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Reflections on Fifth Generation and the Challenge of Understudying Airpower Transformation

6 days ago
2 min read

“The airplane was never the only point.” By Robbin Laird.


Lt. Col. Chip Berke, one of the first Marine pilots to fly the F-22, used to make a point about the iPhone. When Steve Jobs introduced it, he described three devices in one. Nobody describes it that way now. What proved revolutionary was the ecosystem that grew up around the phone.


The same is true of fifth-generation airpower.


For two decades, the West argued about the airplane: its cost, its schedule, its software, its place in a procurement ledger. The real subject was how a force fights, trains, sustains, and networks, and how its allies fit together.


That subject was much harder to see. So it was much harder to study.


My latest article reflects on the years from 2004 to 2018, when I tried to understudy that transformation. It was a role learned by watching the principals perform it, and a subject that was itself understudied.


Several lessons stand out:


The term “fifth generation” came from Secretary Michael Wynne, who used language to force a break in thinking. Once the custodians of that message left, the “replacement” frame hardened, and a cost debate stood in for a transformation debate.


The evidence appeared at the edges: on the USS Wasp during the F-35B sea trials, in the Osprey’s Bold Alligator exercises, in squadrons inventing new tactics. Observers who stayed with the visible event missed the actual one.


Some allies grasped the point before the United States did. Australia treated the F-35 as the spearhead of fifth-generation warfare and launched Plan Jericho to change the force around it. Those who treated the aircraft as an occasion for institutional change got a transformation. Those who treated it as a purchase got a purchase.


Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn’s roadblocks (the acquisition business model, energy, networks, and weapons policy) read less like a 2018 snapshot than an agenda for the 2020s.


None of them is about the airplane.


All of them are about the ecosystem that determines whether the airplane matters.


That is the lesson for the next transformation, whether autonomous systems, distributed maritime forces, or collaborative combat aircraft. Watch the language. Find the custodians. Study at the edge. Take the fleet and alliance view seriously. Expect the roadblocks to be institutional.


The binding constraints are rarely in the thing you are buying.







 
 
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