America's F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Face Another Big Test

Dave Majumdar

Security, Asia

What happens when their bases come under attack? 

The Pentagon will have to rely on fifth-generation fighters like the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in the event of a conflict with a near-peer adversary such as Russia or China. But unlike during present day conflicts, American forces won’t be able to count on operating from secure bases. Instead, American airpower will have to contend with fighting while under fire from enemy cruise and ballistic missiles—or even air attacks. That means U.S. military commanders will have to pay careful attention to dispersing their forces, logistics and securing their support assets such as aerial refueling tankers and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft.

However, while the concept of operating combat aircraft from airfields that are under attack might seem novel, the idea dates back from the Cold War when the U.S. Air Force and its NATO partners assumed that allied air bases in Europe would come under concerted air and missile attack from Warsaw Pact forces. While many of those concepts have fallen by the wayside in the post-Cold War-era, many of those techniques that the U.S. Air Force developed during that period might have applications in the Pacific as China rises to become a potential great power challenger to the United States.

“That’s a lot like the stuff we did during the Cold War, I think we may be reinventing coming we’ve already done,” said Col. Max Marosko, deputy director of air and cyberspace operations at Pacific Air Forces headquarters and who was also part of an elite cadre of instructor pilots who helped bring the F-22 Raptor into operational service. “There’s a lot of things we did in the Cold War timeframe—Concealment, Camouflage and Deception (CCD), airfield repair—air base operability—so there were a lot of lessons that we learned for that theatre—that threat—and potentially there could be some applicability out here in the Pacific.”

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