Not everyone is quite so enthusiastic about UAS, which, so far, have been employed only within permissive environments. Former Pentagon analyst Pierre Sprey believes that they are too expensive to operate, pointing to the current situation in which a single Predator orbit requires four aircraft, a launch site, a ground control system, and complex communications links. Unmanned systems are “a symptom,” says author and analyst Col. Walter J. Boyne, USAF (Ret.), a former director of the National Air and Space Museum, “of our unwillingness to invest in robust, long-range, land-based air power in which manned aircraft will still play the leading role.”

The strongest supporters of UAS say we’re not yet anywhere near the point where a fighter, bomber, or airlifter will be able to perform its duties without a human aboard. The most vocal detractors of UAS regard these unmanned systems – a favorite of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates – as a fad, something like the fighters without guns that were the rage in the late 1950s. “Even if you improve aerodynamics and propulsion,” said Sprey, “you’re not going to have a UAS that can hold its own in a ‘near peer’ war” with a country like Iran or North Korea. If the United States continues to battle insurgencies in Third World trouble spots like Afghanistan, the UAS is likely to retain and expand a dominant role.

 

Cyber Warfare

Perhaps spooked by the obvious vulnerability of the United States’ commercial infrastructure to cyber attack, some experts say cyber warfare will be a crucial mission in the future. The Air Force will have a leading role, they say, not so much because this is an obvious mission for airmen but because the Air Force saw the cyber threat coming and prepared to cope with it before other service branches, law enforcement, or civilian agencies appreciated the threat. “We’ll exploit the cyber domain,” says Deptula.

“By 2030, the Air Force will have a couple of cyber campaigns under its belt,” said Grant. “Cyber is a ‘first in’ tool – a ‘first day, first night’ weapon. The Air Force has been heavily immersed in it from the beginning. Cyber goes back to the 1950s and to the SAGE [Semi-Automatic Ground Environment] system, which was a pre-digital linking of air defense and air-picture nodes. So you could say that if cyber had a ‘Mayflower moment,’ it was with Air Defense Command in those early days.”

That doesn’t mean everyone is thinking about cyber all the time. Retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an aviator, told reporters that “the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has stealth capability to protect it from air defense radars, has no protection against cyber attacks.” Previous aircraft could turn off all electronic transmissions with one switch to avoid detection, Cartwright said, but the F-35 has no such mechanism.

“Cyberspace will dominate military thinking,” said retired Lt. Gen. Stephen Wood, who was U.S. air commander in Korea. “The role of the cyber officer and specialist is evolving. They look at defensive things with the other services and with U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Md.” Wood said offensive cyber operations are “kept very quiet and on close hold” but that “an enhanced capability for offensive cyber operations is needed.” In June, the Pentagon announced that every U.S. combatant commander would have a cyber mission and a component that conducts cyber operations.

Retired Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, director of The Institute for Homeland Security, said the Air Force of the future – and the nation – will be better equipped to sustain a cyber attack and strike back because we won’t have any choice. “Cyber is the most serious of the asymmetric threats we face today,” said Larsen. “We’re getting hundreds of thousands of probes and attacks every day in sensitive government systems and throughout industry. Our weakness, the place where we’ll do better in the future, is attribution – knowing who’s doing it and why. We need to know whether it’s the Chinese army, a criminal, or a teenage hacker. We’re getting better at that but we need to get better yet. Once you know who the attacker is, there are serious ways of responding, from diplomatic means to covert action to military action.”

Ambitious plans for an Air Force Cyber Command, launched in 2008, were knocked flat by Washington politics. The plans died when Gates sought the resignation of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley on Aug. 1 of that year. Instead, in May 2009, the nation invested in a joint-service Cyber Command – subordinate to U.S. Strategic Command – headquartered at Fort Meade and led by the officer who concurrently serves as director, National Security Agency, currently Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander. Because the Air Force continues to have great expertise in the cyber realm, a restoration of Moseley’s hope for a dominant role by his service branch is a real possibility.

Meanwhile, the Air Force has stepped up attendance at its 136-day cyber transport systems school at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss. In May 2012, the Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., added a rigorous cyberspace training regimen to its coursework. “We are the place where the world comes to learn about test and evaluation,” said Col. Noel Zamot, former USAF TPS commandant, who retired June 15. “With the introduction of the Cyber Systems Test Course, we can now teach our graduates and others the framework for testing cybersystems in a contested environment. This is the first course of its kind that includes a disciplined, yet flexible approach to testing cyber-intensive systems.”