Overcoming Barriers To Working With Highly Capable Allies And Partners In The Air Space And Cyber Domains

In this report, the authors consider how the United States can enhance engagement with highly capable allies and partners to improve interoperability by identifying some of the main barriers to security cooperation with these countries.

The Air Force faces a challenging environment as it devises an approach to managing security cooperation with partner countries. The important mission of countering terrorist and insurgent groups abroad requires working closely with allies and partner countries to strengthen security. Accordingly, current U.S. defense strategy emphasizes that the U.S. armed forces should do more to work "by, with, and through partners" to accomplish missions.

"U.S. European Command (EUCOM) views building partnerships as its highest theater priority. U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) seeks to build partnerships and partner capacity in the EUCOM area of responsibility. In spite of the potential benefits of USAFE's building-partnership (BP) activities, USAFE's posture and its BP activities do come with a cost. In today's austere fiscal environment, it is appropriate to assess how the United States and the U.S. Air Force (USAF) can build partnerships most efficiently while ensuring that the requirements for maintaining key alliances and partnerships continue to be met. This report characterizes the current policy debate on security cooperation and force posture in Europe through a review of the literature and discussions with key policymakers and legislative officials in Washington, develops a framework to describe the current BP approach and environment for the USAF in Europe, defines several alternative postures for conducting BP activities using a building-block approach to cost out each high-payoff BP activity, and recommends efficiencies to improve the USAF's BP activities in Europe."--Publisher's description.

The U.S. Air Force faces a challenging environment as it devises an approach to managing security cooperation with partner countries. The important mission of countering terrorist and insurgent groups abroad requires working closely with allies and partner countries to strengthen security. Accordingly, current U.S. defense strategy emphasizes that the U.S. armed forces should prepare to do more to work (by, with, and through partners) to accomplish their missions. The U.S. Air Force could benefit from an enhanced process for identifying appropriate capabilities, as well as the ability to match these capabilities to candidate partner air forces and, where appropriate, build these capabilities into capacity through focused security cooperation. It is also important to identify other useful activities from other Services and key allies to enhance capacity-building and synchronize efforts to collectively pursue U.S. objectives. Five focus areas for implementing an enhanced approach to security cooperation are detailed: increased visibility into activities; strengthening processes for planning, evaluation, and resourcing; and creating institutions that treat security cooperation the same as other major Air Force priorities.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Technology Horizons: A Vision for Air Force Science and Technology 2010-30 concentrates on key science and technology focus areas for the US Air Force over the next two decades that will provide technologically achievable capabilities enabling the Air Force to gain the greatest us joint force effectiveness in 2030 and beyond. Contents: Chapter 1: Introduction * Chapter 2: Strategic Context for Air Force S&T 2010-30 * Chapter 3: Enduring Realities for the Air Force 2010-30 * Chapter 4: Overarching Themes for Air Force S&T 2010-30 * Chapter 5: Technology-Enabled Capabilities for the Air Force 2010-30 * Chapter 6: Key Technology Areas 2010-30 * Chapter 7: Grand Challenges for Air Force S&T 2010-30 * Chapter 8: Summary of Technology Horizons Vision * Chapter 9: Implementation Plan and Recommendations Technology Horizons is our vision for key Air Force science and technology investments over the next decade that will provide us with truly game-changing capabilities to meet our strategic and joint force responsibilities. The coming decades hold high promise for amazing new capabilities across the air, space, and cyber domains. Yet the Air Force and our nation will also be confronted with substantial strategic, technology, and budget challenges. Our greatest advances will come with a focused investment of resources in the most promising technologies. The vision in Technology Horizons provides the shared awareness of the challenges and opportunities that will enable us to achieve this focus. Technology Horizons presents a clearly articulated and credible assessment of the strategic environment and enduring realities we face. It outlines a set of overarching themes that defines attributes our future Air Force systems will need to prevail. New technology-enabled capabilities are envisioned that meet key needs, including long-range strike, deterrence tools, cyber resilience, energy efficiency, and automation and enhanced human-machine interfaces, to help our most valuable asset-our Airmen-be even more effective than today. We believe the Air Force must boldly move forward to advance these technologies through the dedicated, creative, and focused efforts of our science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce. The future is ours to shape. To implement this vision, we are concentrating a meaningful portion of our Air Force Research Laboratory effort on the identified key technologies. We will move forward in pursuing "grand challenges" that will help achieve militarily useful capabilities. We will work closely with our partners across the Department of Defense, government, industry, academia, and allied nations to leverage the best intellectual capital and facilities in pursuit of the most promising ideas. And we will sustain our focus on these science and technology efforts to maximize their likelihood of being transitioned into operational capabilities meeting Air Force needs. We firmly believe that maintaining our technical and operational superiority in this manner is both necessary and attainable. Therefore, we encourage all Airmen-indeed all warriors and our other national and international partners-to read Technology Horizons and seriously contemplate the trans-formative opportunities that technology can enable in the coming decades. We call on you as Airmen to contribute your intellectual energy to developing new frameworks and novel concepts of operations to take maximum advantage of these coming technologies. These are challenging times, but we have no doubt that America's Airmen will overcome the challenges we face to provide the critical capability advances needed to ensure the United States Air Force remains the world's premier air force through 2030 and beyond.

This book, Space Capstone Publication Spacepower: Doctrine for Space Forces, is capstone doctrine for the United States Space Force and represents our Service's first articulation of an independent theory of spacepower. This publication answers why spacepower is vital for our Nation, how military spacepower is employed, who military space forces are, and what military space forces value. In short, this capstone document is the foundation of our professional body of knowledge as we forge an independent military Service committed to space operations. Like all doctrine, the SCP remains subject to the policies and strategies that govern its employment. Military spacepower has deterrent and coercive capacities - it provides independent options for National and Joint leadership but achieves its greatest potential when integrated with other forms of military power. As we grow spacepower theory and doctrine, we must do so in a way that fosters greater integration with the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. It is only by achieving true integration and interdependence that we can hope to unlock spacepower's full potential.

The authors examine potential command-and-control impediments to multidomain operations and propose alternative models for joint all-domain command and control.