Battlespace Journal 2021-1

Summer 2021

  • Suppression Of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) Battle Tracking Challenges In Contested Environments
  • The Exercise-Experiment (E-E): A New Reality
  • Less Is More
  • The Future Of Air-ground Integration: Linking Sensor To Shooter

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April 1, 2021

Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) Battle Tracking Challenges in Contested Environments

The offensive counterair-SEAD campaign is central to joint air forces achieving effects in the contested and degraded operations (CDO) environment. (For brevity, offensive counterair-SEAD will be referred to as SEAD hereafter.) SEAD efforts create localized air superiority through avoiding, suppressing, or destroying the enemy’s integrated air defense system (IADS). The ability to achieve effective SEAD grows in complexity with the advancement of enemy systems and countertactics. The next evolution of automated battle tracking systems offers an opportunity to aid warfighters in tackling these evolving SEAD tactical problems. This article aims to identify tactical challenges in SEAD and suggests potential remedies for inclusion in next-generation, battle-tracking software suites.

May 1, 2021

The Exercise-Experiment (E-E): A New Reality

Combining the training exercise with a discovery experiment represents a nontraditional execution model that creates challenges and opportunities for the leaders of both efforts. The blended experiment and training objective approach allows the participating units time to work on specific, mission-essential tasks while accomplishing experiment objectives; including evaluating technologies. This article highlights the differences between exercises and experiments, identifies planning and execution challenges during OS19 and CB19, and provides recommendations for the planning and executing subsequent E-Es to maximize the benefits for the Soldier, the joint warfighter, the US Army, and the multi-Service force.

June 1, 2021

Less Is More

Although a relatively new tactic, this article focuses on the game plan because it is subjective in execution—leading to a wide variety of techniques across the CAS community. Also, the game plan illustrates the trend toward removing initiative from flight/section leaders, which, inherently, makes CAS tactics less flexible.

July 1, 2021

The Future of Air-Ground Integration: Linking Sensor to Shooter in the Deep Fight

The Joint Force’s ability to move, maneuver, and control territory will continue to rely heavily on joint fires to create conditions that provide the supported commander freedom of action. However, in order to keep pace in an operational environment, where adversary weapon systems present advanced capabilities and ephemeral windows of targetable vulnerability, joint fires must maximize connectivity across the Services and across disparate platforms to achieve that goal. On the modern battlefield, it is increasingly crucial to arm weapon systems with actionable data to achieve effects in a constrained amount of time.