Service pondering future roles.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

Articulating the role of air power has been a high priority for Air Force leaders during the past several years. But exactly what assignments the Air Force will be required to carry out and what systems will be needed to execute the missions of the future is a matter of debate, experts said.

Frederick Kagan, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar, said the "shock and awe," as portrayed in spectacular video footage from the Iraq and Serbia bombing campaigns will not be enough to win future conflicts. Shock wears off, he said at an AEI forum. "What do we do once we've shocked the enemy?"

David Ochmanek, senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, warned of an erosion of the aerial dominance the United States has enjoyed over its enemies for decades. The Air Force remains adept at destroying targets, but enemies are becoming savvier about concealing them.

"Finding, not shooting, becomes the determinant of success," Ochmanek said. "It's getting harder and harder to find things on the battlefield." Iran and North Korea, for example, have learned to move potential targets underground, he added.

Ochmanek and Kagan both warned that future conflicts may not be the cakewalks the Air Force enjoyed in the past. Recent adversaries have relied on 1960s-era, Soviet-designed air defense systems. Ochmanek described them as "slow softballs down the middle of the plate" for the Air Force, adding that the Chinese, for example, have been working hard to upgrade and modernize their air defense capabilities.

Furthermore, potential opponents have been upgrading their ballistic missile systems. It's a 1940s-era technology that continues to proliferate, Ochmanek warned. "The Air Force has got to be in the business of theater missile defense," he added.

China, North Korea and Iran scenarios are speculative, large-scale conflicts. As for the present-day war on terrorism, Air Force officials are keen to point out that the service has an important role to play in lower-intensity conflicts such as the ongoing Iraq insurgency.

"Air power is a viable, critical, very necessary contributor to the counter-terrorism fight, today and certainly into the future," said Maj. Gen. Norman Seip, assistant deputy chief of staff for air and space operations. Air Force Chief of Staff Michael T. Moseley said the global war on terrorism will last as long as a generation. The Air Force's capability of striking targets, projecting and delivering forces, and gathering and disseminating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance will be a vital part of the fight, he said.

Ochmanek said the Air Force will face growing demands to operate in areas where they are not comfortable. "We have to care about any place where people are developing strategies to kill Americans."

The contributions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and their operators are among the most significant made by the Air Force, said Seip. It's not uncommon for the Predator UAV to catch insurgents planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They also can tag an lED location so demolition teams can disarm it later, Seip said. UAVs also have patrolled Iraqi oil pipelines and watched backdoors in support of ground forces during night raids, he said. They can light up insurgents in infrared and follow them so "we can scarf up the folks who think they've got a free pass out of the fight that they started."

Manned aircraft such as the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, (JSTARS), initially designed to track large tanks and combat vehicles, have logged more than 10,000 hours in Southwest Asia since July 2003, Seip added. In one case, a JSTARS recorded a large explosion at an oil pipeline. The crew was able to go through tapes and track a vehicle leaving the explosion. Ground forces later swarmed over a building where the vehicle was parked and caught the bomb makers "with dirt on their hands, so to speak," Seip said.

Moseley said JSTARS tracked Iraqi Republican Guard units in a sandstorm. "We could see them, and they could not even see themselves. That's a tremendous asymmetric advantage," he said.

There are currently not enough Predators or personnel trained to fly them, Seip said. In development is the Multi-Aircraft Control System, which will allow one operator to guide multiple UAVs at once. It could, for example, keep three UAVs flying on standby to be called in when needed. "I look at that somewhat as a quantum leap in UAV technology that will help us satisfy that appetite that all of us out there have for full-motion video," Seip said.

A remote operations video enhanced receiver will allow UAV operators to circle a target of interest on a...