Smaller, faster, and stealthier drones could provide a solution.
Here s What You Need to Remember: Senior Air Force weapons developers certainly see a continued role for the Reaper, particularly regarding its more recent ability to drop a much greater sphere of weapons and fire an AIM-9X air-to-air missile. However, simply put, the drone may not be stealthy enough, small enough or fast enough to survive a war against any major opponent armed with advanced air defenses or sophisticated air-to-air weapons.
The U.S. Air Force Reaper Drones were crucial to victories in the War on Terrorism by delivering lethal, decisive and precise hellfire missile attacks upon terrorist and insurgent targets. They also provided countless hours of real-time intelligence to ground commanders through video surveillance in the Middle East and around the world. In fact, these drones have been continually expanding mission scope through a growing weapons arsenal and even new air-to-air attack capabil
How Will the U.S. Military Win the Next War? Joint Warfare
No man is an island, and no branch of the US armed forces can take on China or Russia alone.
Here s What You Need to Remember: Pentagon war planners regularly say warfare is inherently joint, thus providing the conceptual basis for ongoing wargames aimed at finding potential vulnerabilities or weak points likely to emerge in any kind of a major-scale war against a great power.
In the event of some kind of major war between the United States and a great-power rival such as Russia or China, wouldn’t the deciding factor be determined by which country succeeds in dominating the skies to a large extent? Surely the need for air supremacy, one could argue, supersedes or would need to precede any kind of large-scale ground invasion.
Air Force Special Operations Forces: Readying for a Russia or China War?
The rise of great power competition means that the entire military is spending less time training and planning for nation building and counter-insurgency.
Air Force Special Operators have a lot of jobs. They can attack from V-22 Ospreys behind enemy lines, conduct high-risk aerial reconnaissance when confronted by advanced air defenses and fly dangerous fixed-wing close air support missions. In fact, all of these are all mission possibilities more likely to be taken up as the Special Operation ramp up preparations for major power warfare.
“The AFSOC that we have is not the AFSOC we will need in the future,” Lt. Gen. James Slife, Commander, Air Force Special Operations Command, told The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in a recent video interview.
Lasers are but one of several high-tech future weapons already being tested across different platforms.
Lasers, robots, drones, artificial intelligence (AI) and hypersonic attacks are all areas of concentrated focus for U.S. Air Force innovators now looking to introduce a new generation of weapons into current and future warfare.
The Air Force Research Laboratory is accelerating its Science and Technology 2030 Strategy to fast-track innovations to war for the purpose of deploying a new generation of weapons, computing and sensing to future warfare environments.
“The whole goal here is to create technological surprise,” Brig. Gen Heather Pringle, Commander, Air Force Research Laboratory, told The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in a recent video interview.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wa.) said the U.S. military look for ways to reduce its dependence on the F-35 fighter jet, a notoriously expensive weapons platform.