Recent air operations, including Operations Epic Fury, Midnight Hammer, and Absolute Resolve, have renewed national focus on the role of strategic airpower in modern warfare. These campaigns are actively challenging long-held military assumptions regarding the design, employment, and long-term sustainment of air assets. While forcing military leadership to navigate new operational realities in high-intensity combat environments.
A central issue raised by these sustained combat operations is the severe pressure placed on aviation readiness, precision munitions inventories, and the defense industrial base. At the same time, adversary access to inexpensive one-way attack drones and precision missile technology creates a dangerous cost asymmetry. This requires defending military assets with interceptor missiles that far exceed the cost of incoming threats. To maintain combat effectiveness, strategic planners must determine how to balance reliance on exquisite. High-cost platform systems with cheaper, mass-produced attritable unmanned aircraft, while redefining what air superiority looks like against AI-enabled swarms.
In conclusion, these ongoing air campaigns demonstrate that traditional air power doctrine must rapidly adapt to technological shifts and economic sustainability. Military forces must align their industrial production and force design with the realities of asymmetric aerial threats to ensure operational resilience and air dominance in future conflicts.
Reference
The Air Campaign Returns: From Epic Fury to Midnight Hammer. (2026). CSIS. https://www.csis.org/events/air-campaign-returns-epic-fury-midnight-hammer