Page 55 - Lessons-Learned-at-Pax-River_Neat

But the French and British were defeated; the British Expeditionary Force was evacuat-
ed and lived to fight another day on to the eventual V-E Day. So betting on the French
and the British was the wrong chip to play on the table of the battlefield.

The Germans Blitzkrieg generals down to the lower ranks were all “making their own
luck” by exploiting the French and British approaches with the weapons they had.

The fall of France may have some interesting lessons on CONOPS and decision making
against a reactive enemy. And those lessons argue for shaping a transition from legacy
air CONOPS to new distributed air operations CONOPS leveraging the F-22 and F-35.

The Germans were a quicker and smarter force that defeated the French and the British.
Words echoing from history tell us that story and also can now bring an interesting les-
son learned to the current debate on what is becoming known as “distributed air opera-
tions.”

The shift from “legacy” air operations to distributed air operations is a significant oper-
ational and cultural shift. Characterizing the shift from fourth- to fifth-generation air-
craft really does not capture the nature of the shift. The legacy aircraft operate in a strike
formation, which is linear and runs from Wild Weasels back to the AWACS.

The F-22 and F-35 are part of distributed operational systems in which the decision
makers are distributed and a honeycomb structure is created around which ISR, C2,
strike, and decision-making can be distributed.

A new style of collaborative operations is shaped but takes away the ability of an adver-
sary to simply eliminate assets like the AWACs and blind the fleet. Distributed opera-
tions is the cultural shift associated with the fifth-generation aircraft and investments in
new weapons, remotely piloted aircraft, and the crafting of simultaneous rather than
sequential operations.

Unfortunately, the debate about fifth-generation aircraft continues as if these are simply
aircraft, not nodes driving significant cultural changes in operational capabilities.

Second Line of Defense Lessons Learned at Pax River
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