U.S. air superiority faces new challenges

ARLINGTON, Va., March 17 (UPI) -- In the last two decades, the United States has used airstrikes to contain dictators, punish aggression, turn around international violations of sovereignty and stop regime-inflicted humanitarian disasters. No-fly zones squelched Iraqi military activity for a decade.

There's no reason to think the United States and its armed forces will depend less on airpower for conventional deterrence in the future. It remains just the type of flexible, proportionate tool essential to credible, conventional deterrence. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates explained the need for options well. "A conventional strike force means that more targets are vulnerable without our having to resort to nuclear weapons," he said in an Oct. 28 speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

It is therefore reasonable to ask: Is the United States keeping far enough ahead to make its conventional deterrence effective? The answer depends, in part, on U.S. airpower in general and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor in particular.

There is an exceptionally vital aspect of conventional deterrence: how to assure that the United States can open up the airspace and execute a conventional strike. Trends now suggest that the U.S. armed forces can't take that advantage for granted or rely on airpower's conventional deterrence for much longer.

Potential adversaries are moving way too fast on aircraft, weapons and tactics, and the gap is narrowing. Instead of nuclear-warhead throw weight and survivable second strike, the technical details of the balance for conventional deterrence in the 21st century may come down to stealth and supersonic speed without afterburner.

The tactics necessary to exert conventional deterrence are changing. America's defense officials once followed the relative standings of conventional forces very closely.

Conventional deterrence came into vogue in the 1980s when Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union revived interest in strong conventional forces as deterrents in their own right. Back then, scholars researched case studies on historical and regional conflicts and re-examined how military might on each side influenced the causes of wars. Keen interest developed in whether the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact could restrain themselves and fight a conventional war in Europe without resorting to nuclear weapons -- and if so, who would prevail. Major improvements in air and land forces followed.

All that preparation for Europe turned out to be unnecessary -- but highly useful elsewhere. No challengers arose to test the ability of the United States to employ airpower as it chose.

However, there are very clear indications that the military balance may be shifting again.

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(Part 4: The challenge of Russia and China's asymmetric anti-aircraft missile capabilities)

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(Rebecca Grant, Ph.D., is a senior fellow of the Lexington Institute, a non-profit public-policy research organization based in Arlington, Va.)

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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)