...Air Force leaders
have described ACE as predicated on a ‘hub and spoke’ network of permanent, well-established ‘hubs’ and more remote, austere ‘spokes.’ But that framework idea is based on a number of different, but inter-related, subcomponents.
“Critical infrastructure defense — based defense in other words. How do we defend what we have out there?” Nahom elaborated. “And, certainly, you’ll hear a lot about logistics under attack. Moving logistics will be very difficult in the future, and we’re going to have to make sure that we have the ability to move not just to establish runways, but to small runways and places that may not even have runways.”
The concept is an evolution of what former Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein called “agile basing” in his
Joint All Domain Operations doctrine paper — and something he made one of his top priorities for future investment.
It has also become one of the four critical supporting concepts, under the term “congested logistics,” for the impending
Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC) designed to lay out how the services will work together to enable all-domain operations. And as such, the question of who is responsible for protecting vulnerable bases against everything from adversary missile strikes to small drone attacks to infiltration by enemy soldiers has emerged as a
roles and missions squabble between the Air Force and the Army.
ACE will require high-speed, highly protected communications networks — meaning it’s success will be highly dependent on the service’s
Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) and DoD’s overarching
Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy.
Nahom said that the Air Force is “starting off small” to both invest and experiment in how to make ACE work. The issues require further “conversations,” he explained, both internally and externally with industry partners to make sure that “we’re getting what we need at the speed we need.”...
