For my entire career as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), the sky over my head belonged to us. Close air support (CAS) meant calling a jet into airspace nobody contested, on a timeline we set. We haven't sent conventional ground forces into ground combat under contested skies in over 50 years.
That sky is gone. Over today's infantry it's contested all the way down to the quadcopter, and the enemy buying that airspace is paying pennies on our dollar.
BLUF: We plan for the war we want, short and decisive, fought with a few exquisite platforms in skies we own, and we keep getting the war we get: long, contested, and cheap. We don't get to pick when or where we fight. Low-cost mass, and the ability to replenish it under fire, isn't austerity. It's a strategic requirement. Without it we hand an adversary the kind of cost-imposition ratio that bankrupts a superpower, and the Department of War (DoW) keeps volunteering for exactly that trade.
We don't get to pick the war
Here is the chart that should hang in every requirements shop in the Pentagon. It counts the days American aircraft spent in combat in permissive airspace against the days they spent in contested airspace, from 1991 to 2017. The ratio is on the order of a thousand to one.
We looked at that thousand-to-one picture and built the force for the thousand, then told ourselves the one hard day would look like the easy ones with the contrast turned up. It won't. The war outside the Formosa Strait is not the war inside it, and a force optimized for permissive skies is precisely wrong for the day the skies close. A platform you own two of, and can't afford to lose, is not a war-winner. It's a hostage.
This is the oldest mistake in the building: we buy for the fight we just had, or the fight we would enjoy, instead of the fight the enemy will actually hand us. We're already in it, and it does not look like a Red Flag sortie.
Politics picks the war
We don't get to pick the war, but politics does, and politics has a type. Force-on-force against a nuclear near-peer is the one war the American political system is least willing to actually wage. And for good reason; those are existential threats to the entire human race. More realistically, leading parties in Congress and the Executive are not eager to explain how two carriers ended up on the bottom of the Pacific when elections roll around in November. Nation-building and counterinsurgency, by contrast, we have signed up for again and again. No one in Washington thought twice about bombing random nations and even occupying them. It wasn't terribly politically inconvenient that I turned 26, 28, 30 and 32 in Afghanistan.
The wars we are politically willing to fight are the long, cheap, messy ones.
So invert the budget and look at it honestly. The wars of cheap assets and sustained presence are probable. The great-power, force-on-force clash is, for now, mostly a scenario the Pentagon runs to justify exquisite platforms that will in all likelihood never fire a shot in anger. We spend hardest on the war we are least likely to be allowed to wage, and starve the wars we keep actually fighting.
The sky over the infantry
Contested airspace used to be an air-component problem: surface-to-air missiles, enemy fighters, the exquisite-against-exquisite duel that anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) was built to describe. That duel has collapsed onto the rifleman. A few-hundred-dollar small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) now contests the first few hundred feet over a squad, carries the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) that used to require a satellite, and drops the munition that used to require a sortie. A2/AD has come down to eye level.
That is the real strategic implication, and it is the one our force structure refuses to absorb: the infantry now fights under persistent, cheap, contested air, and nobody owns that air for them. Ukraine isn't a cautionary tale about drones. It's a preview of what every dismounted soldier's day looks like when the other side also gets to plan.
We keep buying the war we want. The enemy keeps selling us the war we get, at a markup we pay.
The exchange rate of the wrong plan
Why does any of this rise to strategic? Because the wrong plan has an exchange rate, and it is ruinous.
Al-Qaeda spent somewhere between four and five hundred thousand dollars to plan and execute the attacks of September 11.[1] The United States answered with the Global War on Terror (GWOT), whose budgetary cost runs to roughly eight trillion dollars.[2] That is a cost-imposition ratio on the order of seventeen million to one, and we chose it, one exquisite response to one cheap provocation at a time.
Every time we meet a few-hundred-dollar threat with a multimillion-dollar interceptor, a bespoke program, or a decade of presence, we re-run that trade. A cheap thing that forces an expensive answer is a weapon, whether or not it ever detonates. Low-cost persistence is how a serious military refuses the ratio: you answer mass with mass, cheap with cheap, and you keep answering long after the exquisite magazine is empty. A force that cannot do that doesn't lose the first engagement. It loses the fourth year.
The fix
Make low-cost persistence a programmed strategic requirement, not a hobby and not a bill-payer for the next exquisite platform. Write the long, contested, protracted fight into the planning scenarios as the default case, and judge programs against it. Buy attritable mass, magazine depth, and the production base to refill both under fire, and the broad competence to crew all of it. None of this is a call to abandon the exquisite force. It's a call to stop pretending the thousand-to-one chart is someone else's problem, and to quit funding the seventeen-million-to-one trade on purpose.
What you can do Monday
- Unit commanders: Train as if the sky over your own formation is contested, because it is. Put sUAS threat and sUAS defense into every exercise, not a once-a-year certification.
- PEOs / PAEs: Program for magazine depth and replenishment, not just overmatch. A weapon you can't afford to expend isn't a weapon, it's a trophy.
- Contracting officers: Buy sustained production and the right to re-order at tempo, with warm lines and surge terms, not one-time delivery of a fixed buy.
- DIU and the service innovation organizations: Source cheap, attritable mass and the manufacturing base to refill it near the fight, and prove the exchange ratio, not just the capability.
- OSD: Make the protracted, contested fight the default planning scenario, and direct that low-cost persistence be scored as a strategic requirement in its own right.
- Congress: No new authority needed. Ask for one number on every major program: its cost-exchange ratio against the cheapest thing that can kill it. If that number is worse than the enemy's, you're funding the next seventeen million to one.