Remember Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb last year, when the Ukrainians took out most of Russia’s bomber fleet?
Good news: The Russian air force is much weaker now. Bad news: It can happen to us too.
Drones have transformed warfare. Once upon a time, having an air force was expensive, difficult to maintain, and impossible to hide. Now, even a small terrorist group can have a big air force of drones on the U.S. homeland, and we might not even find out about it until they attack us, just like the Russians did not find out until they were attacked. For a much larger enemy, like China, Russia, or Iran, they can do that at a much larger scale, in a way that it would become a strategic liability for us.
The problem is that, like Russia, our military aircraft are all parked in the open. As long as you can reach them, you can hit them. There is no protection.
This has always posed a big risk. But before the drone era, you could plausibly argue that, if the Soviet Union decided to launch an attack against us, it would take almost a whole day for their bombers to reach the United States, and we would have the time to move around our aircrafts. It was a risk, but it was understandable. It is no longer defensible that we are leaving our air fleet naked.
The good news is that at least for the time being, it will not be difficult to build shelters against drones. Unlike a heavy bomber, a drone can carry small explosives that cannot even penetrate thick concrete.
This problem is not receiving any attention, so much so that there are very few estimates for how much it would cost to build aircraft shelters and harden the existing ones. One estimate predicts that this will cost between 4 and 5 million dollars per fighter to build shelters, and it will cost about $20 million dollars to build them for bombers.
A back of the envelope calculation means that this will cost around $20 billion. This is just for the 2,000 bombers and fighters the United States stations at home.
There are about 7,000 additional fixed wing aircraft in the United States, as well as thousands helicopters that are necessary for the U.S. military’s function, including transporting wounded personnel out of the battlefield.
Now, add the aircraft that the U.S. military deploys overseas. U.S. airfields in the Indo–Pacific, including Guam, are particularly vulnerable. Of course, because of different labor laws and wages, costs are lower there, but we don’t have a good estimate for that.
This is not something people are unaware of. Civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon have the audacity to tell the Taiwanese that they need to harden their airfields, but they don’t seem that alarmed about our own problem at home and in our overseas bases.
This is a multi-billion dollar problem. The military never even ask for a billion dollar in annual appropriations to harden our bases, and Congress always gives less than the military asks. Why? Because the next cutting-edge military technology is much more exciting than buying cement!
As the saying goes, amateurs do strategy, and professionals do logistics. Unfortunately, we have too many amateurs who are all about the big ideas of how to fight a modern war. That’s not a bad thing, as long as there are some professionals who are thinking about the basic stuff, like making sure that we won’t lose half of our aircraft over a few hours from drone attacks.
This is just another example of how we are stuck in the past. We are living in a new world and doing things the old way. If we don’t wake up and act immediately, we will come to regret it.
This might take $20 or even $50 billion over a few years. Let’s say that we will have to spend $10 to $20 billion a year on this. The federal government spends $20 billion over three days, most of it on much less important stuff. We can argue over which one of those things are important, but it is inarguable that not losing half of our air fleet in a day is one of the best ways we can spend our taxes.
Credit: Chuck Warren