The Case for Greater Mission Specialisation by NATO’s European Air Forces

The paper’s key findings are:

• As NATO’s European air forces attempt to transition towards a primary focus on the threat from Russia, and the need to have credible capability in that high-threat, high-intensity context, most are likely to struggle to do so without reducing the breadth of mission sets and capability areas that they currently attempt to cover.
   
• Fast jet pilots must work in an extremely physically and mentally demanding role. Despite the vital role of advanced synthetic training, many European air forces will struggle to afford sufficient live and synthetic flight hours to
  enable pilots to build and maintain the levels of skill required in a Russia–
  NATO threat context across the full range of missions possible for modern
  multi-role fighter aircraft.
   
• Even where air forces can provide sufficient high-quality training flying, both
  live and synthetic, to generate pilot mission competencies at the required
  level across the full multi-role mission set, this is not enough to ensure
  effectiveness without adequate stockpiles of suitable munitions. In particular,
  the munitions required to be effective against Russian ground-based air
  defences and Russian combat aircraft in an air-to-air role are very expensive
  and would be required in much greater quantities than currently owned by
  most European air forces in any serious clash with Russia.
   
• Therefore, to afford a meaningful stockpile of suppression and destruction
  of enemy air defences, long-range precision strike or long-range air-to-air
  missiles, most European nations would need to either greatly increase defence
  spending allocated to combat air, or cut other areas of capability, to afford to
  specialise in building out munitions stocks required for one or more specific
  mission sets.
   
• The political and geographical location of different countries, as well as the
  type of combat aircraft currently operated or on order, will affect the potential
  mission areas in which any given country could credibly and relatively quickly
  build up seriously high-intensity readiness.
   
• Countries can only take risk against some mission areas in order to specialise
  in being really good at others if this approach is pursued in close coordination
  with trusted allies who are doing the same in a complementary way, to ensure
  that, as European air forces, all the required mission areas are well covered.
   
• However, the current approach of most states attempting to field small multirole
  fighter fleets that has preserved apparent sovereign freedom of choice
  in the relatively permissive or semi-permissive operations since the end of
  the Cold War may not be practical as a deterrent to Russia. Meeting the cost
  of ensuring that pilots are sufficiently well trained to survive and be effective
  against the high-end ground-based and airborne threats that they would face,
  and that they have adequate stockpiles of suitable munitions, decoys and other
  enablers, is likely to only be possible for most European air forces if they focus
  such efforts on a few mission sets each. The only viable alternative would seem
  to be a huge increase in funding to fill in the gaps across the board.