Over the past decade the world has seen profound changes and an upheaval in international balances that have led to a more unstable strategic environment. That there is a return of power politics is undeniable, but at the same time armed groups are benefiting from the endemic weakness of some states to extend their area of influence or control, the ramifications of which affect our democracies and endanger the stability of wide geographical areas. These changes are leading to a more dangerous world: because it is more mixed and more unpredictable, it poses new challenges for us. At the same time, and whereas for decades technological progress has been fairly steady, we are now witnessing a great acceleration in innovation especially in the field of digital technology, which forces us into continual processes of step-by-step change for the development of our future capabilities. Our potential adversaries having caught up, preserving our advantage means we have to improve the agility and performance of our air forces and our organisations.

A rapidly changing environment

For over twenty years, Western air forces have enjoyed unchallenged technological and operational superiority in the absence of credible air and ground-air threats in theatres, in which the majority of missions has concerned the fight against terrorism. Their principal advantages are speed, reach and firepower, and these air forces offer an immediately and permanently available asset to military and political authorities that can act rapidly, flexibly, reactively and, if needed, deep into the adversary’s territory. This was clearly demonstrated in Operation Hamilton into Syria in April 2018.⁽¹⁾ Additionally the air arm offers the ability to perform the entire range of its missions while limiting its ground footprint, thus limiting risks and losses while controlling collateral damage by the accuracy of the weapons it carries.

The environment in which this air force operates is nevertheless undergoing profound changes. At the upper end of the spectrum the major powers have considerably increased their investment in defence to provide better capabilities in both quality and quantity. In parallel, regional powers are benefiting from a proliferation of high-performance weapon systems and are developing Anti Access/Area Denial (A2AD) strategies based on the combined use of integrated long-range anti-air systems, EW assets, jamming of GPS and recent or modernised combat aircraft. Airspace is therefore more and more disputed. The advanced integration of such systems risks seriously calling into question the mastery of airspace enjoyed by Western air forces, which it is now wrong to consider unchallenged. The dividends of air superiority were garnered by all Western countries, a situation which has led to reductions in the strengths of air forces by 30 to 50 per cent in the course of the past thirty years.

For France, the capability for initial entry, including in depth into the adversary’s layout, is the basis of the airborne element of our nuclear deterrent. In the range of missions we have to carry out, these are considered the most dangerous. At the other end of the scale are the most likely missions, those against irregular adversaries using asymmetric and agile modes of action, which include hiding within concentrations of population, brief offensive actions followed by rapid dispersion, the combined use of low-cost weapons and freely-available high-tech equipment such as mini drones, IEDs and effective communications equipment. This combination of assets, unconstrained by ethics or rules means they can reduce the effect of the Western technological advantage. Their action is often supported by effective propaganda on Internet, digital warfare waged on social media and the use of terror on civilian populations.

Another notable development in the environment is the increasing number of players in the aerospace domain at a time of increasing civil and military traffic and the multiplication of drones of all sizes, whilst operations are conducted in zones that broadly have no limitation on non-military activity. This increases the difficulty of detecting and classifying everything that flies, when to control the environment it is of primary importance to identify all mobile objects in order to ensure the security of the force and of the populations under protection. The air arm must therefore take into account these constraints when conducting its operations in much more contested and congested airspaces.

In addition to that, the range of threats has greatly widened because of the development of information technologies. These afford new weapons for our enemies to use such as cyber attacks and attacks on systems that support positioning and coordination functions—the NAVWAR scenario. They also allow the enemies to optimise the use of their weapon systems and to update them rapidly. Here, irregular adversaries have far greater agility than regular forces since their capability developments do not have to conform to any standards in contrast to Western forces, whose systems must always follow an ever more onerous regulatory framework and abide by demanding qualification regulations that retard developments.

Our space assets, which have long been considered invulnerable, can now be the targets of aggression given that they constitute the essential capabilities for the conduct of modern military operations in intelligence gathering, long-distance communications and navigation, and are the source of environmental data.

The Air Force must take into account this new environment to ensure it retains air superiority in the long term—an essential prerequisite to any military action. As Field Marshal Montgomery famously remarked, if we lose the war in the air, we lose the war and we lose it quickly.⁽²⁾

This means we must modernise our equipment and rethink our modes of action, the way we function and our processes.

The imperative modernisation of our equipment and necessary development of our modes of action

Faced with these new threats and given the decisions that have for too long been put off, renewal of our equipment has become necessary. This has already been set in motion by the Military programming law for the period 2019 to 2025, which dedicates considerable effort to the improvement of capability in the air.

In first place, intelligence: external operations show every day how essential this is for the conduct of military action against the transient adversaries of current conflicts. Such effort is also made necessary by the strategies adopted by a number of powers that use proxies or strategies of ambiguity. In order to act, one has to decide. To decide, one has to understand the situation and limitations of the protagonists. Intelligence is therefore as essential in the preparation phases as it is during the action. By 2030 our medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) drone capability will have doubled, going from 4 Reaper to 8 systems on arrival of the Euro-MALE. For light surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft (Avions légers de surveillance et de reconnaissance—ALSR) the effort will be greater still, passing from 2 aircraft in 2020 to 8 in 2030. This equipment will considerably increase the intelligence capability of the forces in permissive theatres of operation, particularly in the Sahel-Sahara band in support of Operation Barkhane and also in the Levant. For strategic intelligence gathering, the two EW-fitted C-160 Gabriel planes will be replaced by three new systems fitted with appropriate captors.

Air transport capacity will also be improved throughout the period of the military programming law. By 2025 there will be 25 A400M Atlas, 4 C-130J Super-Hercules of which, 2 with in-flight refuelling capability, and 14 modernised C-130H. The A330 MRTT (Multi Role Tanker Transport) programme will also update an in-flight refuelling capability that has passed its best: for this, 12 Phénix will be delivered by 2025 (from an eventual total of 15) which will also allow an increase in the strategic transport capability. In 2030, the Air Force will bring renewed projection capabilities into service, thereby depending far less on chartering, and will have the assets appropriate to the new types of theatre, especially for special operations.

In the foreseeable environment in which air power will operate, its survivability and overall effectiveness will depend more and more on networking. The Air Force is therefore completely committed to developing connectivity. Collective combat will make coordinated and concentrated action of assets more effective, in turn enabling weapon systems to work together to win the day. The rapid dissemination of information within a combat cloud will accelerate manoeuvres in the air and rapidly overcome the adversary: the air forces must draw on the digital revolution, already widely used in the world of economics.

The F4 update of the Rafale, which began at the end of 2018 will over the coming decade lay the first brick in building the structure of connected combat by expanding its means of communications and giving it the software tools to allow network operation. The ability to operate when faced with new threats will also be boosted by improvement in the aircraft’s protection system, its sensor suite and the armaments it will carry. This work will also lead to the development and testing of the initial capabilities in terms of equipment and services necessary for the development of the connected collaborative combat that forms the hub of current Franco-German thinking⁽³⁾ and which are intended to lead to the definition of the Future combat air system (FCAS, Système de combat aérien du futur—SCAF), which should enter service around 2040. In addition to that connectivity, some sixty Rafale are planned to be delivered between now and 2030. These deliveries are essential for the renewal of a third of our combat aviation fleet, taking into account the planned service life of Rafale of 30 years. In addition to the Rafale, the connectivity will link the MRTT, electronic warfare planes, the MALE drones and C2 (command and control) assets.

This interconnectivity of air assets must be developed hand-in-hand with reinforced C2 capability: it will be the digital backbone that links C2 with the forces in action and will bring progress that has been made in the civil sector in management of vast databases and will facilitate the rapid and optimised handling of considerable flows of data. From that will come acceleration of decision-making processes up to almost real time so that the enemy might be engaged at the right time with armaments most appropriate to the environment and to the military effects desired, as well as automation of air traffic control procedures that are under increasing pressure. Some processes that are currently not well optimised, since they rely on conventional analytical methods based on experts’ skills and knowhow, will be improved by the use of digital methods: in-flight refuelling plans, general coordination of action and direction of sensors. Possession of such equipment means shortening timescales for planning and for the various teams involved to adapt more rapidly to unexpected changes through the use of targeted aids to decision-making, which ultimately lead to more agile command and control. Connectivity therefore has a major stake in operational effectiveness and will need to be deployed as and when advances are made in the digital world.

Moreover, gaining control over new areas of conflict requires our weapons systems to be made secure against potential cyber attacks and also that we develop our means of action in digital matters and in the electromagnetic spectrum. In the range of weapons that might be used in air operations we now also need to consider cyber weapons. It is worth noting in passing that the modes of action in these two fields are similar, from which comes the notion of multi-domain operations. Cyber attacks could well be linked with EW attacks in a few years’ time.

On another point, the separation between atmospheric and extra-atmospheric space is tending to become less distinct: we now have to conduct aerospace manoeuvres by expanding our fields of action in the areas of surveillance, protection and action to take into account the ever-greater contest in the space domain and the appearance of systems that bring together these hitherto separate spaces.

As well as these major programmes for combat and transport aircraft and for in-flight refuelling, the other aircraft fleets should not be forgotten. We now have to prepare the modernisations that must take place during the next decade—renewal of light helicopters, of the Alphajet, the AWACS system (Airborne warning and command system), and the ground-air component. The demands placed on the Permanent posture of air security (Posture permanente de sûreté Air—PPS-A) and air defence of the territory mean that modernisation of our search radars needs to be pursued, too, as does that of radio and air operations control systems, whose mobile versions support operations. Taking account of the changing nature of the threat, the protection of advanced air bases and deployed forces requires reinforced ground-air defence, to be achieved principally through the current modernisation programme of the SAMP/T and the replacement of Crotale.

Development of these capabilities is of priority in a European context and has to result in the maintenance of a very high level of interoperability with our allies, since it is clear that future operations will continue to be for the most part in coalition.

Modernisation of equipment and improvement in the agility of C2 will nonetheless not compensate for the difficulties that flow from the reduction in the size of our fleets over the past twenty years. When supporting more difficult operations in more challenging environments in which attrition is inevitable, the criterion of numbers again becomes important. We need strength in numbers to absorb the shock if we are to cover all eventualities and to do so in the longer term. The size of fleets will therefore probably have to be revised upwards in the coming years if France is to maintain its capability for first entry in high-end conflicts.

Renewal of function and processes

This essential modernisation must be accompanied by reform of our practices made possible by the digital revolution, and first in line should be human resources.

The new generations have different aspirations regarding quality of life at work and the social responsibility of companies, and will have a very different perception of their professional career from that of those who went before. They will be quite happy with the digital world yet will be a resource hard to capture in a tense job market, particularly in the digital, data and maintenance sectors, all of which are essential for the Air Force. Beyond the need to offer more dynamic and more individual career management for airmen, we need to go out and capture those essential skills—and retain them. We will have to create new trades or transform existing ones. A number of studies highlight that some 65 to 85 per cent of available jobs by the year 2030 do not exist today. The Air Force will not escape the great change that information technologies will bring and will have new needs in the fields of artificial intelligence, encoding, network management and data handling, not to forget cyber and space matters.

This transformation will also require adaptation of our training cycle, which will make greater use of the progress made in digital matters. The coming years will also see a complete revision of the training of aircrews, which has already started with the entry into service of the Pilatus PC-21 training aircraft for training combat pilots. Greater call will be made upon simulation, using the rapidly growing technologies of serious gaming and video games.

It will undoubtedly affect our procurement processes, too. In parallel with the long processes associated with renewal of our major equipment our operational superiority can only be ensured if we use our ability to benefit from innovation and put it into service quickly. The incremental development of aeronautical programmes has for long allowed us to update platforms with technological improvements, although in general a considerable number of years is required to develop, qualify and then deploy a new standard. The challenge now is to reduce the time to make innovations available by the use of more open architectures that allow speedier introduction of new digital applications and facilitate the handling of technical obsolescence whilst at the same time maintaining a high level of security of the core systems. The introduction of recent technological innovations must also be feasible during the development phase of new equipment, which often takes from five to ten years. In this, industry has to help us by avoiding proprietary standards.

As well as these major weapons programmes, the Air Force will favour open innovation, be it from the acquisition of technology coming from the civil world or from ideas from airmen themselves. The system whereby the basic military requirement is expressed and we then wait until defence industry responds to it, is no longer the only way: we now need to cross cultures and be open to innovation, with ideas coming from within or outside the Air Force, if we are to be more agile and have a greater facility for adaptation. That means we have to promote a culture of risk-taking, something not traditionally in the genes of the aviation world, and of willingness to call accepted principles into question since invention, in the spirit of Albert Einstein, means ‘being different’. But innovation also means accepting that mistakes will be made. The release of energy therefore comes from acceptance of seeing some projects failing to come to fruition and some ideas not being transformed into reality whilst at the same tile accepting questioning of established principles: being too selective at the outset tends to limit innovation. And yet airmen are often best placed to offer solutions to the real problems that they encounter daily doing their job. Once these ideas are assembled, transforming them into something greater will become one of the major challenges of the policy of innovation if today’s momentum is to be maintained. Creation of the Defence innovation agency (Agence de l’innovation de défense—AID) is a promising move, supported by the Air Force.

All of our current processes, as well as operational innovation, will benefit gradually from the increased activity afforded by the arrival of digital equipment; activity whose inspiration will come from the vitality of the sector and from the delegation that offers greater decisional flexibility. They will also be aided by the independent and reactive capability for creation and support of ad hoc digital applications that respond to needs at unit level as well as at the higher echelons.

Over the past ten years-or-so the network of air bases, critical to the operation of the Air Force, has been rationalised. Reorganisation of these bases will continue over the coming years to become ‘functional centres’, their modernisation meaning they can encompass the new capabilities planned in the military programming law, thus confirming their role as melting pots of open innovation (by smart base initiatives, for example) by dint of their geographical connection with local economic structures and the innovative spirit of their personnel. In return, new technologies and innovation will lead to improvement in the operational capabilities of the air bases and in the airmen’s quality of life.

* * *

Faced with an upsurge of threats and a rapidly changing environment in a world in which technology is transforming society and established rules, we are at the beginning of a decade which will be crucial for the modernisation of the Air Force and its ability to act rapidly, independently and in all places as an extension of political policy. The many missions conducted recently by the Air Force in Australia and in the Southern Indian Ocean demonstrate that no point on the planet is inaccessible for combat or transport aircraft in a few dozen hours. After years of under-investment despite sustained operational commitment since 1991 the current military programming law allows for the renewal of essential worn-out equipment. Hand-in-hand with this modernisation must be a major transformation of processes and modes of operation such that the increased complexity of new systems does not slow their development.

The next decade will also be essential in shaping the one that follows, which will have to respond to two major—though not the only—challenges: renewal of the airborne component of the deterrent and the entry into service of FCAS around 2040—little more than 20 years away.

The Air Force is preparing for it. ♦

(1) See the article by Lieutenant Colonel Moyal in this volume, p. 47-52.
(2) Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, The Role of Science in Warfare of the Future, Egineering and Science, December 1954, pp. 20-28.
(3) Spain is now joining this project.