The U.S. Air Force and Army plan to conduct a series of joint table-top exercises over the next year to refine ideas for fighting seamlessly across multiple domains, an Air Force official said Jan. 25.
The Air Force’s Air Combat Command (ACC) and the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) are running the effort, said Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, ACC’s commander, who spoke at the Brookings Institution. Both commands are headquartered at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia.
The exercises were supposed to start last week but were delayed by the federal government shutdown, which prevented some people from traveling to participate. “We’ll have to reschedule the first of those four table-top exercises,” Holmes said.
The joint exercises will be conducted in parallel with Air Force experiments on multi-domain command-and-control. Brig. Gen. B. Chance “Salty” Saltzman, director of current operations for the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations, is leading those experiments.
Air Force and Army officials believe they will need a multi-domain approach to operate effectively in the contested environments that they are increasingly likely to face in the coming years.
To make multi-domain battle a reality, the Air Force is pursuing multi-domain awareness, such as the ability to integrate air, space and cyberspace sensors, Holmes said. Multi-domain awareness will also require advanced battle management and agile resilient communications.
The Air Force is also interested in adaptive basing, such as maneuvering among smaller bases and improving base defenses against precision long-range threats.
“Our enemy is giving us a problem, which is how do you operate close enough to them to be persistent enough to have the effects that you’d like to have,” Holmes said. “We’re going to have to work through some counters to that.”
A key challenge for small bases is that it is more difficult to sustain them with food, fuel, power and weapon than the “large, efficient bases” the Air Force usually uses, he said. Improved defenses might include non-kinetic weapons, such as cyber and directed energy, to avoid the need to always use expensive interceptor missiles.
Holmes has publicly addressed the topic of multi-domain battle before. In November, he said that ACC is studying potential organizational changes, such as better links with other commands, to enhance its multi-domain operations (Defense Daily, Nov. 20, 2017).