The Air Littoral Is a Maritime Problem Too: What the Kill Web Fleet Can Teach the Airpower Debate
Two pieces published within eight days of each other in late July 2026 stake out what looks, at first glance, like the same argument from opposite sides. David Deptula’s Forbes essay, “Stop Judging Airpower Against Missions It Was Never Assigned,” is a broadside against a genre of commentary he considers lazy: the recurring claim that “bombing alone cannot win a war,” recycled every time an air campaign fails to produce the collapse of a hostile government. Maximilian Bremer and Kelly Grieco’s Breaking Defense piece, “Airpower Opened Iran’s Skies. Why Hasn’t It Reopened Hormuz?”, reads at first as exactly the kind of argument Deptula is inoculating against another indictment of airpower’s limits, built around the awkward fact that months after Operation Epic Fury supposedly delivered a “historic and overwhelming victory,” Iranian drones and missiles were still closing the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping.
Read them side by side, though, and the more interesting story is not that they disagree.
It’s that they are having two different arguments that happen to intersect on the same campaign, and that the intersection point the seam Bremer and Grieco call the “air littoral” is a problem I have spent a good part of the last several years thinking through in a different domain. The maritime kill web force, the USV wolfpack tactics denying Russia’s Black Sea logistics and threatening a PLA cross-strait invasion fleet, and the payload-utility framework Ed Timperlake and I have built out across a decade of work on distributed maritime autonomy all describe the same underlying dynamic Bremer and Grieco are pointing at in the air domain.
That is worth spelling out, because it suggests the “air littoral” debate is not really a debate about a label at all.
It is a rediscovery, one domain later, of something the maritime autonomous systems community has already been forced to confront.
Deptula’s Argument: Match the Mission to the Metric
Deptula’s essay is, at bottom, a plea for discipline in how success is measured. His target is a cluster of 2026 commentaries, pieces in The Atlantic, 19FortyFive, and RealClearDefense that judge airpower against a single, unstated standard: did the enemy government fall?
By that test, he argues, every campaign short of regime change and occupation is declared a failure, which tells you more about the critics’ assumptions than about the campaign itself. His examples are Desert Storm, where a decisive air campaign against Iraq’s command and control, air defenses, and ground formations made the four-day ground war possible rather than necessary, and Kosovo, where sustained air pressure not an invasion of Serbia persuaded Belgrade to withdraw. In both cases, he argues, airpower was assigned the mission it was actually suited to, and it delivered.
His prescription is a checklist, not a slogan: did the campaign reduce a dangerous capability, restrict the adversary’s freedom of action, delay a weapons program, or generate diplomatic leverage at acceptable cost?
If the political objective was denial, disruption, or degradation rather than regime change, then the persistence of an unfriendly government in Tehran is not evidence of failure. The mission should determine the force, he writes, not the other way around, and jointness does not require every service to carry an equal share of the load in every campaign.
This is a sound framework, and I have made versions of the same argument in my own work on how the ADF and USMC are co-inventing force designs suited to specific missions rather than defaulting to service-symmetric campaign templates. The trouble is that Deptula’s own checklist, applied honestly to the Strait of Hormuz, does not obviously let Operation Epic Fury off the hook.
One of his own test questions is whether the campaign restricted the enemy’s freedom of action. For months, Iran’s freedom of action to close a strait through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil trade transits was not restricted at all.
That is precisely the fact Bremer and Grieco are pointing at, and it is not resolved by observing that regime change was never the assigned mission.
Bremer and Grieco’s Argument: The Seam Beneath the Blue Sky
Bremer and Grieco are not arguing that Operation Epic Fury should have overthrown the Iranian government. Their claim is narrower and, in a way, more damaging to the traditional airpower narrative: that the United States achieved uncontested air superiority in the “blue skies” over Iran destroying much of Iran’s air force, rolling back its integrated air defenses, striking targets at will while simultaneously failing to secure the low-altitude airspace that mattered most operationally. Iranian drones and missiles struck dozens of commercial vessels and kept both merchant shipping and U.S .warships out of the Strait for months, reopening only briefly under a framework agreement before closing again.
Their explanation is that traditional air superiority is a contest of destruction: find the enemy’s aircraft, radars, and integrated air defense system, and the system collapses once its nodes are destroyed. The fight over the “air littoral” the airspace close enough to the surface to be contested from below as much as from above follows a different logic entirely. There is no integrated system to collapse. There are only masses of cheap, dispersed, expendable drones and missiles, thousands of them, that do not require air superiority to be denied. They require attrition, saturation defense, and persistent presence to be denied.
Responding to David Deptula’s rebuttal that “renaming low-altitude airspace does not create a new domain,” Bremer and Grieco are careful to say the air littoral is not a claim about domains at all. It is a claim about a seam borrowed explicitly from the maritime littoral concept where different kinds of control interact and produce distinctive operational demands that neither classic air superiority doctrine nor classic surface-fleet doctrine was built to handle alone.
Their sharpest point, and the one Deptula’s Forbes essay does not anticipate because it was written to rebut a different set of critics, is that traditional airpower doctrine substitutes speed for persistence: aircraft cannot loiter forever, so air superiority is treated as temporary and local, won where and when it is needed rather than maintained continuously.
That assumption holds only if the contest is, in fact, temporary and local. Over the air littoral, it is not. The threat is continuous, dispersed, and cheap enough to regenerate faster than a handful of high-value strike aircraft can suppress it. Traditional airpower, they conclude, was right about the nature of control and wrong about where it would be needed most.
Two Debates, One Collision
It is worth being precise about what each piece is actually contesting, because conflating them obscures the more useful insight. Deptula’s Forbes essay is fighting a battle about service primacy and mission-metric discipline pushing back on commentators who treat “airpower alone cannot win a war” as a profound revelation rather than a strawman, and who define victory so narrowly that only ground occupation counts. Bremer and Grieco are not making that argument at all. They accept that airpower did exactly what it was built to do in the high skies over Iran, and their complaint is that “airpower,” properly understood, includes responsibility for the low-altitude seam as well and that the services have not organized, resourced, or doctrinally acknowledged that responsibility.
Deptula’s response to that specific charge, buried in the editor’s note appended to the Breaking Defense piece, is more concessive than his Forbes essay would suggest. He does not deny that low-altitude drone and missile density is a serious operational problem, and he lists the capability investments he has called for, persistent sensing, electronic warfare, affordable interceptors, directed energy, mobile defenses, passive protection, resilient basing, integrated command and control.
His disagreement is narrower than it first appears: he does not think the “air littoral” label improves force design, doctrine, or command relationships, and he insists that reopening Hormuz was always a joint and combined problem, sea control, mine countermeasures, escort, counterair, air and missile defense, intelligence, space, cyber, economic pressure, and diplomacy together, not an airpower failure in isolation.
That is where the argument stalls, and where it becomes, I think, unresolvable on the terms either side has set. Deptula is right that “air littoral” is a label, and labels do not build interceptors. Bremer and Grieco are right that the Air Force’s own 2025 doctrine advisory on control below the coordinating altitude describes the low-altitude seam as a management and command problem rather than something existing doctrine already handles well, which is itself an admission that something changed.
What neither side supplies is the force-design answer: what, specifically, does persistent control of a seam contested by thousands of cheap, dispersed threats actually require, if not more fifth-generation aircraft and not occupation?
That is a question the maritime domain has already had to answer, because the same seam exists at sea, and it has been closing on the U.S. Navy’s terms of reference for several years now.
The Same Seam, One Domain Over
Substitute “Black Sea” or “Taiwan Strait” for “Strait of Hormuz” and the pattern Bremer and Grieco describe is not new.
It is the maritime story I have been documenting since Ukraine’s USV wolfpacks began strangling Russia’s Crimean supply lines. Russia retained, on paper, one of the world’s larger navies. It could not clear the western Black Sea of Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles, cheap enough to mass-produce and attrite, that sank or damaged a meaningful share of the Black Sea Fleet and pushed its remaining major combatants out of effective operating range. Russia’s problem was never a lack of blue-water naval power in the abstract. It was that blue-water naval power, built around a small number of expensive, difficult-to-replace hulls, is structurally the wrong tool against a mesh of cheap, dispersed, expendable systems operating in the littoral seam close to shore.
The parallel to Taiwan is clear as well: a PLA invasion fleet’s real vulnerability is not the initial beach assault but the sustainment logistics, the RO-RO ferries, landing craft, and barges, crossing a strait narrow enough, and a coastline mountainous enough, that a USV mesh fleet modeled on Ukraine’s tactics could do to a cross-strait logistics train what Ukraine’s wolfpacks did to Crimea’s.
This is the same seam Bremer and Grieco are describing over Iran, just underwater and on the surface instead of in low-altitude airspace. In both cases, a traditionally dominant force, blue-water navy, a blue-sky air force, achieves the kind of control its doctrine was built to win, and finds that control does not extend into a seam where the contest is decided by mass, cost, and persistence rather than by destroying an integrated system.
In both cases, the seam is populated by exactly the kind of threat neither traditional force structure was designed to counter economically: not a handful of high-value platforms to be hunted down and destroyed, but thousands of cheap, distributed, replaceable ones that regenerate faster than they can be attrited by expensive platforms optimized for a different fight.
The maritime kill web force concept Ed Timperlake and I built out over several books, and that I have continued to extend in the shipbuilding and mesh-fleet work since, was a direct response to that recognition. Its central move is to stop treating the capital ship as the source of combat power, the platform that both finds the target and kills it, all in one hull, and start treating it as what we call a payload-utility manager: a node-host and command-and-control orchestrator sitting above a distributed mesh of unmanned surface and undersea systems that actually occupy the seam, sense within it continuously, and either kill or call in fire on what they find. That separation of “target acquisition” from “target engagement,” borrowed from Timperlake’s original payload-utility framework, is what allows persistence to substitute for platform survivability.
You do not need the sensor-shooter to be expensive and hard to kill if there are enough of them, spread widely enough, that losing several does not matter and finding one is not decisive.
What the Kill Web Framework Tells the Air Littoral Debate
Applied back to Hormuz, that framework does three things neither the Deptula essay nor the Bremer-Grieco piece does on its own.
First, it explains precisely why “more fifth-generation aircraft” Deptula’s implicit answer, and the premise behind his 2020 prediction that the right mix of fifth-generation capability would deliver a rapid, decisive outcome in Iran without ground forces was never going to reopen the Strait, independent of whether that prediction was fair to judge against a different mission. Manned strike aircraft, however capable, are built around responsive presence: they arrive, achieve an effect, and leave, because they cannot loiter over a contested seam indefinitely and there are never enough of them to do so continuously. Against an integrated air defense system, that is a decisive advantage, because destroying the system’s key nodes ends the contest.
Against a seam populated by thousands of cheap, dispersed, continuously regenerating drones and missiles, responsive presence cannot substitute for persistence, no matter how capable the platform providing it. This is exactly the argument I have made about undersea and surface autonomy: blue-water and littoral autonomous systems differ in kind, not merely in degree of cost or robustness, because the seam itself imposes a different logic of control, one built on numbers and persistence rather than on individual platform quality.
Second, the kill web framework gives concrete content to the joint capability list Deptula says he has been calling for, persistent sensing, affordable interceptors, mobile defenses, integrated command and control, without requiring anyone to adjudicate whether “air littoral” is the right label for where those capabilities need to operate. A distributed mesh of low-cost, attritable air-domain sensors and interceptors, orchestrated by a manned or unmanned node-host under the same payload-utility logic that governs the maritime mesh fleet, is what persistent control below the coordinating altitude actually looks like in practice. It answers Deptula’s own question, what capabilities are needed to execute the joint mission he says Hormuz always required, with something more specific than a list of investment categories. It also validates the empirical core of the doctrine advisory he cites in his own defense: the low-altitude seam is a management, command, and mass problem, not a doctrine-naming problem, and it is the same management, command, and mass problem the Navy has already had to confront in the Black Sea and will confront again in the Taiwan Strait.
Third, and this is where the “intelligent mass versus exquisite scarcity” framework I have used throughout the maritime autonomy work becomes directly relevant, it reframes the actual stakes of the Deptula-Bremer/Grieco exchange. The debate over whether “air littoral” is a legitimate concept is really a debate about whether the Air Force is prepared to build intelligent mass, cheap, distributed, expendable, autonomous or semi-autonomous systems fielded in the numbers a seam contest requires, or whether it will continue to field exquisite scarcity, a small number of extraordinarily capable but irreplaceable platforms optimized for the contest it already knows how to win. Iran’s drones and missiles are, in that framing, an early and crude form of intelligent mass. Russia’s Black Sea losses and the emerging Taiwan Strait USV mesh are more developed forms of the same logic, one domain over.
The lesson of Hormuz is not that airpower failed a mission it was never assigned, and it is not that a new label improves doctrine. It is that whichever service controls a contested seam in the next decade will be the one that fields mass fast enough, and Deptula’s own capability list, sensing, interceptors, command and control at scale, is the beginning of an honest answer to that requirement, not a rebuttal of it.
A Shared Vocabulary Across Domains
None of this resolves the argument between Deptula and Bremer and Grieco on the terms they have set it, whether “air littoral” belongs in doctrine is a question about institutional language, and reasonable people can keep disagreeing about it. What the maritime experience suggests is that the underlying operational problem is not new, not unique to airpower, and not especially mysterious once it is separated from the labeling fight.
A force that has spent decades winning contests of destruction against integrated systems will always be tempted to answer a contest of mass and persistence with the same tools that won the last fight, because those tools are the ones it has already built, trained on, and budgeted for. The Black Sea and, prospectively, the Taiwan Strait already highlight what happens when a numerically superior traditional force meets that kind of seam without an answering mesh of its own.
The Strait of Hormuz is the airpower community’s turn to learn the same lesson, and the kill web vocabulary developed to answer it at sea, payload-utility managers, node-hosts, intelligent mass fielded against intelligent mass, is available to be borrowed rather than reinvented from scratch, one domain and one embarrassing gap at a time.
See the following:
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/airpower-opened-irans-skies-why-hasnt-it-reopened-hormuz/