The USAF and the RAF Working with the RAAF: A September 2024 Perspective

General Kevin Schneider, Commander of U.S. Pacific Air Forces and AVM Mark Flewin, Air Officer Commanding 1 Group Royal Air Force both spoke at the September 26, 2024 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar.

The first presentation was by a video recording and the second was an in person presentation after the long flight from the UK. Together, the two provided insights into USAF and RAF thinking about the way ahead with allied airpower.

General Schneider underscored the close working relationship between the U.S. and Australia over the years and provided several examples of recent collaborative activity.

He focused on the recent Pitch Black exercise which was especially notable because of the expansion of partners in the Pacific region who participated.

Exercises like Pitch Black are not only increasing our interoperability, but they are helping our allied and partner nations rapidly to grow their capabilities. This in turn, helps secure their nations and provide stability to the region.

Your leadership in that exercise was evident, and the work accomplished there reached audiences around the world. You brought in so many firsts, the deployment of the Philippine Air Wing, our partners in Papua, New Guinea, and you worked tirelessly to bring in critical NATO allies from France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK.

NATO recognizes the importance of the Indo-Pacific and understands the impact it has on Euro Atlantic security. They also know where to find world class training with allies like you as well.

He then when on to highlight Australian cooperation in Filipino training as well as a key contribution to the common defence in the region.

I found quite interesting his spending time discussing the E-7 as well. When I first came to Australia in 2014 and then subsequently visiting the RAAF Wedgetail squadron, it was clear that the ADF had something special in the Wedgetail. But the United States and the United Kingdom even though looking for AWACS replacements, were slow to embrace the Wedgetail option. But now they have.

He noted:

The RAAF’s significant focus and role in air domain awareness stems from your nation’s early investment in the E-7 Wedgetail. It is a critical asset in our most advanced high-end training. The US Air Force Weapons School hosted the RAAF’s No. 2 Squadron for the first time as part of the weapons school integration phase in May and as part of the modernization of our own fleet.

We are excited to see the expansion of the exchange program, because now No. 2 Squadron is a multinational, integrated unit whose regular participation in global exercises with joint partners is a must, because we are developing and testing E-7 tactics with their air superiority and support for maritime strike forces. We wouldn’t be able to accomplish any of this without the genius of our collective airmen who are doing wonders at the tactical edge.

The General underscored: Australia adds immense value at the cutting edge of our most advanced tactics, techniques and procedures.

Quite obviously, the USAF needs to operate very differently in the evolving contested combat environment. And in this effort, it is working hand in glove with the RAAF.

This is how PACAF put it:

We must reorganize ourselves to tackle the high-end fights in the future, where we must be lethal while surviving in an anti-access area denial environment. We are learning to operate from austere locations, testing critical capabilities like our bomber Task Force and stressing our agile combat employment concept through a series of complex exercises at scope and at scale.

Through tremendous support from you, we’ve increased the rotational presence of U.S. capabilities in Australia across all domains, ensuring our forces work as interchangeable teams who are efficient during peacetime and lethal and survivable during wartime…

We want to find more ways to operate from different locations around the region to drive solutions to logistical challenges and to conduct rehearsals like hot pit refueling events and integrated flying operations to make our footprints even more lean and agile.

The bomber task forces, and our strategic aircraft play a critical role in our collective ability to support counter-maritime missions, something that we must do because the rise of competitors in both the Indo, Pacific and European theaters has brought anti-ship capability back to the forefront of the ASW mission. The bomber fleet is finding innovative ways to integrate modern weapons capabilities to increase survivability in an anti-access area denial environment and to support the joint fight.

He then discussed Agile Combat Employment and immediate ways ahead on training for this capability.

Next summer, we’ll partner with like-minded nations to host a large scale exercise to test agile combat employment at speed and scale in the Pacific that will coincide with the Talisman Sabre exercise, and as we anticipate the exercise will include fifth generation fighters, ISR, C-2, airlift and air fueling, and all the enablers to test our ability to deploy from the continental United States into theater to regional hubs in the first and second island chains.

We will disperse, aggregate, disaggregate, and recover aircraft. It is a highly complex logistical challenge in terms of access, spacing and overflight, maritime domain awareness and maritime strike capabilities, as well as generating and sustaining the force, making it even more challenging, we are adapting this new operational scheme of maneuver under significant fiscal constraints, a challenge that we all face as exciting as all these things are, I will never say that what we are doing is fast enough, that we have integrated enough, that we have prepared enough, or that we are ready enough.

AVM Mark Flewin then provided an RAF perspective on the way ahead.

He conveyed the sense of urgency as the West faces increasing threats and challenges. He looked back at World War II to remind the audience of the cost of the failure of deterrence.

But his presentation underscored the need for the West to get it right in terms of deterrence and although there is clear progress in the West’s capabilities, the tenor of his remarks that as an enterprise, we need to get better in order to ensure that deterrence prevails.

He underscored what he saw as five critical challenges that needed to be met on an urgent basis. The first is the need to generate greater combat mass.

He noted: We need to have the capacity to scale. It doesn’t need to be exquisite in terms of combat systems though it can be. It needs to be on the right side of the cost curve. It can be cheap.

We’ve seen from Ukraine that there’s a heavy mix of exquisite and non-exquisite capability that is ultimately delivering effects. But we need to absolutely partner with industry to be able to do that.

The second is enhancing our ability to fight tonight. The majority of the equipment we will have in 10 years we already have so we need to engage in continuous force improvement and training to ensure our force in readiness is at the level needed for deterrence

He underscored: We need to work together to optimize and get the most out of our platforms.

We’re working that in the Royal Air Force through a program called Optimize. It’s seen significant benefits already. We’ve seen the 20% improvement in availability on some platforms.

With Typhoon, for example, we’ve managed to remove 750,000 maintenance hours from that platform based on some data analysis and a risk aware approach which means we get more availability, and our mechanics are available for other tasks.

And it’s really important that we continue to spiral develop these platforms. They are going to be the baseline of our capability up to 2040 and they need to be ready to deliver.

The third is to ensure that we can adapt rapidly to technological change and to be able to incorporate relevant combat innovations being unveiled in the regional wars we see in front of us.

He put it this way:

My next point is on the criticality of embracing technological change. We talked about the electromagnetic environment today. What we witnessed in eastern Ukraine is that it’s an absolutely denied electromagnetic environment, we need to get around how we work in that environment, how we evolve in that environment. How we can bring operational advantage in that environment. We also need to not be afraid to fail and test and fail fast. It’s something we’ve worked on a lot in the UK. Naturally, we’ve moved away from it because we’ve been risk averse.

The fourth is the challenge of overcoming risk aversion and become more agile and capable of rapid innovation in our tactics and warfighting skills.

AVM Flewin emphasized:

We need to continue to change our mindset and make sure that we’re ready for the fight tomorrow. You might throw back at me that our processes aren’t efficient enough. We procure very slowly, our commercial process isn’t proficient enough.

We’ve learned a lot about that through Ukraine. We’ve adapted our process with industry. And I’d argue now that we are, we are getting after it, but there’s more to do. And we clearly need to transition from risk aversion to risk aware and objective focus.