[Webstral]

One factor we should bear in mind when considering the correlation of forces in the American Southwest is the fact that the war was fought in a conventional mode by US forces in Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf for seven months before the first nukes were used. As regards aircraft, losses among US airframes in those theaters would have been staggering. Losses would have exceeded replacement by a huge margin. I say this not to disparage the USAF in any way, shape, or form. I don’t doubt that the USAF would have achieved a splendid exchange rate once the lessons learned by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force on the Far Eastern Front and the Luftwaffe over Europe were fully digested and put into practice.

Still, if we work with General Sir John Hackett’s proposition of an exchange rate of 2:5 in combat airframes in Europe as a starting point for the discussion, we are left with a massive load for the USAF to carry. We should consider several salient factors:

By the time the USAF gets directly involved on or about 12/1/96, the Soviets have been fighting an air war for 15-16 months. While they will have suffered serious losses, they will have had the time to ramp up production to offset those losses—at least partially. More importantly, their air crews will have two years of invaluable combat experience. In the air, this means the average number of flying hours for the surviving pilots will be very considerable indeed. Multiply that value times whatever factor flying those hours under combat conditions can be expected to yield, and we may find that that Soviet air crews at the end of 1996 are dramatically superior to what we might have expected in July, 1995 (before the start of the Sino-Soviet War).

Of course, not every pilot in the SAF (a blanket term to cover the various commands employing fixed wing combat aircraft) is going to have rotated through the Far East by the time the West Germans cross the border in October, 1996. But I would expect some effort by the senior leadership to rotate air crews and ground crews through the Far Eastern Front on some basis so that the benefits of operating in combat could be more widely distributed. By the same token, the Soviets would have good reason to rotate individual pilots or even whole regiments out of the Far East for rest, retraining, and refitting. Morale would suffer if the Far Eastern air regiments began to get the idea that they were doing all the heavy lifting for the nation while their comrades in Europe lived the easy life.

If we dig into the details, we may find that the experience of the SAF in the Far East might not translate perfectly evenly to Europe (or the Middle East) in every particular. The early air dominance of the SAF means that the institutional experience gained in air-to-air operations will be less than the experience gained in air-to-ground operations. The Chinese won’t allow the PLAAF to be wiped out entirely in unequal air-to-air fighting during 1995. They will do their best to keep a force in being that can challenge Soviet air supremacy at moments the Chinese will hope to choose. The Soviets definitely will have the chance to practice bomber escort and counter-air operations on an ongoing, if sporadic, basis during the first ten months of 1996.

The Soviets will get plenty of practice flying air-to-ground missions. I suspect these pilots will be the first to suffer combat fatigue. CAS, interdiction, and other strike missions are highly dangerous against any defended target, as US pilots who fought over Vietnam can attest. Stand-off munitions will run short long before requests for air support do, meaning that Soviet air crews are going to have to fly into the teeth of the Chinese ground based air defenses to deliver bombs and rockets.

Ground based air defense systems will be at or near the top of list of materiel the Chinese request from the West. It’s hard to say where the Western powers will draw the line regarding provision of these items. I rather suspect that the United States will be inclined to be conservative, not wanting state-of-the-art systems to fall into Soviet hands. The French may be more willing to risk having their gear fall into Soviet hands in order to turn a profit in the short term and increase their influence in China over the long term. That’s all politics, which is a whole separate area for speculation. Suffice to say that I think that the fact that there are multiple Western suppliers who will be competing for money and post-war influence will cause the Chinese to receive more and better systems generally than if a single Western power were supplying them.

Consequently, the Soviets will be exposed to Western ground based air defenses in combat before the fighting starts in Europe. Conditions won’t be exactly the same, of course. Still, the Soviet pilots who survive their encounters over China will have dearly-purchased experience in how to deal with some of the same systems they will be facing in Europe and the Middle East once the fighting starts there.

Soviet ground crews will gain enormously, as will the air controllers. A year is a long time in an air war—long enough for procedures and training to be modified to fit real world circumstances. By the time the West Germans attempt to liberate East Germany, the Soviets will have the time and the motivation to rewrite their book on air operations from the air control and ground support standpoint. They will be highly motivated to ensure that these hard-won lessons are incorporated into every air regiment, whether that regiment fights in the Far East or not.

Going forward to the involvement of the USAF in WW3, the Americans are going to find themselves up against a foe in the air who is leaner and meaner than anything they might have encountered in July of 1995. The SAF definitely will be much smaller than it was at the start of the Sino-Soviet War. The personnel and aircraft will be better managed. Although the benefits of experience in the Far East will not be evenly distributed, the Americans are likely to find that the quality of Soviet tactics, battle management, and ground support are considerably superior to what might have been found two years prior. In Europe, the Americans are going to be up against the winners of the defensive air battle against the Luftwaffe.

So while the SAF the USAF encounters from 12/1/96 forward will be quantitatively inferior to the SAF of early 1995, the SAF will definitely be qualitatively superior to the SAF of 1995. Room exists for considerable speculation on how these two factors translate into overall combat power or combat power in a given theater. Historically, a relative handful of pilots have made a highly disproportionate percentage of the air-to-air kills. It’s hard to say who these pilots are going to be in peacetime, though history tells us that many of these guys are not the command’s favorite officers in peace time. By December 1996, the Soviets will have gone through the process of having peacetime troublemakers transition into wartime heroes. The transition may not be complete—look at how the Soviet military treated the Afghanistan veterans. However, the scale of the Sino-Soviet War may cause the senior leadership to have an attitude closer to that of the leadership in the Great Patriotic War than during the war in Afghanistan.

One thing I feel comfortable in asserting is that the pilots who are likely to become real achievers in the air are also likely to request reassignment to the Far East once the fighting starts and once the need for more pilots becomes clear. Air commanders in Europe and the Caucasus may see this as an opportunity to get rid troublesome officers for a time or maybe even permanently. In this sense, the cream of Soviet pilots probably ought to rise to the top. Though this process probably won’t be complete by December 1996, the Soviets certainly will be much further along than the Americans.

By the same token, the Pact air forces will be fewer in number of aircraft but much stronger in terms of experience by the time the West Germans cross the border in October 1996.

All this has to be taken into account when we assess the loss rate of US aircraft from 12/96 through 8/97. We also have to bear in mind that NATO will not enjoy the participation of French, Belgian, or Italian aircraft. The Luftwaffe will have been very badly damaged. The USAF will go into the fight with the experience of Operation Desert Storm under its belt, but this will not be anything like the kind of experience the Soviets will have gained in the Far East. Qualitatively and quantitatively speaking, the USAF and the SAF will be much more evenly matched in early 1997 than they would have been in early 1995. We should expect the exchange rate to reflect this reality. It may cost the USAF 1,000 aircraft to knock out 1,500 Soviet and Pact aircraft in 1997.

Once the Allies decide to attempt the knock-out blow General Hackett describes in The Third World War and which seems to inform the invasion of Poland, both the loss rate among US aircraft capable of ground attack missions and the demand for those missions will explode. We should bear in mind that the US is on the offensive in Korea and the Middle East during this time. The USAF is going to be deployed forward to the greatest extent possible to support the strategic decision to knock the USSR out of the war in 1997.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on the matter, I find it highly unlikely that there will be hundreds of American combat aircraft left in the United States by Thanksgiving 1997. Like the Army, the Air Force will have pushed almost everything forward, leaving just enough here to mind the store and train replacements. Those air units that remain as of late November 1997 will endure six months of post-apocalypse conditions before the Mexican Army crosses the border in the Southwest in June 1998. It should go without saying that such conditions are not conducive to unit readiness—especially for high-maintenance machinery like modern combat aircraft. While the American Southwest may not be entirely devoid of serviceable aircraft in mid-1998, the air situation probably will much more closely resemble that of the fighting in the Congo over the past couple of decades than that of pre-war American circumstances.