The Air Force is looking for additional ways to prepare for a potential war
against an advanced adversary in Europe, a top commander said April
5.
The efforts come at a time of heighted tensions with a resurgent
Russia, which has been probing NATO air defenses and deploying forces
abroad.
“Another activity which I’m keen on … [is] continuing to develop
the airfields, particularly on the eastern side of NATO: the Baltics, Poland,
Romania and Bulgaria, and then a couple of other projects elsewhere that would
make … an easier place to go to accomplish what I call high-volume/high velocity
kind of operations,” Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander U.S Air Forces Europe and
Allied Air Command, told reporters at a breakfast in Washington, D.C.
The
service needs additional airfields with strong runways, ramps, fuel and weapons
storage, he said.
“All of those kinds of things that would allow us to
react and to accept force if necessary in order to create an airfield
environment where we could generate … sorties [and] combat power from the air as
part of the joint campaign,” he said. “My focus and my concern is to make sure
that we have the available infrastructure to accept incoming rotational forces,
or if something happens on a large scale … that we would have the ability to bed
down all of the aircraft, or any kind of reinforcement that comes into
Europe.”
The Air Force is also looking at utilizing under-developed
airfields in the event of conflict as part of its Rapid-X
initiative.
“Rapid-X is basically the idea that we’re going to deploy
airplanes in a very agile and quick way to accommodate missions maybe from bases
that don’t necessarily have the full infrastructure,” Gorenc said. For example,
“we would bring in four aircraft and then go ahead and rearm them and maintain
them and then they go fly another mission, and then we leave that
base.”
“That’s important to make sure that we’re able to fully explore
all of the locations that are available to us in Europe, maybe not in a robust
way as we would … a big base with lots of infrastructure, but to be able to take
advantage and create challenges for any potential adversary with respect to
being able to interrupt our operations,” he added.
Officials are eyeing
eastern and southern Europe as areas where those types of makeshift bases could
potentially be located, he said.
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