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Airlift, Military --- Transportation, Military --- Planning. --- United States. --- Transportation.

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Faced with the challenge of deterring and defeating aggression by the kinds of highly capable adversaries highlighted in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) is exploring alternative weapon systems and concepts of employment that will allow it to generate combat power without being harnessed to air bases and runways that adversaries may view as high-value targets. In this report, the authors examine the logistics and sustainment aspects of an emerging operational concept for employing a family of unmanned aerial vehicles that can be launched, recovered, and sustained with minimal reliance on runways, thereby improving operational resiliency in the face of adversary targeting of runways. The authors find that this class of weapon system—called affordable runway-independent unmanned aerial vehicles (ARIUAV)—can conduct high-volume combat operations with lower resource requirements than traditional platforms. The authors identify options for reducing the logistics and support "footprint" associated with ARIUAV operations by using nontraditional support concepts and incorporating design changes that enable reduced support requirements.

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The relationship between China and Taiwan is more stable in 2009 than it has been in years, but China has nonetheless not renounced its “right” to use force to forestall Taiwan's “independence”. At the same time, the cross-strait military balance is shifting in ways that are problematic for Taiwan's defense: The growing size and quality of China's missile arsenal, along with other advances in Chinese military capabilities, call into question the United States' and Taiwan's ability to defend the island against a large-scale Chinese attack. In this volume, the authors employ a mix of theater-level combat modeling, simpler mathematical models, historical analysis, interviews with experts, and qualitative judgment to evaluate both the China-Taiwan political dynamic and the cross-strait military balance. Shlapak et al. conclude with a discussion of how Taiwan might be successfully defended against a Chinese invasion attempt.

China --- China --- Taiwan --- Taiwan --- Military policy. --- Military relations --- Military policy. --- Military relations

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The U.S. Air Force is exploring adaptive basing (AB) concepts to reduce the vulnerability of U.S. forces to growing air and missile threats and to preserve critical combat capabilities in highly contested environments. These concepts are likely to stress the U.S. Air Force's global mobility capabilities. AB concepts call for force packages to operate in mobile and responsive ways to provide protection and fight from positions of advantage. Although these concepts place additional and different demands on the U.S. Air Force's global mobility capabilities, their effect on the Mobility Air Forces (MAF) had not been fully analyzed. In this report, the authors assess the impact of AB concepts on the MAF and recommend how to enable the MAF to better support operations in contested environments. The analysis considers the impact of several AB concepts on the demand for tankers, airlift, and base enablers in the Pacific area of responsibility and examines the sufficiency of current MAF forces to support AB concepts. Potential enhancements are then considered. In general, the authors find that the current MAF (tankers, airlift, and base enablers) could support a few fighter wings (two or three) operating using an AB scheme of maneuver. Significant changes must be made to support larger force packages. Potential enhancements include culture; tactics, techniques, and procedures; equipment; and new technologies.

Air bases, American --- Air warfare --- Airplanes, Military --- Military planning --- Combat sustainability (Military science) --- United States. --- United States. --- United States. --- Mobilization --- Planning --- Operational readiness

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Every few years, the Air Force develops the Strategic Environment Assessment (AFSEA). The 2016 AFSEA is a 30-year look into the future for Air Force planning. As part of this process, Air Force asked RAND researchers to identify plausible futures based on nine trends in the categories of Geopolitical, Military & Warfare, and Human & Workforce to assist Air Force strategic planning in developing the AFSEA. The RAND team generated a range of future projections based on each of these trends and then convened a collaborative structured workshop to identify important interactions between these trends and to develop a set of future worlds during a 30-year time frame to assist the Air Force during the AFSEA. The workshop was a two-day event during which the RAND trend experts (1) presented their trend assessments and plausible futures; (2) conducted a cross-consistency analysis to look for any combinations of futures that they felt would be inconsistent with each other; (3) identified "interesting pairings" of futures; and (4) developed future worlds using different combinations of trend futures. The purpose of the workshop was to create a set of future worlds that represented diverse contexts and potential challenges for the Air Force to consider. This report presents the results of that workshop.