enemies. From my personal point of view as a former pilot, I take great pride in the fact that I played some role, however minor, in keeping American special operators safe.

Looking forward, however, it’s clear that the way of war my generation got used to won’t work against a modern nation-state military that wields a modicum of air defenses. Even the Houthis — not exactly the guidon bearers of ultra high-tech warfare — have managed to down a concerning number of U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones over the past few months.

If the U.S. military decided to establish air dominance over Yemen, I’m sure we could. But what about Iran? Or Russia, or China? And what does that term even mean these days?

Definitions

The different levels of controlling an enemy’s air space ascend in their degrees of absoluteness according to the following definitions: air denial, air superiority, air supremacy, and air dominance.

A 1998 Air Command and Staff College paper, Achieving and Ensuring Air Dominance, provides some general definitions of these terms. Here are some excerpts, taken directly from the text:

Air denial: “[T]he lowest airpower state where friendly aircraft can conduct air operations sufficient enough to deny the enemy air dominance while conducting those airpower activities necessary to halt an initial enemy advance.”

Air superiority: “Joint Pub 1-02 defines air superiority to be the degree ‘in the air battle of one force over another which permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea, and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.’ This state is not enough to ensure the effectiveness of airpower.”

Air supremacy: “The next airpower state is air supremacy, which Joint Pub 1-02 defines as ‘that degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force in incapable of effective interference.’ Most theorists add that air supremacy is achieved when superiority is ensured just about everywhere, thus allowing friendly aircraft the ability to fly anywhere.”

Air dominance: “[T]he highest airpower state when the requisite effectiveness of airpower is achieved, that 100% of friendly bombs hit enemy targets while no enemy bombs hit friendly targets, that wars are won quickly (such as during the Six-Day War of 1967 and Operation Desert Storm of 1991), and that fewer friendly casualties are suffered.”

The author goes on to contend that even if the U.S. achieves air dominance, an enemy can still resort to what he calls a “kill Americans” strategy to win the war. This basically boils down to inflicting enough American casualties that public opinion turns against the campaign.

In the words of John M. Loh, a former Air Force general who headed Tactical Air Command: “Congress and the public now expect U. S. forces to prevail by 99-1, not 55-54 in double overtime.”

‘Impunity’

In a 1998 U.S. Air Force report titled, Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force, the overall objective of air dominance was outlined as such: “[I]f air dominance is achieved and joint forces can operate with impunity throughout the adversary’s battle space, the Joint Force Commander will prevail quickly, efficiently and decisively.”

Thus, according to this interpretation of air dominance, the baseline objective for air power is to clear the way, so to speak, for all levers of military power to operate with “impunity.” In this new age of unmanned warfare, such as we’ve seen on Ukraine’s battlefields, I’d argue that this concept needs some re-examining.

Even if American F-35s and B-21s crush an enemy’s air force, that does not guarantee command of the air littoral — that low-altitude layer of airspace within which small, tactical drones fly. In other words, an enemy force totally defeated in a traditional air war can still maintain lethal pressure on American forces through unmanned operations conducted at low altitude.

In their defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian fighter pilots have flown heroic missions, MacGyvering new tactics and technologies and rapidly integrating Western weapons and aircraft to establish off-and-on air denial against Russia’s air force. One Ukrainian MiG-29 fighter pilot told me about a plane that came back with a street sign embedded in its air intake, evidence of how low the pilot was flying to evade Russian radars.

“Maybe it’s stupid, but we don’t give a shit about technologies,” the Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot, who went by the callsign “Juice” told me back in 2022. He went on: “We’re just trying to do everything we can with what we’ve got. We succeed in this because the Russians are surprised, they were fucking surprised. They were not expecting resistance in the air at all.”

Closer to the Earth, Ukrainians have been able to do more than just resist. They’ve employed a wide range of small drones, operating in concert to create a paralyzingly lethal low-altitude environment that wreaks havoc on Russian ground forces. Using UAVs, Ukrainians have basically replicated low-altitude versions of the aerial stacks employed by the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ukrainian UAV brigades now field their own, complete drone warfare units, comprising fixed-wing ISR platforms, quadcopter ISR drones that double as bombers, as well as FPV strike drones and other lethal variants. In a sense, these mobile drone stacks can relocate to any section of the battlespace and establish a degree of control over the air littoral that lands somewhere on the spectrum between denial and supremacy.

Now imagine if China employed such drone warfare stacks against U.S. ground forces. How useful would our multi-million-dollar warplanes be against massed swarms of small Chinese drones, zipping around in helter-skelter flight paths at extremely low altitude? And what good is an air power victory, however you want to define it, so long as enemy drones continue to strike our forces?

Following America’s dominant air power performance during Operation Desert Storm, Merrill McPeak, a retired Air Force general who served as chief of staff of the Air Force from 1990 to 1994, said the following:

“Our idea of air superiority is not that we win the fight like the RAF won the Battle of Britain, but that we win the fight in the other guy’s airspace. In Korea, we fought the air superiority battle over the Yalu River. In Vietnam, we fought it over Hanoi. In Desert Storm, we fought it over Baghdad. So no American soldier presently serving in the Army has ever been attacked by an enemy airplane. It has been 40 years since we have had anybody come under enemy air attack. If you want to know what it is like to be attacked by an airplane, you have got to go talk to an Iraqi or a North Vietnamese or somebody else.”

Reading these words, I recall my experiences on the front lines in Ukraine, and how foreign it felt for me, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, to be under such constant danger from Russian drones. Thus, when McPeak refers to the American soldier’s unfamiliarity with being on the receiving end of “enemy air attacks,” I think it’s high time we re-imagine what that statement entails. In other words, is it any more dangerous or psychologically terrifying to be shot at by a MiG versus an FPV drone? And what’s more likely to happen on a future battlefield?

That kind of constant pressure — the inescapable prospect of death from above — is paralyzing for soldiers who aren’t used to it. Even for battle-hardened Ukrainian troops who’ve endured years of brutal, conventional warfare, the prolific threat of small, Russian drones elicits a different type of fear than an artillery barrage or a glide bomb does. In those instances, the threat is objective, mathematical. When artillery shells rain down around you, there are predictable actions to take that, statistically speaking, will probably keep you alive. With drones it’s different. With drones, you feel like you’re being hunted.

I’ve seen how soldiers can get used to living and operating under artillery fire. I’d even say that a degree of complacency settles in, since experienced soldiers develop a sort of sixth sense to understand how immediate and real a threat is. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the times, and they were many, when I’d sprawl out flat on the ground during an outbound Ukrainian cannonade, earning a round of well-deserved laughs from my Ukrainian friends.

That kind of sang-froid is harder to come by in a drone war. Your sixth senses don’t matter so much when there’s a human being at the controls of a miniature, guided cruise missile zipping around like a bumblebee looking for something to kill.

Air Dominance in the Unmanned Era

Our current definition of air dominance does not translate into control over the air littoral. Yet, if the ultimate goal of air power is to enable and empower ground forces to defeat the enemy, then we must also dominate the air littoral. This is how we must re-conceptualize air power in the unmanned age.

And let’s be clear, manned fighters and stealth bombers still matter — probably more so than ever when you imagine what a war against China would look like. Yet, we must also accept that these advanced aircraft are designed to win a different kind of air war than the one being waged at treetop levels in Ukraine.

Air superiority, supremacy, dominance — these terms mean something different today than in 1992, when air power theorists were after-actioning the Persian Gulf War to theorize how American air power would shape wars in the post-Cold War era.

Fighter jets and stealth bombers still matter but they aren’t enough to achieve our air power objectives in this new era of low-altitude, unmanned combat. We must pair our traditional air power assets with a dominant air littoral force established through the massed use of small, unmanned platforms. That’s how we enable and empower our ground forces to win, and that’s how we save American lives when the next war comes.