Hinote expounded on the need to multiply operating locations to complicate the enemy’s targeting problem, saying the Air Force will transition toward a force that increasingly will be “runway independent,” taking advantage of unmanned systems that can launch from a vehicle or patch of ground using “rocket-assisted takeoff” and recover by parachute, and aircraft that can take off and land either on a short runway or road, or vertically. “We are going to have to … reimagine air superiority for the next 40 years,” he said. The Air Force will have to put more thinking into defending the homeland from air attack and projecting forces forward to protect allies, he said. For while total air control was a “prerequisite” to almost all military operations, but Hinote said, “I don’t see as a viable thing to try to establish.” New thinking will be needed about “how we’re going to penetrate into those contested areas and how we’re going to create that effect of air superiority.”
… We need to experiment with that and exactly how to build those units.” However, he called the work “exciting … because we get a chance to shape that for the next generation of Airmen.”Īir superiority has become “much more challenging,” Hinote said, and “it will require us to think differently than we have in the past.” In fact, “I have a lot of trouble with” the idea of perpetual air dominance. “If they’re flying all of these small unmanned aircraft around … to accomplish different things?” he continued. The service will soon be doing experiments to examine “what does a unit of combat power look like?” he said. Hinote did not mention the Next-Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, system as central to this mission. The profusion of airborne targets, he said, will make an adversary’s job harder and make it easier for USAF to achieve air superiority at the time and place of its choosing. The Air Force is now looking to large numbers of unmanned aircraft as one way to achieve the combat power needed without the expense of building every airplane with a seat, displays, and an escape system for a human operator.
The Air Force has pitched Congress to allow the retirements of legacy platforms and systems that are no longer relevant in order to free up manpower and funds for new systems, but Congress has been skeptical so far. Hinote said the Air Force has recently opened up some of its exercises to Capitol Hill staffers and members of Congress, allowing the stakeholders to “help us shape the game, and we took the results back to them to show them what happened.” It’s “one of the ways of helping us tell the story of the change we need and the fact that we need to get after it faster,” he said. The short timeline also puts a priority on training, he said, which will make “a huge difference there.” That horizon makes it “more difficult to imagine” starting new systems now that will be ready by then, making an imperative of connecting the equipment already in hand, he asserted. He noted that the Air Force “used to” think it had until 2030 or so to achieve its evolution but now sees the need to get to a new posture by around 2027, given the advances being made by China and other potential adversaries. Brown’s mantra is proved right by the outcomes of recent exercises-about which Hinote did not elaborate-saying, simply, “We’ve got to go faster.” “Unfortunately, the wargaming says that we’re not accelerating our change fast enough,” said Hinote, the deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements, during a webinar hosted by the Center for a New American Security. The corrective action is to speed up the deployment of large numbers of unmanned systems and to proliferate operating locations to complicate an enemy’s decision-making, he said. Clinton Hinote, the Air Force’s futurist. has been to “accelerate change or lose,” but the most recent wargaming indicates, so far, the latter, according to Lt.