The Navy has distinguished between the blue waters far from shore which must be fought in to dominate the seas and the shallower green waters--and even brown waters where soil runoff darkens it--closer to shores where the Navy can influence events ashore.
Air power needs to distinguish between the high blue skies where air forces traditionally vied for supremacy and the "brown" skies just above the Army where drones roam.
On the issue of ground support, the combination of precision ground fire, helicopters, and drones seemed to offer the Army a better method of providing prompt ground support to troops in contact while freeing the Air Force to dominate the skies well above the battlefield and to deal with the deep battle beyond the battlefield.
The Air Force lost the battle to control all the drones over the battlefield because it made no sense. And in wartime what made sense mattered more than bureaucratic prowess.
But the limitations of the Air Force in supporting the Army may be worse than what I thought then:
While the U.S. military pioneered the large-scale use of drones, both for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike missions, other militaries are now catching up. In many ways, small and medium-size UAVs challenge the notion of air superiority.
Perhaps more significant, nonstate actors are rapidly adding UAVs to their arsenals and developing sophisticated tactics for their employment. ISIS pioneered the use of small, commercially available drones to bomb Iraqi forces. For the first time, nonstate adversaries will have air power. Equipped with cameras, drones provide terrorists and insurgents with critical, real-time ISR information. Loaded with just a few pounds of explosives, drones become precision-guided weapons.
If drones becomes a constant threat, the Air Force has lost the air supremacy battle right off the bat. Don't even try to tell me that high-flying F-35s and F-22s are going to shoot down the drones that will target Army troops.
Perhaps Army air-to-air drones with smaller ones carried by even platoons are the way to fill the gap between the high-flying fighter planes absolutely necessary to control the blue skies and the brown air just above the mud where the Army fights and from where it can be targeted even when the blue skies are friendly.
