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| Image: Flickr User - Marion Doss |
By Col Michael W. “Starbaby” Pietrucha
The role of modern airpower in the critical maritime domain
The Maritime Domain is “all areas and things of, on, under, relating to, adjacent to, or bordering on a sea, ocean, or other navigable waterway, including all maritime-related activities, infrastructure, people, cargo, vessels, and other conveyances.”
-US Navy
In the past decade and a half, American airpower has been heavily involved in fighting irregular wars. Often unacknowledged even by Department of Defense leadership, the Air Force and Naval aviation have been continuously involved in combat operations starting with Desert Storm and continuing without a break since then. For almost a quarter century, there has not been a single day where traditional combat air forces (CAF) have not been involved in a combat operation. In that timeframe, the application of airpower has been very land-centric, against adversaries who have no significant seapower capabilities and no reliance on maritime transportation. Both the Air Force and Navy essentially ignored antisurface warfare capabilities to the point where no USAF aircraft or Navy submarine carries antiship cruise missiles. Aerial mining, while regularly practiced, has quite literally not evolved since Vietnam. The intense involvement on conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Middle East has led to the neglect of the countermaritime capabilities that we will need to fight other adversaries.
In the meantime, both Russia and China have substantially improved their naval capabilities. While the Russian Navy is still a shadow if its former self, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has undergone over two decades of sustained modernization. The outcome of Russian system development and Chinese development of “counter-intervention” capabilities is that both navies have ships that are substantially more advanced, better defended, and pack a heavier punch than older ships. The PLAN has fielded capable surface combatants in significant numbers, operated them at long distances, and is taking the first steps towards the development of a blue-water capability. Clearly they have recognized what the U.S. has temporarily forgotten – that control of the maritime domain is not a luxury for a modernized nation with global interests. The maritime domain is indeed the “middle domain,” which can reach out to others and be reached by them. In the event that the U.S. has to fight China in the Indo-Pacific region, the former’s lack of air-delivered countermaritime capabilities will be a sore deficiency, not quickly remedied.
Read the full story at The Diplomat