Source: World Wide Web
Us media said that the country's air force is currently facing the problem of "getting lazier", and this problem may cause the US military to encounter "big trouble" in clashes with "competitors" such as China and Russia.
Screenshot of the Forbes report
On the 18th local time, the US "Forbes" magazine website said that the US Air Force has become "more and more lazy", and the US Air Force Air Combat Command has expressed "concern" about this.
Over the past few decades, the U.S. Air Force has moved from "spacious, comfortable bases" to bomb militants "leisurely," which has led the U.S. Air Combat Command to worry that the U.S. Air Force has become a bit lazy. If there is a war with "competitors" such as Russia or China, it can mean "big trouble". As a result, the U.S. Air Combat Command is reorganizing its flying wing, which has a total of about 1,100 fighter jets, attack aircraft, reconnaissance aircraft and drones, to enable them to deploy more quickly and more widely, and thus to operate more effectively.
The U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command has set up an "Action Plan Task Force" to oversee these changes. This may seem bureaucratic to some observers, but in wartime the plan could mean success or failure. "Years of low-intensity combat in the Middle East, combined with the high-intensity combat force management structure that has not yet been optimized, have provided us with the opportunity to overhaul the way air combat command is organized, trained and armed forces," the command recently announced." ”
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Since the 1990s, the U.S. Air Force has organized many flying squadrons into 10 "air expeditionary forces," which take turns to devote troops to various wars waged by the United States. For example, a squadron of F-16 fighter jets stationed in South Carolina landed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and then dropped bombs on unsuspecting militants for the next 6 months.
In a 2018 study by the U.S. think tank RAND Corporation, it said: "The 'Air Expeditionary Force' represents a major change compared to past practices. But the Forbes report argues that the step-by-step "waiting for the right time" approach to training and deployment can actually only be applied to predictable, protracted, low-intensity battles. If Russia invades the Baltic states, or if China takes action on some islands in the South China Sea, U.S. "air expeditionary forces" will not be of much use, and the U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command and the entire U.S. Air Force will need to move more troops more quickly.
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The report also acknowledges that it is impossible to keep every squadron on high combat readiness, and even in large wars, combat units need to rest. For more than a decade, the Air Force has been working on a concept known as "agile combat deployment" (ACE), which spreads out combat squadrons into smaller units, in order to make it harder for the enemy to predict where U.S. warplanes will take off for strike missions. But this "agile combat deployment" also poses the administrative challenge of who will command the dispersed forces and then how the commanders of a certain region will direct the troops to fight.
The report also mentions that as organizational structures change, the Air Force is trying to phase out older, more vulnerable aircraft and replace them with newer ones that can survive major battles. To be clear, the Air Force Air Combat Command, like other Air Command, is trying to break 30 years of bad habits that could put the Air Force at a serious disadvantage against an adversary with powerful high technology.