The US Air Force's big plan to spread out and take on China may actually make things easier for Beijing

• The US military is making plans to dodge China's growing arsenal of long-range missiles.
• For the Air Force, a key part of the plan is to spread jets and airmen across bases in the Pacific.
• But using more bases creates more logistical and defensive needs, a recent think-tank report found.

With US airbases in the Pacific under potential threat from Chinese missiles, one obvious defense is dispersal. Rather than concentrating aircraft and supplies at a few central locations, spread them out among multiple airfields to make it harder and more costly to target all of them.

Hence the US Air Force is keen on its agile combat employment (ACE) concept, in which aircraft and equipment are dispersed between major hub bases — such as Andersen Air Force Base on Guam — and smaller airfields at remote locations.

In theory, this should complicate a Chinese planning and increase the chances that at least some US airbases would continue to function. But dispersal creates its own challenges, warns a new report by the RAND Corporation think tank.

The problem is that the Air Force would need a logistical system that could sustain numerous bases across a wide area. Distributed operations such as ACE "could be key to increasing survivability," RAND said. "However, the U.S. Air Force's limited combat support capacity constrains how many distributed locations could operate simultaneously."

"In short, the greater the dispersal, the greater the challenges for sustainment and communications," the study concluded.

To explore how dispersal complicates things for the attacker and the defender, RAND combined seven mathematical models to test various scenarios for airbase defense and resiliency.

For example, the Theater Air Base Vulnerability Assessment Model assessed attacks on air bases using a variety of weapons; their effects on aircraft, runways, and personnel; and their impact on how many sorties US aircraft could fly after an attack.

The Theater Air Base Resiliency Optimization Model used tens of thousands of TAB-VAM results to identify the optimum defensive methods — that is, those that would allow the most aircraft sorties from a base under attack — at various levels of spending on airfield defense.

While it would be easy to turn Guam into a fortress with an unlimited budget and a vivid imagination, simply throwing more money at any project eventually has diminishing returns.

RAND concluded that "robust, passive defenses" were the "most-cost-effective ways to improve air base resilience."

"Passive defenses include hardened shelters for aircraft; dispersal of aircraft; redundant fuel supplies; pre-positioned munitions; rapid runway repair capabilities; and tailored forms of camouflage, concealment, and deception," the report noted.

However, passive defense alone won't suffice. Rather than just trying to enable base facilities to survive bombardment, the Air Force will need active defenses that can actually shoot down cruise and ballistic missiles. While active defenses "are useful, especially in combination with passive defenses," they can also be "vulnerable to attack and less cost-effective," the study said.

Another option is to station US aircraft at bases farther from China. However, those distant bases would also need to be hardened and protected. "Counterintuitively, distant operating locations may not be more survivable than those closer to the threat if the farther bases can be brought down by a small number of missiles," RAND noted.

RAND's analysis illustrates the dilemma that the US military faces in the Pacific. As the Chinese are well aware, the best way to destroy enemy aircraft is when they're on the ground.

In turn, since the World Wars, a traditional defense has been dispersal of aircraft to satellite fields to avoid enemy bombardment at major bases.

However, resource constraints mean that most or all of these auxiliary airbases will be austere locations without the resiliency of major facilities — turning every airfield into a fully protected, hardened, and well-supplied installation would be insanely expensive. On the other hand, while it's easier to concentrate defensive systems and logistics at a few major bases, an attacker like China could saturate those locations with massed salvos of missiles.

Air Force officials have acknowledged the complexity of defending dispersed forces.

In September 2021, the service's top Pacific commander said heavy air-defense systems, like the Patriot, are not suited for agile operations and that new technologies may be needed.

The service's top civilian official said in January 2022 that ACE was only part of the solution and that the Air Force still needed to figure out how to invest in the "mix of defenses: hardening, deception, and proliferation."

Of all the military arms, airpower is the most complex. It's a machine with a lot of moving parts – and thus is vulnerable to disruption.

"To generate sorties, an air base must bring together multiple assets, including maintenance personnel, functional aircraft, sufficient fuel, and an operational runway," RAND said. "An adversary needs to deny only one of these assets to inhibit combat power generation."

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master's in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.