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People like to complain that the US Air Force hates the Close Air Support mission. Which kind of ignores the reality that CAS is what they’ve done more of for the last 15 years than all other types of strike missions combined.  Only in Libya and in the last year or so against ISIS has the Air Force moved to interdiction missions.

One mission the Air Force hasn’t performed much in combat lately is the Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses. The main reason they  haven’t done much of it is there simply hasn’t been much of an enemy air defense to suppress.

But retired Air Force Colonel Mike Pietrucha is deeply concerned that the Air Force has also shed much of the capability it had to perform SEAD, just as several potential threat nations are fielding air defense capabilities far greater than any the USAF has had to confront before.

Twenty-five years ago, Coalition forces began combat operations to eject Iraqfrom Kuwait. The method chosen was airpower, which shattered Iraq’s military forces weeks in advance of the ground campaign that punctuated the end of the war. The Iraqi air defense system, called “Kari,” was effectively neutralized within three days, leaving Iraqi commanders with only short-range defenses completely disconnected from the air defense system. The surface-to air missile (SAM)-killing Wild Weasel force, rushed into service in the fall of 1965 to counter the Vietnamese missile threat, had grown into its own a quarter century and five airplane designs later. Unofficial accounts within the Weasel community, based on combat tapes, put the tally of radars killed by the F-4G over 250, with some aviators suspecting that the number was much greater. This was a dominant performance that exceeded the most optimistic projections.

None of that mattered. Following the conflict, the electronic warfare capabilities that made this possible were retired without replacement. The impact of this divestiture should have been apparent over Serbia in 1999, when “after 78 days, we effected little degradation on a modern IADS [integrated air defense] system.” But other events and demands on the force shielded the Air Force from the potential impact of its own neglect.  In an environment dominated by irregular warfare challenges, this lack of capability has not made a difference. Afghanistan never had air defense worth mentioning. When Iraqi Freedom kicked off in 2003, Iraq’s air defense had been shattered by an ad hoccampaign of lethal counter-integrated air defense strikes that had been ongoing since late 1998. In the absence of a modern threat, the lack of capability implied by a limited Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) enterprise went unnoticed. In an environment where the United States had uncontested air supremacy, the Department of Defense was allowed to forget why air superiority is necessary, and how it is achieved.

All is not lost, of course. First, the Air Force does operate the F-16CJ, which is an F-16 equipped with the AGM-88 HARM anti radar missile, and a special targeting pod. That’s hardly the same as a dedicated Wild Weasel, but it’s better than nothing.  Further the US Navy operates a handful of squadrons of its excellent EA-18G Growler jamming and electronic attack aircraft as “expeditionary” squadrons in the land based role, with the mission of supporting Air Force operations.  But Colonel Pietrucha is correct that the Air Force has far fewer platforms dedicated to the mission than it did just a few short years ago, just as the threat is growing ever more capable.