AIR FORCE Magazine / July 200240

By Rebecca Grant

HE fighter force is under attack. Big price tags fornew acquisition plus the claim that the demandfor fighters is based on old requirements havespawned doubts about the current and future role

of fighters in air and space power.Earlier this year, for example, the New York Times

pointed out in an editorial that the Air Force “remainscommitted to the F-22,” then referred to the Raptor as“a short-range tactical fighter designed for Cold Wardogfights.” The newspaper suggested that “Air Forcedollars should go to unmanned reconnaissance andattack craft like the Predator, long-range bombers, andthe troop transport planes that are in chronic shortsupply.”

Another defense critic, Lawrence J. Korb of theCouncil on Foreign Relations, argues the Pentagonshould be spending money on “true” transformationalsystems such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that wereused so successfully in Afghanistan.

More significant were reports in May that a draft ofthe Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal

Those who think fightersare finished do not understandbasic operationalrequirements of war.

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fighters came to dominate the forcestructure. In the 1970s, technologydevelopment feeding on the lessonsof Vietnam produced the F-15 as atrue air superiority fighter. A com-petition to build an innovative, light-weight fighter led to the design ofthe F-16. Fresh emphasis on conven-tional warfare and cooperation withthe Army through AirLand Battlehelped push a major buildup in fight-ers in the 1980s.

Brig. Gen. R. Michael Worden,author of the book The Rise of theFighter Generals, notes that Secre-tary of Defense Melvin R. Laird inthe early 1970s pushed for “youth”in the military leadership ranks. TheAir Force responded in part by giv-ing early promotions to youngerfighter wing commanders, with theresult being that they “were youngenough to compete in greater pro-portion for the higher flag officerranks before reaching mandatoryretirement at 35 years of service.”Later, disproportionate growth innumbers of fighters put more andmore fighter pilots in the rated pipe-line for senior jobs.

The cliché of fighter pilots pro-tecting their interests got new lifewhen UAVs began to make seriousstrides in capability and usefulness.

“Not long ago, an Air Force F-15pilot had to be persuaded to forgo arated pilot’s job to fly—I guess that’sstill the correct word—an unmannedPredator aircraft from a location farfrom the field of battle,” said Paul

2004 and beyond called for re-evaluating the F-22 program. Spe-cifically, it called for a study of theimpact of buying only 180 new F-22air dominance fighters, rather thanthe planned fleet of 339. The otherfuture Air Force air combat system,the F-35 strike fighter, faces a simi-lar review.

The idea that the fighter is on itsway out reflects a misunderstandingof the basic operational requirementsof joint warfare—and of the fighter’slong history of carrying forward in-novative new developments in airwarfare.

Magnets for CriticismFighters and bombers have been

magnets for criticism and contro-versy all through the history of warin the air and never more so thanwhen the bill for enhanced capabil-ity comes due. A few months beforePearl Harbor, Gen. Henry H. “Hap”Arnold famously confessed, “Frank-ly, fighters have been allowed todrift into the doldrums.” As a result,the US entered World War II withsecond-rate fighters on the front lines.

In Vietnam, US airmen paid theprice for lack of emphasis on fighterdevelopment, as powerful but un-wieldy F-105s and F-4s were shotdown by surface-to-air missiles andagile MiG-21s flown by experiencedNorth Vietnamese pilots.

It hasn’t been all that long since theUnited States was forced to learn thesestark lessons about military airpower.Even so, the issue of whether to buyfirst-rate fighters is back.

Today, the case against the fight-ers bounces from budget worries totechnology debates. Among the nu-merous allegations are claims thatfighters lack key performance require-ments, such as range; that they areoverbuilt to Soviet threat standardsthat no longer matter; or that other airvehicle systems will soon be able totake over the work of air dominance.

Running through it all is the chargethat fighter modernization plans fa-vor gold-plated aircraft built to meetthe kinds of specifications that thrillfighter pilots and aerospace engi-neers but exceed joint requirements.

Most damaging are doubts aboutwhether so-called “short-range fight-ers” truly qualify as prospects forthe transformation team. With trans-formation atop the list of defensepriorities, most attention focuses on

precision weapons, the potential ofUAVs, long-range bombers, and fu-ture space systems.

Scratch the surface of the fighterdebate and one of the first problemsto arise is the widespread perceptionthat a mafia of fighter pilots is will-ing to sacrifice other systems andeven transformational capabilities topreserve their single-seat cockpitsand silk scarves. According to thisline of thinking, the passion for af-terburners and nine-G turns biasesAir Force generals in favor of fund-ing for fighters and against systemsthat threaten to do some of the workof fighters.

In the Air Force, pilots—especiallyfighter pilots—dominate the ranksof three- and four-star generals. Since1982, all Air Force Chiefs of Staffhave been fighter pilots. Fighter pi-lots of Tactical Air Command ap-peared to win the battle of the AirForce’s post–Cold War reorganiza-tion when Strategic Air Commandwas disbanded in 1992 and the newAir Combat Command, emblazonedwith the old TAC patch and com-manded by a senior fighter pilot,Gen. John Michael Loh, was stoodup at TAC’s headquarters at Lang-ley AFB, Va. Through the defensedrawdown of the 1990s, USAF’sforce structure was expressed in termsof “fighter wing equivalents.”

The Fighter SurgeIn truth, fighter pilots started to

dominate Air Force leadership when

Some critics claim that fighter aircraft are not suited to transformation, but USfighters have often been the first to take breakthrough technology intocombat.

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Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary ofdefense in recent congressional tes-timony. He went on to praise the AirForce leadership for “working hardto encourage this pilot and others tothink of piloting UAVs as a majormission and to become trailblazersin defining new concepts of opera-tions.”

The implication was that neitherfighters nor fighter pilots were natu-rally well-suited to transformation.Yet the history of air operations at-tests to the place of fighters in thefront rank of innovation and trans-formation.

Technological superiority is thefighter’s first and foremost contri-bution. In air warfare, the ability tosurvive, complete the mission, andcontrol the airspace determines thesuccess of the air campaign. Spads,P-51s, F-4s, F-15s, and F-22s haveall had the same goal: Combine per-formance and tactics to outgun any-thing else in the air and then pivotoff that dominance to conduct dev-astating ground attack operations.

Fighters past and present sharebasic aerodynamic attributes that ex-plain why fighters remain on the frontlines, generation after generation.While individual specifications vary,every fighter is designed with powerand maneuverability in mind. Theseand other physical attributes sharedby all fighters represent the attemptto achieve state-of-the-art aerody-namics and deliver the maximum inair combat capability.

Consequently, fighters have oftenbeen the first to take breakthroughtechnology into combat. Cockpit ra-dar, jet engines, and pods for self-designated laser-guided bombs allwent to war first on fighters. Theterm “fighter” is decades old, buttoday’s fighters bear no more re-semblance to the World War II erathan a Ferrari does to a Model T.

Precision and StealthFighters were at the core of the

precision and stealth revolutions ofthe 1990s. The wave of transforma-tion that led to the stunning resultsof the Gulf War depended on fight-ers and fighter–bombers as the en-gines of change. In the Gulf War, forthe first time, American forces wonair superiority quickly and effi-ciently. The F-15 led the dogfightresults and suffered no losses. TheF-117 stealth fighter dissected thedifficult Iraqi defenses while theF-111 fighter–bomber turned its pre-cision capabilities to the unforeseentask of destroying Iraqi tanks half-buried in sand.

Fighters succeeded in the Gulf Warbecause their greater survivability—whether in the form of air combatmaneuvering or stealth—gave themthe widest range of potential actionin the battlespace and because theyhad the latest technology for precisionattack. Aircraft originally designed formore limited missions—for example,the F-4G “Wild Weasels”—provedcapable of employing new weapons

and tactics. Versatility, sheer num-bers, and the higher chances of mis-sion success made fighters the toolwith which air commanders accom-plished the broadest and deepestrange of tasks.

Following the Gulf War, the fighterforce as a whole received targetingand weapons upgrades that extendedthe benefit of precision throughoutthe Air Force, Navy, and MarineCorps. The Navy made its F-14 Tom-cat into a precision-capable “Bomb-cat.” In 1995, just four years afterthe Gulf War, fighters carried outOperation Deliberate Force, the two-week air campaign against BosnianSerb targets. By 1999, it was thefighters that drew most of the as-signment for time-critical targetingin Operation Allied Force. A casein point was the F-15E, modified inthe mid–1990s so the pilot couldreceive video images of a targetwhile he is en route. The B-2 stealthbomber was the only aircraft able todrop the all-weather Joint DirectAttack Munition in 1999. By thestart of Operation Enduring Free-dom in October 2001, however,Navy F/A-18s and F-14s and otherAir Force aircraft all employedJDAM to great effect.

In keeping with the transforma-tion tradition of the fighter, the F-22incorporates all-aspect stealth andadvanced avionics in an advancedfighter design. The combinationmakes the F-22 the most survivableaircraft ever to fly and will give itsuperior ability to conduct air-to-airor ground-attack missions.

Still, the chorus of doubt about thefuture of the fighter has grown stron-ger since the mid–1990s. Critics pointto several shortcomings thought toinhibit the utility of fighters.

The Range IssueHeading the list is range—or the

supposed lack of it. Geographic ac-cess to the battlespace in major re-gional conflicts emerged as a pos-sible Achilles’ heel for the fighterforce. The worry has been that eithermilitary attacks by the enemy orpolitical constraints from friendscould deprive US fighters of basesfrom which to launch operations. A1993 RAND study observed that the“greater the combat range of an air-craft, the more likely it is to find asuitable beddown base in any the-ater.”

The F-15, here launching an AIM-7 missile, was designed to outgun anythingelse in the air. The F-22, with stealth, supercruise, and triple the F-15’s range,represents a new generation of air dominance.

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As the US drifted away from SaudiArabia and some other Gulf allies,the question of access loomed evenlarger. Raids such as OperationDesert Strike in 1996 and OperationDesert Fox in 1998 raised new di-lemmas with allies reluctant to grantuse of in-theater bases for new of-fensive strikes. USAF heavy bomb-ers, Navy aircraft carriers, and longland-based fighter missions helpedtake up the slack.

Critical claims about fighter rangedeserve far closer scrutiny than theyhave so far received. It is axiomaticthat no combat aircraft can ever havetoo much range. The new fighterdesigns make this abundantly clear.The Navy F/A-18E/F multirole Su-per Hornet was designed with about25 percent more range than extantNavy fighters. The F-35 Joint StrikeFighter will more than double theunrefueled combat radius of the fight-ers that it replaces. The F-22 willtriple the combat radius of currentfighters.

However, actual combat radiusdepends on a whole host of vari-ables, ranging from altitude to theamount of ordnance carried and theattack profile.

Today, virtually no combat mis-sions take place without air refuel-ing. In Operation Allied Force, thecrowding of in-theater bases com-pelled Air Force F-15Es to fly seven-hour missions from RAF Lakenheathin England to targets in the formerYugoslavia, but their missions were

successful. Moreover, even bomb-ers need prestrike and poststrike re-fueling. B-2s leaving the target areaover Serbia were thirsty for fuel un-til they met their tankers in the Medi-terranean.

The debate about the combat util-ity of fighters boils down to a nar-row band of scenarios where basingconcerns and extreme inland rangesstretch out the combat radius andrelatively light air defenses take at-trition out of the equation. Afghani-stan after the first few days was justsuch a scenario.

Operation Enduring Freedom pre-sented a serious access challenge.In-theater bases were few and notparticularly close to the action. Land-based and carrier-based strike fight-ers had to use multiple air refuelingsfrom Air Force tankers to get enoughrange. The extreme distance to thetarget area limited the fighters’ timeon station.

Bombers operating from DiegoGarcia faced no such constraints,loitering for hours at a stretch toprovide on-call air strikes. The suc-cess of the bombers—which ac-counted for more than 70 percentof all of the ordnance dropped dur-ing the war—led some to questionwhether fighters would ever beneeded again. “Restart the B-52assembly line,” sneered Ralph Pe-ters, a retired Army lieutenant colo-nel and pundit. “We don’t needextravagantly priced dogfightingmachines.”

The F-117 was the leading edge of the revolution in precision and stealth inthe 1980s and 1990s. US fighter forces quickly established air superiority inthe 1991 Gulf War and every war since.

The focus on range left out theother side of the coin of anti-accessscenarios: air defenses.

Fighter TerritoryHostile airspace is fighter terri-

tory. With the exception of thestealthy B-2, bombers require sig-nificant standoff ranges to strike tar-gets in heavily defended airspace. InEnduring Freedom, the air defenses—rudimentary as they were—had to bedefanged first or even the Vietnam–era MiG-21s possessed by the Talibancould have been a lethal threat to thebombers. The B-1s and B-52s loi-tered safely over Afghanistan onlyafter it was cleared of air defensethreats by carrier-based fighter andB-2 strikes. Even so, fighters werealways in the area when bombersoperated.

In the Balkans in 1999, long-endurance on-call air support op-erations with the bombers wouldnot have been possible with theroving Serbian SA-6s on the loose.In those situations, it falls to fight-ers such as the F-16CJ to performhunt-and-kill missions of lethalsuppression of enemy air defenses.Many potential hotspots in the waron terrorism include stiff air de-fenses. It will be up to the fighters,perhaps assisted by the B-2 andTomahawk cruise missiles, to takethem down.

As recent operations attest, fight-ers do much more than engage indogfights. New platforms such asthe F-22 and F-35 are designed toplay multiple roles and streamlinethe fighter inventory.

Still, the primary mission of thefighter boils down to air dominance.

Regional air dominance counts.US fighters have flown more than100,000 sorties for combat air pa-trols over northern and southern Iraq.When the Iraqi air force started vio-lating the northern no-fly zone, theoperation needed more fighters tokeep control of the airspace.

A senior defense official said: “Italked to the Turkish general staff;they said they understood, andwithin a couple of days, it was ap-proved, and we put the fighters inthere.” For these regional air domi-nance missions, only fighters willdo. “If Saddam can’t fly up here[north Iraq] and can’t fly down here[south Iraq], that really puts greatconstraints on his air force as far as

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Rebecca Grant is a contributing editor of Air Force Magazine. She is presi-dent of IRIS Independent Research, Inc., in Washington, D.C., and hasworked for RAND, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Chief of Staff of theAir Force. Grant is a fellow of the Eaker Institute for Aerospace Concepts, thepublic policy and research arm of the Air Force Association’s AerospaceEducation Foundation. Her most recent article, “The Bekaa Valley War,”appeared in the June 2002 issue.

their training,” the senior defenseofficial explained. “They can’t op-erate with the army in the south;they can’t operate with the army inthe north.”

Even in low-intensity conflict,air commanders cannot run the cam-paign without important battlespacemanagement platforms such as theE-3 AWACS and E-8 Joint STARS,but fighters need to be available todefend them. “The first thing I wantto know is where the F-15s aregoing to be in case we have to gohide behind them,” said one of-ficer explaining mission planningfor an electronic attack aircraft. Inevery air operation from DesertStorm to Allied Force, fightersmanned combat air patrol stationsto protect other assets from thethreat of attack by even a handfulof enemy aircraft.

How Many and How MuchFor those who concede fighters

have some utility, a second perni-cious line of argument is that today’sroster of fighters provide all the airdominance needed—and that stealthis a waste of money. Naval analystNorman Friedman wrote in the Na-val Institute’s Proceedings in Maythat ongoing technology improve-ments might make stealth irrelevantand that “the sheer cost of buildingF-22s might make it impossible tobegin a new program.” He went onto say that “after all, the currentthreat is such that aircraft already in

Putting the brakes on US fighter modernization is false economy. The F-22,shown here, and the F-35 are designed to maintain the US advantage far intothe 21st century.

production seem to be quite effec-tive against it.”

Even since the heyday of the Mili-tary Reform Caucus in the 1980s,there has been a widespread viewthat adequate defense of the nationcould be had by buying cheaper,less-capable fighters. The myth ofthe cheap fighter was a staple of theReforms. The “cheap hawk” schoolof defense policy carries on thattradition, supporting a strong de-fense and a robust military, but dis-daining any effort to differentiateamong so-called “advanced jet air-craft” or to evaluate operational ar-guments for their joint warfightingroles. By failing to look at thesefactors, the cheap hawks gloss overthe real debate about how fighterscontrast or complement each otherin joint operations.

Also lost in the price tag argumentis the fact that, when war breaks out,the best systems are sent in first.Plans for the coalition air campaignof Desert Storm centered deliber-ately on the stealthy F-117. Themainstay F-16s, which lacked preci-sion targeting in 1991, filled in thegaps, with missions suited to theirmore limited capabilities. The one

attempt to send F-16s in a large pack-age against a heavily defended tar-get near Baghdad resulted in loss oflife and a decision that no target inIraq was worth the risk—because, ofcourse, the more advanced and sur-vivable F-117 was around to do thejob.

Putting the brakes on US fightermodernization is false economy anddiscards the nation’s key asymmet-ric advantage. The fighters strengthenUS air and space power; new onesare needed to help the US stay aheadof emerging capabilities. Already,advanced Russian SAMs can be foundin many countries. They are beingmarketed to many others.

Ensuring that US aircraft can getinto a target area and perform theirmissions—now and in the future—ultimately comes down to whetherthe fighters can be tasked to takeon the total threat of adversary air-craft and surface-to-air missiles.The F-22 Raptor and the F-35 JointStrike Fighter are specifically de-signed to unravel integrated air de-fenses. Standoff cruise missiles suchas the Tomahawk Land Attack Mis-sile augment air dominance—butTLAMs, too, are vulnerable. OneTLAM flying a preplanned route wasshot down by anti-aircraft fire dur-ing the Gulf War.

It is interesting to note that thefighter debate seems to be takingplace only in the United States.Worldwide, the market for fightersremains strong and competitive, withmany nations choosing to spend theirdefense dollars on fighters.

In every air campaign, openingthe skies for friendly operations isthe foundation of all that comesafter. Fighters also remain the cor-nerstone of sovereign air defense.Operation Noble Eagle put fighterpatrols over many parts of theUnited States after Sept. 11. Noother type of aircraft could havedone that job.

Whether at home or abroad, win-ning air superiority is the reasonfighters will continue to be the acesof air warfare. ■

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