RAA Liaison Letter 2024 - 2025 Edition

RAA Liaison Letter – 2024 / 2025 Edition 119 for the next. Before the Korean War, the USAF focused solely on air superiority and sea control, losing the experience and knowledge necessary to conduct CAS. Consequently, the USAF found itself woefully unprepared to support ground forces in the Busan Pocket, while the United States Marine Corps (USMC), which maintained the skill set, was heavily relied upon by ground forces to conduct CAS to fend off the North Korean armies (Cooling, 1990). The USMC ensured that they had both ground and air personnel who were trained and experienced in conducting CAS with members spread throughout the Area of Operations. This approach proved very successful during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir against the Chinese Army, where CAS was credited with causing 50% of enemy casualties (Cooling, 1990). Unfortunately, the USAF did not learn the lessons of the Korean War regarding the importance of trained personnel in CAS. As a result, the USAF entered the Vietnam War without aircrew or ground personnel trained to safely coordinate strikes, while the USMC and US Navy provided the majority of CAS until the USAF relearned this essential knowledge (Phillips-Levine & Tenbusch, 2023; Corell, 2019). While the Air Combat Wing and Army have important roles to focus on, it is essential to preserve the experience and knowledge of CAS. If the RAAF or Army lose the ability to conduct CAS, the orchestration and coordination between the domains will become a distant memory. The ADF cannot afford to underestimate the importance of maintaining the CAS capability for the future. In future conflicts against a peer enemy in the littoral environment, we must utilise all the joint effects we can wield to achieve multi-domain offensive and defensive actions. The removal of the land domain’s ability to coordinate with RAAF assets is likely to result in limited success against a numerically and technologically superior enemy. Recent wars, such as the one in Ukraine, have highlighted the vulnerability of aircraft to sophisticated, layered integrated air and missile defence (IAMD), leading to the absence of CAS on the battlefield during these conflicts (Goodwin, 2024). This situation is not new; CAS can only occur within a bubble of air superiority. For example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Air Force lost 63 airframes on CAS missions because they did not establish air superiority. Only after they neutralised Egyptian and Syrian air defences could they return to the CAS role, which in turn enabled the Israelis to regain the initiative against the more numerous Arab states (Cooling, 1990). In the first Gulf War, the ground campaign was not initiated until the Coalition forces established conditions for ground troops to advance through the Iraqi deserts unopposed. Most importantly, it neutralised the air defence systems and thus allowed ground attack aircraft to conduct CAS. Ultimately, A-10s conducted about 30% of the USAF sorties performing CAS/Interdiction, credited with over 50% of the Iraqi ground targets destroyed by aerial attacks (Pustam, 2020). As current world events – such as the war in Ukraine – highlight, a European war bears very little similarity to one in the southwest Pacific. The distances involved in the amphibious environment rarely allow IAMD zones to be as dense, enabling platforms to slip into areas of air superiority to support ground forces (Savage, 2022). Furthermore, these distances restrict the employment of traditional land and sea-based offensive support assets. Drawing from experiences during Exercise Predator Run 24, air assets were able to navigate this terrain with relative ease compared to their ground-based offensive support counterparts. While I acknowledge the risk of losing an airframe due to IAMD, this may be a risk acceptable to a commander as priorities change throughout the course of the war. If a ground force faces a higher risk of losing the land battle, a commander will be more willing to accept the risks of deploying aircraft to support CAS. This has been demonstrated in both the Italian and Vietnam Campaigns, where land objectives outweighed the risk to aircraft (Cooling, 1990). Current CAS doctrine also recognises this operational conundrum: “in isolation, CAS rarely achieves campaign-level objectives, at times it may be the more critical mission due to its contributions to a specific operation or battle”. Although the risk of losing an airframe to IAMD is high during the opening stages of a land battle, the coverage of IAMD decreases as the war progresses. Air defence systems are often the first to be degraded due to kinetic and non-kinetic operations within the battlespace; even the Russian Air Force is on the cusp of returning to a more active role with the reduction of Ukrainian air missile stocks (Watling & Reynolds, 2025).