The End of Flight As We Know It?

The story in the October 5th issue of “Aviation Week and Space Technology” began:
“The successful test of a TRW-designed laser recently has opened the door for a valid demonstration of the device’s usefulness as a weapon against ballistic missiles.”

Good news for those of us who would like the government, some decade or other, to get around to its constitutional duty to protect the American homeland and field forces against missile attack.

The article had another item to report.

“Less obviously, this test will allow the airborne laser to begin taking on crucial new missions.” Among the candidates: cruise missile defense; suppression of enemy air defenses; countering anti-aircraft missiles; and long-range reconnaissance.

Obviously, also good news.

Or is it?

Technology has an annoying habit. It diffuses. What we do today, they do tomorrow. Perhaps not as well, but well enough to annoy, frustrate, or annihilate us. In this sense, development of lasers and other directed-energy weapons as all-purpose anti-missile and anti-air systems may have a nasty long-term effect.

Several years ago, a study commissioned by the Electronics Industry Association defined this effect with scary succinctness:

For the next few decades, American offensive and defensive aerospace superiority would remain unchallenged. But after that, as others acquired similar capabilities, there could evolve a world “where nothing will fly.”

It is at the very least conceivable that American aerospace superiority–since World War II the sine qua non of American military success–has entered its climacteric. Indeed, it is more than conceivable. Forty years from now, most honest pilots will tell you (maybe after that second whisky), traditional, i.e. large and expensive people-aboard fighting machines, will be as obsolete as knights in armor. So perhaps the question is less “will it happen?” than “how to manage the transition?”

Obviously, the change will not come immediately. Equally obvious: not all our foes will be able to acquire or use, or need to use, exotic new defensive weaponry. Also obvious: the Black World yields its secrets slowly. They may be brewing some dandy counter-gadgets out there. But proceeding on the assumption that a “nothing will fly” world is a real possibility, the following might constitute a reasonable approach.

First, for the next two or three decades, American aerospace supremacy must be maintained. This means that the next (and final?) generation of fighter aircraft, specifically the Air Force’s F-22 fighter and the Joint Strike Fighter, a tri-service plane, must be built and fielded in adequate quantities.

That these are Cold War “legacy” weapons is true but irrelevant. They’ll still have to face a new generation of threats. The Russian aircraft industry won’t stay down forever. Their latest models have plenty of room for avionics and other upgrades. Nor are our European competitors exactly incompetent. And who knows where the Eurofighter will end up?

Whether this country needs another heavy penetrating bomber, the “B-3,” may be debated.

Second, the time to press forward aggressively with development of UAVs–Unmanned (or, more accurately, Uninhabited) Aerial Vehicles–is now. These are essentially transition systems, still more like aircraft than anything else. In the near term, they can take over a number of reconnaissance and surveillance duties, augmenting satellites and other platforms. Gradually, they should be given combat missions. Humans will remain “in the loop.” They just won’t be aboard.

Finally, it is likely that the long-term future of military aviation (excluding airlift) lies with nanotechnology: systems the size of insects or smaller, with capabilities that today would astonish us, to the extent that we’re still capable of technological astonishment.

In short, if combat aviation has reached its climacteric, it’s going to be a long one. And it will also have to be managed by the service that seems the least capable, psychologically, of doing it.

The Air Force, as the late Carl Builder, a RAND analyst and astute sociological observer liked to note, is less a coherent institution than an elite of aviators, plus everybody else. Indeed, Builder suggested that this elite sometimes identified more closely with its machines than with its service. Flight, not institution, was the core.

If so, then the shift to uninhabited flight entails nothing less than the abolition of the present Air Force culture, with enormous implications for careers and control. No other service is expected or needs to tear its soul apart in order to keep up with the technology. Even with a generation to ease the transition, it could be ugly and rough. Will the old Wild Blue Yonder mentality calcify into bureaucratic obstinance and rigidity, at enormous cost and peril to the country?

Hard to say. But a recent speech by Gen. Lloyd W. Newton, commander of the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, may hold a key. Addressing a group of new lieutenants at the “Air and Space Basic Course”–a curriculum designed to provide all Air Force officers with a common intellectual foundation–Newton said:

“Over the last decade [and maybe much farther back than that] we’ve lost the ‘bubble’ on what it means to be an airman.” He noted that “airpower is a state of mind” involving “control and exploitation of the entire vertical dimension.” He did not specify how.

It is imaginable that, forty years from now, one young lieutenant in that audience last July will lead the final flight, or stand on the rostrum below.

Philip Gold is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Insitute.