| Since WWII, U.S. military successes have depended on air superiority and air dominance. Successive generations of fighters have wrestled air superiority from each adversary in turn, enabling every other use of airpower, and indeed, military power in general. The last American killed by a foreign aircraft died in 1953,1 and U.S. air superiority has enabled every other airpower capability - ISR, C2, interdiction, strike, close air support, etc. U.S. air superiority has also given land and naval forces unprecedented flexibility and security. U.S. warfighting has evolved with air dominance as an assumption, enabling positioning of overwhelming forces at large, secure bases and staging areas.;This dissertation examines the risk of U.S.-China conflict based on a variety of theoretical works on conflict, applied to the U.S.-China relationship. Following this examination, and finding that the U.S.-China relationship does include elements of risk, the dissertation examines the implications of anti-access weapons on USAF sortie generation. The dissertation develops a simple sortie-generation model and air combat framework, using open-source data to estimate the forces that the USAF and the PLAAF can bring to bear, and predicts the results of air combat between two forces of dissimilar performance and quantity. Finally the dissertation examines options for increasing USAF performance in the face of antiaccess weapons, which includes a methodology to assess the effectiveness of strike employed to achieve air superiority.;This dissertation includes assumptions and omissions intended to focus its scope. These limitations are fully caveated in the introduction, in the conclusions, and as they occur throughout the dissertation. This research should be of interest to anyone involved with defense policy regarding USAF modernization and force structures or defense policy regarding the U.S. security posture in the western Pacific.;1Robert Dudney, "Air Supremacy in a Downdraft," Air Force Magazine, Dec. 2008, p. 2.;There is a distinct possibility that this assumption might fail in a vital theater of interest - the western Pacific. Chinese military modernization has proceeded rapidly, giving the PLA a formidable array of modern weaponry, including advanced 4th-generation fighters, the latest integrated air defenses, and a huge arsenal of conventional ballistic missiles. Chinese military modernization has focused on finding an "indirect approach" to blunt or neutralize the hallmark of U.S. military power, airpower. This report examines whether such efforts may prove successful, and if so, the extent to which U.S. airpower suffers in a notional Taiwan air defense scenario. |
