 And welcome to Figments, the Power of Imagination, season four, arbitrarily determined episode one, well, it's the first one, my arbitrary season four. And I'm happy to be with you and to chat with you about air superiority, imagining air superiority. That's an important topic that's come up a lot in commentary on the Russian misadventure in the Ukraine. And sadly, most of the folks who are talking about it don't know what they're saying or what they're talking about. It's a complex topic. So, you know, that kind of kind of irritating. So I've got to give you a quick viewer warning here, folks. Quick viewer advisory, your host is irritated. I am irritated. My wife, Ollie Hunter told me the other day that it seems like I like to be irritated. I look for things to irritate me, but that pissed me off. No, it didn't really. She never makes me mad. But this does irritate me because the folks are talking about a very important topic, extraordinarily relevant to American military operations in the future. And they're giving a hand wave like it's an on-off switch. You either have air superiority or you don't. And it isn't that simple. Now, this whole discussion of air superiority started with an even more annoying discussion of no-fly zones, the topic of my opening rant, because people really don't know what they're talking about, no-fly zones, including some who should not. On the right side of that map there are two no-fly zones established in Iraq and I patrolled both of them, one in the F-15, the other in the F-16 up there. No-fly zones, folks, are not an instrument of war. The discussion should stop there. If anything else were to be said about no-fly zones or other military matters, it would be to say less, shut up, keep it secret. Don't make it a podium discussion in the daily press conference of anybody. I realize we have to engage with media in the modern military, but the no-fly zone discussion is ridiculous because it's not an instrument of warfare. It's in essence a sanction and post-conflict. Now, it could be a pause in a conflict of truce or a ceasefire, or it might be at the end of the conflict because it was after Desert Storm in Iraq. These are the no-fly zones that existed between the end of Desert Storm in the beginning of Iraqi freedom in 2000, from 1991 to 2003. So they require an official mandate, by the way. You don't just make them up. You don't just say, okay, that's a no-fly zone for you and a no-fly zone for you and an Oprah Winfrey sort of a way. Everybody doesn't get a no-fly zone. And that mandate usually comes from the United Nations, the United Nations Security Council in the form of a resolution. Who's the chairman? Who's the chair of the UNSC, the United Nations Security Council right now? Sadly, it's Russia. So that's probably not happening. This is a discussion that diverted too much attention of our national leadership and of the public and I find really irritating. There were other options and those were not discussed, nor do they appear to have been used, but that's neither here nor there. So having said that, let's talk about no-fly zones. And I'll get over my irritation that I think that the, or let's talk about air superiority, that the depth of understanding of air superiority and all the elements of it appears to be about as deep, maybe five, 100 to the millimeter, the thickness of a piece of paper that you can print a snarky tweet or a sanctimonious meme on. Folks really don't understand it. There's a long history since the beginning of air power, World War I, to now in the concept of air superiority. And it's a fundamental enabler. And that's what I'd really like our viewers to know, many of you are not military experts. You might just tune in to see what other interesting people I know are kind of funny stories I might have for you, but you all should think about this, all American citizens should give some thought to what we need to be successful in employing our armed forces, ideally for defense, but if necessary in conflict in the coming years. Air superiority is the great enabler. For United States forces, for reasons I'll discuss in a bit, it has become an assumption almost looked at as a birthright. We're going to have air superiority. And it's not that simple when Ukraine should further illustrate that we can't make that assumption. And it's invalid and dangerous. And we have to do our best to have the capability to achieve air superiority, ideally to deter conflict, but if necessary to be successful in conflict. So, what is air superiority? I should know, because I was an air superiority fighter pilot for a long time, a long part of my career. That's me in my initial checkout class in the F-15 in 1981, and on the tail of a F-15 at Osan Air Base sitting alert to keep the North Koreans North and protect the South Koreans South. And so I did that for almost 2000 hours. And as I said, I flew over Iraq and later commanded a wing in the only war where the sole direct application of military power came from the air. And I would submit that we won. And I learned a lot about that, about air superiority in that. I'll talk about that in a bit. But you need a definition if you're going to understand air superiority. So, since this is in NATO's backyard, East Yard, I'm not sure what you call it. Let's look at a NATO relevant definition. Air superiority is a measure of dominance of the air power hat that one side's air power has over another as you see on the screen during a military campaign, which we're seeing unfortunately, Ukraine. And in the NATO glossary, they say that the degree of dominance in battle, in the air battle of one force over another permits the conduct of operations by the other, by everybody else, land air, sea. And that's key. It's not the end all be all, but without it in modern warfare against a committed and capable adversary, you're in big trouble. And there's good evidence over and on the terrain of Ukraine that reinforces that. And the idea is that you want to be able to use your elements of military power at the time and place of your choosing without prohibitive interference. So if you take anything away from the definition of air power that I've just given you of air superiority that I've just given you, it's that without prohibitive interference. Because that's a euphemism for casualties folks. That's how much are you willing to sacrifice to achieve your military objectives? And the measure of air superiority that one side has over the other is in large, to a large degree, the determinant of how many casualties you have. And that's blood and treasure airplanes but more importantly people. We haven't had to spend much lately and we have gotten the idea that we have a birthright to air superiority, not true. So let's go back only to World War II. World War I is relevant, but I only have 30 minutes here on figments, the bar of imagination. And I was not yet on active duty in World War I or several of the others, but there is relevant stuff there. First talking about World War II, we were able, well, let's look across, not just us, not just allies, but look at the impact of air superiority in World War II. In Europe, the failure to achieve air superiority over England sported Hitler's ambitions to invade the UK. He thought he could, he didn't. Air superiority to a sufficient degree enabled the massive landing at D-Day. Imagine if in addition, all of the other threats that our landing forces faced, they were under continuous attack by German aircraft. There were some attacks, not enough to deter it. And it enabled the D-Day invasion. There was no question about that. In the Pacific, the air superiority was achieved to a degree that allowed us to launch the nuclear attacks Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can view those as you want, but the truth is they happen. And the truth is they were critical to ending the war short of an invasion of the Japanese main islands. Again, that doesn't mean that it was free. The air superiority, such as it was, came at the cost of 50 over 50,000 casualties in the US Army Air Forces alone, 50,000 casualties. And that was suitable to fall within the, I guess if it's not prohibitive, prohibited interference. It wasn't prohibitive interference because the conflict was so massive and important and the threat so existential to the United States that we were willing to spend those lives, 50,000 sharements and many soldiers and sailors just trying to put a price tag on air superiority for you in that case. And we were never completely, we never had complete domination of the skies. We had enough to allow us to do what we needed to do. Sometimes on a very local level, the Japanese had local air superiority over the island of Oahu on December 7th, 1941. They didn't sustain it and they didn't need to sustain it. They needed to dominate the skies for about an hour and a half to achieve most of their tickets. In April of 1942, the US achieved an odd bit, an unusual bit of air superiority when the duly little raid occurred and we launched some B-25s off an aircraft carrier for surprise attack on the Japanese main islands. And that local air superiority was very brief and very local, but it was good enough to deliver very significant blow, not in a military sense, but in a psychological sense and a strategic sense to the Japanese military. So it doesn't mean you own the skies. It doesn't mean you're not going to lose any aircraft or pilots. It means you can do what you want and it enables the land and sea forces, not just the air forces. That's air superiority for your two style. In the Korean War, we rapidly established air superiority over friendly forces and we had sufficient air superiority over enemy territory to support our troops and to conduct strategic bombing. That's a topic that the strategic bombing in North Korea is a topic I'd like to address in detail. It's a very difficult tragic episode not to cover, but not today, but we had sufficient air superiority to succeed within our cost constraints to go back to that notion without prohibitive interference. It was good enough. An interesting point about Korea that is historic, that is relevant to the current conflict in Ukraine is that one of the biggest challenges for maintaining our desire for necessary level of air superiority during the Korean War was the use of sanctuary airfields in China. Just across the border near Sinai-Ju and Dundong were some dirt airstrips, dirt fields with over 400 meg-15 jet fighters that would fly out of China and largely be able to go back to China safely and hide there. They were flown by some North Korean pilots, but many Chinese and a lot of Russian pilots. That's right, Russian pilots. We could have been a little more imaginative in thinking about solutions to make that the Russian Air Force's application of air power against Ukraine difficult, I think, and we could have used that model. Too late for that now. Maybe it was discussed. I wasn't part of those discussions. I'm not sure. But the sanctuary airfields did present a real challenge and while we had an acceptable ability to conduct military operations, and we continued to lose aircraft up to the end of the war to these MIGs operating out of sanctuaries, we were very successful in providing air superiority over our friendly forces, our friendly ground forces. In fact, 1953 is the last time a U.S. soldier was bombed by an enemy aircraft killed by an enemy air attack, 1953. And that's in large measure why I say it's so tempting to think of air superiority as a birthright, as a given, as a constant. And that's not necessarily the case. So on to Vietnam. Vietnam, once again, sort of similar to Korea. We had air superiority most of the time over friendly forces against North Vietnam over their territory, not so much. And the air superiority that we achieved over friendly forces didn't protect our helicopters from AAA, anti-aircraft artillery, flak guns up to 85 millimeters, so pretty big guns and even a machine gun. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. lost over 10,000 aircraft. 10,000 aircraft. So as I've said, air superiority is not as simple as hand waving, we own the sky. It's a tough grinding business that has to be dealt with throughout the course of the conflict. And Vietnam has a clear instance in that. So we lost over 10,000 aircraft, including helicopters and drones. Drones were used there, but not as we see them used today. The loss rate was about four tenths of an aircraft per 1,000 stories. It's hard to lose four tenths of an aircraft, four tenths of an aircraft, but you know what I mean there. Converse, or in comparison, we lost two aircraft for 1,000 stories during the Korean War and almost 10 per 1,000 stories in World War II. So we were getting better, right? Right. But it wasn't really that good. And in our air-to-air fights against North Vietnamese MiGs and in evading and defeating surface-to-air missiles, which made their debut in the Vietnam War as a significant force, we were not successful at all. And that inspired a significant investment in real air superiority capability, in especially the F-15, but also the F-14 and the F-16 as air superiority aircraft in the US took the lessons of Vietnam, applied them and built some very capable airplanes. A couple of those were used in both the Arab-Israeli conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war. I'm not going to talk about those in the interest of time because I wanna talk about the illusionary nature of our post-Vietnam experience. And that this includes all of our conflicts from Panama to Grenada to Iraq to Kosovo slash Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria, where we have basically total air superiority and every one of those. That's not solely because we had the best stuff, the best aircraft, the best pilots, the best training, the best missiles, but it's also because we never ran into an adversary that had the key requirements, a combination of capability and commitment to oppose us in the year. It worked out very well. In my own experience, I've been over enemy territory in Serbia at the moment where as a one-star wing commander I decided we had achieved total air superiority. We were attacking a target at night and the weather was bad and we flexed to another target. And the weather was bad there. And we came back to the original target and the weather was sufficient for us to adjust our attack deliveries and destroy the target. We did that without opposition. We had air superiority, reasonably capable but not fully committed adversary. That's not necessarily how it's gonna be in the future and we need to learn from the experience of Russia in the Ukraine and plan accordingly. So let me take a quick breath and mention that in two weeks I'm going to have Jim Hayth, the CEO of Spirit of America, a nonprofit, a very unique nonprofit, a non-governmental organization that's doing some wonderful work for supporting the Department of Defense and the State Department in their efforts to support Ukraine. Jim will come talk to me about how he founded Spirit of America, what they're doing now and what their motivation is, really what's different about Spirit of America because it's a very unique nonprofit and I'm proud to be on their board of advisors. Please note the length there. They can use your help. They're doing some great work. Go to their website spiritofamerica.org. The donate button will be right there in front of you and I hope you'll support them. Either before or after you see Jim in a couple of weeks. Okay, so let's get on to what we need to learn from Russia's misadventures in Iraq. As I said, we have this illusionary sense of air superiority. There's a beautiful F-15, I've thrown that jet, that particular jet as the operations group commanders, the Colonel lying the Air Force base and the FF first fighter wing. The F-15 is 104 to zero, is its combat record in air to air combat. Think about that, 104 to zero, never been shot down by another. It's a dominating airplane, right? What about next time? As I said, we haven't faced, it's not that it's not a great airplane. It's not that we don't have great and well-trained pilots, we do, but we have not faced a modern, capable and committed adversary. Russia is facing that, much smaller, Ukraine is much smaller, not as well equipped as they are, but they're facing it and they're facing it in the complexity of a 21st century warfare environment. And it's not just the aircraft and its guns and missiles that you're fighting. It's the surface-tier missiles, the advanced surface-tier missiles, like the S-300, by the way, the S-300 surface-tier missile and older Soviet-era missile, there was a rumor that those would be introduced into Kosovo during the air war over Serbia. My assessment as a combat commander was that we would lose five airplanes in a snap of a finger, if that was introduced and not detected and that would seriously impede our operations. It's still very capable and game-changing and not yet really faced until this experience over Ukraine. You've got cyber capabilities that the Russians have and the Ukraine and then a expanded use of drones. And I suspect many of you've seen the footage of the Ukrainian drones attacking Russian armor. They're not big, they're not expensive. Some of them are home hobby drones. Getting air superiority is really complex so we should learn that. There have been lots of losses on both sides. I tried to sort through and be ready to give you a good assessment of what's happened in the air. I can't because I don't trust what I see in the internet. It's gonna take a long time to get to the real who-shout-who, how much of it. But there have been a lot of losses and there's a pretty credible report that one of the most advanced Soviet fighters, Sups, that was a Freudian slip, folks. One of the most advanced Russian fighters, a Su 35 S was shot down. There's some pretty compelling pictures of wreckage and of the captured Russian pilot. So lots of losses in a big war, not what we've experienced before. Size matters. Ukraine's a big place, not just too big to try to impose a no-fly zone on but just to fight a war over. A lot of opportunity options for access and for hiding, camouflaging, moving things much bigger than Kosovo. It's about the size of Texas. Iraq was pretty big but when I went to war there on the ground, one of the first things that struck me in the planning was the size but it was only the size of California. Ukraine's much bigger, the bigger the operation, the more complex and the broader demands you have for surveillance, for intelligence and for the ability to be present to maintain air superiority as needed to let your forces do what they choose to do. We've learned that Russia is not as capable as many expected. They've got some very good equipment, very capable aircraft and missiles but they're landing air forces, not as capable as we expected. We can't expect that from China. And why do I mention China? Because there are pacing challenge. They are strategically, there are most likely big problems. I don't advocate war with China at all. I advocate the opposite and that means I'm for deterrence, not confrontation but the Chinese are gonna learn from what's happened in over Ukraine, what's happened with the Russians, what their losses have been, what's worked and what hasn't and we have to learn as well. What should we learn? We should learn that we must understand what they need to go back to my definition. What is the measure of prohibitive interference? What are we willing to sacrifice to achieve our military aims? Because the next time we're involved in our own conflict, I believe it's highly more likely to look like the warfare in Ukraine than what we've seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in recent years. It's likely to be that muddy and that bloody and that costly. So what are we willing to sacrifice? A, how do we limit that sacrifice? What capabilities do we need? And I'm an air superiority fighter pilot. I believe in the F-15, the F-22 in particular, we need those capabilities. They're expensive, but if we don't invest in we're not going to deter and if we wind up forced into a fight and I pray we don't, then we're going to have losses that may cost us more than we're willing to sacrifice and allow folks who don't see the world as a free and open place. May allow them to succeed. I don't think we want that. So that is a start on a conversation about air superiority because it is complex. I think it's a topic that needs to be addressed and much better understood than it has been in the media. So what would Fig do? Here's my advice to you. Faithful figments viewers, don't be naive about the requirement for deterrence or about the cost of rule, especially the cost of rule and encourage your elected representatives to invest in deterrence and be ready. Next thing I advise comes from my irritation factor. As I mentioned, think deeper than tweets and memes. They don't explain anything. They should start you searching and reading and wondering. And then finally, please consider donating to both Spirit of America for their efforts supporting Ukraine and actually supporting the US efforts to support Ukraine and of course, think tech-wide. Our hosts for this, you can find my previous figments on reality at that barcode and all of the playlist for figments, our imagination at the barcode on your left. So again, thanks to figments or thanks to think tech-wide. Thanks for tuning in, folks. I'll look forward to your comments. Please drop me a note at info at phase-one.com and I will see you in two weeks on figments, the power of imagination. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.