Lt. Col. Grant Georgulis, USAF
The proliferation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has shaken up the military world, fueling concern that UAVs could revolutionise airpower concepts and even negate the need for air superiority as a fundamental objective of airpower strategy. Dr. Kelly A. Grieco and Col. Maximillian K. Bremer’s “air littoral” concept—defining the airspace from the coordinating altitude to the Earth’s surface—argues that increasing numbers of UAVs and one-way attack “drones” have shifted the importance of air control to low altitudes, altering the doctrine of air superiority. Retired Army Lt. Gen.
David Barno and Nora Bensahel assert that “drones” have displaced manned aircraft and are now threatening the U.S. Air Force’s relevance with “an almost-existential crisis.” These perspectives all share another commonality: They suffer from a collective airpower amnesia acquired over a 30-year period in which American airpower reigned supreme against a series of nonpeer rivals. Absent the challenge of air-to-air combat and without the context to understand what could happen in a peer fight, these observers are overstating the impact of UAVs and misinterpreting their tactical role.
The biggest lesson from the Russia-Ukraine war is not how small UAVs are reshaping air warfare, but rather how they are reshaping ground combat. The term “drone” lies at the heart of the problem. It is, at best, a lazy catchall, covering everything from an out-of-the-box commercial quadcopter to the YFQ-42 and YFQ-44 Collaborative Combat Aircraft autonomous fighters now under development for the U.S. Air Force. Lumping all these aircraft into a single, oversimplified category obscures their unique capabilities and fuels misguided hype. Breaking down UAVs into distinct groups based on weight, operating altitude, and speed as their defining characteristics can help clarify the diversity of this category of aircraft. Groups 1-3 represent small UAVs.
which are the aerial weapons employed abundantly in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, causing some to shift airpower assumptions prematurely. These small UAVs frustrate ground operations and excel in reconnaissance, precision strike, and electronic warfare roles. But they do not challenge air superiority, which is defined as the degree of control of the air domain necessary to “enable successful execution of joint operations such as strategic attack, interdiction, and close air support (CAS),” according to Air Force doctrine.
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