If the Air Force can't defend its big bases against Chinese initial attack waves, why dangle assets close to China to tempt them?
The test is brutally simple: can the US military absorb the first punch, fight through the second, and make sure there’s still a joint force on day three that can find, fix, and finish at scale?
I wonder why we think we must pack assets into air bases that might have their runways knocked out, rendering perfectly working planes and living pilots quite useless. And dispersing planes to a handful of rough air bases won't work because China will know where those are, too.
America should forward-deploy token planes plus ground-based air defenses, runway repair crews, passive protection--and keep the planes for war safely back out of range. Even if that means dispersing within the continental United States.
And make sure we have the ability to move and sustain the Air Force squadrons into position when we know the forward runways are intact.
The article mentions the Navy and Marines, too.
My concern applies to the Navy, too. And God help the Marines who think deploying within range of China's A2/AD threat is a feature rather than a bug.
I'd rather have a real force in a week or two rather than lose our best stuff in the first hours in the hope that some will survive the theater-wide Pearl Harbor to fight in the first couple days.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
