🔷 Control & Denial

Control & Denial

Note: This is part 1 of a series exploring control of the air, inspired by recent developments—the proliferation of cheap drones, China’s expanding military capabilities, uncertainty surrounding the Air Force’s NGAD 6th-gen fighter program, and more.

In modern warfare, securing control of the air—air superiority—is a fundamental prerequisite for any successful military campaign.

Accordingly, the cornerstone purpose of the US Air Force is to provide airpower—the ability to project power through control and exploitation in, from, and through the air.

While the concept of control and air superiority has remained largely unchanged for generations, it is often misunderstood—even within the Air Force.

Control of the Air

Air Force doctrine AFDP 3-01 categorizes control of the air into three degrees:

• Air Supremacy: A high level of control where operations occur without effective interference.

• Air Superiority: A level of control that allows operations without prohibitive interference.

• Air Parity: A contested state where neither side holds control due to significant interference from the other.

Despite its foundational importance, this framework is surprisingly underdeveloped within Air Force doctrine, which devotes little more than a single page and a shoddy picture to articulate its cornerstone mission.

So here’s a much better chart we made:

Other Domains?

Looking for analogies in the other services should help.

• The Army’s landpower doctrine emphasizes the ability to gain, sustain, and exploit control over land, resources, and people.

• The Navy’s seapower doctrine focuses on imposing conditions in and from the maritime domain to achieve national objectives.

That’s where the good news ends.

Unlike the Air Force, neither service distinguishes between degrees of control—there is no "land superiority" or "maritime superiority" to be found.

There will be more on air superiority in part 2.

Denial

Keeping it high level, let’s flip the script.

If control of a domain is essential, then denying adversaries the ability to use it should be equally important.

After all, the 2022 National Defense Strategy discusses deterrence by denial as a key part of integrated deterrence. From a combined sense, a ‘deterrence by denial’ strategy should equate to area denial concepts—but it does not. There are parts and pieces, though.

The Navy recognizes sea denial in its doctrine.

The Army doesn’t explicitly define it, but it does impart terrain denial through obstacles, mining, and fires.

But there is no explicit equivalent in the Air Force.

Air denial is not new, but it garnered renewed interest (and debate) after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Depending on how you frame it, air denial could be an outcome of deliberately pursuing air parity—though that’s not a play in any modern playbook we’ve ever heard of.

To date, area denial only exists in the US military in terms of looking at an adversary’s strategy—anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) environments—not its own capabilities.

Fight’s On

Zooming out: Control and denial.

These 2 important concepts shape how the US military organizes, trains, and equips.

Two important concepts with surprisingly shallow and misaligned frameworks across the Joint Force.

In That Number

3,902

Last month, Russia launched 3,902 Shahed drones at Ukraine.

That’s a single month. Of 1 type of drone. And it’s growing every month.

TRIVIA

In World War II, a shortage of metal for fighter auxiliary fuel tanks forced the British to make drop tanks out of what material?

A) wood
B) plastic
C) paper

On the Radar

America’s first loyal wingmen will be designated the FQ-42 and FQ-44. Initially, they will carry the “Y” plane designator (YFQ-42 and YFQ-44), denoting they are flying prototypes—not X planes. These are the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) Increment 1 aircraft being built by General Atomics and Anduril, respectively. Expect both of these to fly this summer. On the heels of that news, General Atomics revealed that its prior factory investments for the MQ-1/9 can produce 12-18 CCAs per month.

• The Merge’s Take: If you are wondering where the “YFQ-43” is, don’t—it doesn’t exist. The reason: flight leads always assume the odd numbered callsign prefix; in a 4-ship, the flight leads are ‘1’ and ‘3’. Given the CCA program is all about autonomous loyal wingmen….they were anointed the YFQ-42 and YFQ-44 designations. We aren’t making this up—we confirmed it from Air Force sources.

• ICYMI: Check out our exclusive CCA interview with both General Atomics and Anduril—it’s worth the watch/listen.

Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software flew on General Atomics’ MQ-20 Avenger CCA surrogate during the Air Force’s recent exercise Orange Flag.

• The Merge’s Take: General Atomics is aggressively working to refine the tech and integration to field its YFQ-42 CCA. Accordingly, the event had many other honorable mentions. Along with Shield AI’s autonomy, General Atomics also flew an autonomy government reference implementation—and swapped it mid-flight via Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) satellites. It also tested a government-provided C2 interface. Finally, Shield AI flew some of the first known Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) compliant interfaces, a new interface standard to ensure CCA hardware platforms don’t get vendor-locked software—a critical element of the program given the quality of the autonomy is what will ultimately define a CCA’s capability and limitations.

TowFLEX demoed their remote-controlled aircraft tug with the Air Force. The latest demo tugged an MQ-9 but used an integrated LIDAR system for collision avoidance—a feature that could reduce or eliminate manpower currently used as “wing-walkers.” For those unfamiliar with the legacy ‘tug & tow bar’ practice, this F-16 towing video shows the difference between the old way and this way.

• The Merge’s Take: These aircraft tugs are small but pack quite a punch—a slightly larger variant can tow a C-130. These seem ideally suited for Agile Combat Employment (ACE) and should be part of all operational units’ flyaway kit.

They Said It

“If you think about dropping a bomb based on data from [China’s GNSS constellation] BeiDou, for instance, there’s an initial, and I think very healthy, gag reflex that we all probably have.”

— Jeffrey Hebert, the senior scientist for positioning, navigation, and timing in the Air Force Research Laboratory sensors directorate  

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Knowledge Bombs

• The Pentagon is expanding the use of the Software Acquisition Pathway to buy software faster

• Lockheed Martin is out of the Navy’s NGAD next-gen fighter program—Boeing and Northrop Grumman remain

• The EU unveiled a $840B plan to ‘rearm’ Europe

• Scale AI was tapped to lead Thunderforge, a DIU project to integrate AI agents across military workflows (Anduril and Microsoft are on Scale AI’s team)

• Mach Industries is building a vertical takeoff (VTO) cruise missile for the Army

• Palantir delivered the first 2 TITAN systems to the US Army

• Anduril and Zone 5 were selected by DIU to continue developing their low-cost cruise missile prototypes

• Shield AI raised $240m to scale its Hivemind Enterprise autonomy product

• The Navy started flight testing F-35B with LRASM stealth anti-ship cruise missiles (pic!)

• Astranis demoed its GPS augmentation capability for the Space Force (part of the Resilient GPS competition)

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ANSWER
C) paper. The glue-impregnated kraft paper tanks, aka ‘Papier-Mâché Tanks’, were good for 1 sortie and dropped after the fuel was used. Over 13,000 of these paper fuel tanks were used by US and British fighter squadrons during the war.