The recent Breaking Defense response to Lt Gen David Deptula’s “Altitude Is Not Strategy” article critiques an argument he never makes while advancing a more consequential claim: that recent conflicts require a reconsideration of foundational airpower theory. The authors contend that persistent adversary strategic effects, proliferating low-altitude threats, and emerging technologies expose deficiencies in enduring concepts such as air superiority and justifying new frameworks, including the “air littoral.”
That claim deserves serious consideration. Debates over military theory matter because doctrine shapes how commanders understand warfare, organize forces, and employ military power. When proposals emerge suggesting that enduring theory no longer explains modern conflict, they warrant careful examination. Military theory should evolve when it no longer explains warfare, illuminates cause and effect or provides commanders with a more effective framework for employing force. The evidence offered, however, does not establish such a failure. Instead, it confirms a recurring feature of warfare: technologies and methods change continuously, while the enduring principles governing the employment of military force remain remarkably durable.
That distinction lies at the heart of the disagreement. The authors correctly identify genuine operational challenges confronting modern air forces. They do not demonstrate that those challenges require replacing enduring theory rather than applying and adapting it. The burden therefore rests with proponents of a new theory to show more than the appearance of new technology or new operational challenges. They must demonstrate that enduring theory no longer explains observed reality or enables sound military decision-making. That burden has not been met with the notion of the “air littoral.”
Applying the Right Standard
The disagreement begins with the analytical framework used to evaluate military operations. Joint doctrine distinguishes among the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war because each addresses a different dimension of military action. Tactics employ forces in battles and engagements. Operational art links tactical actions to military objectives through campaigns and major operations. Strategy integrates military power with the other instruments of national power to achieve political objectives.
Those distinctions matter because success, or failure, at one level neither guarantees nor determines success at another. The retorts to Lt Gen Deptula’s points repeatedly evaluate operational military outcomes against unresolved political objectives. They argue that because Iran retains the ability to threaten maritime commerce and generate strategic effects, the operational success of recent air operations should be discounted. That conclusion results only from applying the wrong analytical framework.
Opening Iran’s skies demonstrated the ability to suppress integrated air defenses, penetrate contested airspace, strike assigned targets, and establish the freedom of action necessary to accomplish assigned military objectives. Those are operational outcomes. Whether those outcomes ultimately compel Tehran to alter its political behavior is a strategic question informed by diplomacy, economic pressure, escalation, and military force operating together. Evaluating one by the standard of the other conflates distinct levels of war.
Military operations create conditions that advance political objectives; they do not independently guarantee political success. Measuring military effectiveness solely by whether political leaders achieve every desired end state assigns military force a burden that no instrument of national power can consistently bear on its own. That distinction provides the proper framework for evaluating the remainder of the authors’ argument.
Enduring Doctrine Already Explains the Challenge
A related analytical error appears in the article’s treatment of air superiority and its advocacy for a proposed “air littoral.” The authors assume that because adversaries continue producing strategic effects, enduring airpower concepts no longer explain modern warfare. Doctrine and history demonstrate otherwise.
Joint doctrine defines air superiority as the degree of dominance that permits one force to conduct operations without prohibitive interference from opposing air and missile threats. It does not require absolute immunity from attack, the destruction of every enemy system, or the prevention of every residual strike. Its practical purpose is to provide the freedom to attack and the freedom from attack required to accomplish the mission. German V-1 and V-2 attacks did not negate Allied control of the air during World War II, nor did Iraqi Scud launches disprove coalition air superiority during Operation Desert Storm. Air superiority has always described an operational condition that provides friendly freedom of action despite residual enemy capability.
The same principle exposes the weakness of the proposed “air littoral.” Cruise missiles and small attack drones unquestionably present serious operational challenges, but those challenges do not arise because they inhabit a newly discovered domain. They arise because modern air defenses must detect, track, and defeat a more diverse threat set across a wider range of altitudes, speeds, signatures, and flight profiles.
Existing joint doctrine already addresses how to meet those challenges through offensive counterair, defensive counterair, integrated air and missile defense, command and control, and air battle management. Those enduring functions were designed to adapt to evolving threats without requiring the invention of new domains whenever technology changes. Whether the services have acquired the means in sufficient capacity and developed the tactics, techniques, procedures, training, and command and control enterprises necessary to appropriately execute the doctrine to succeed in negating these threats is a separate subject.
The burden of any new military operational construct is not novelty but explanatory power. It must improve a commander’s ability to understand the battlespace and make better operational decisions than enduring doctrine already allows. By that standard, the “air littoral” falls short. It changes neither command relationships, operational design, planning considerations, targeting logic, nor authorities. More importantly, it produces no operational decisions unavailable under existing doctrine. Renaming a portion of the air domain does not improve how commanders employ military force. It introduces new terminology to describe an operational problem that enduring theory already explains.
Military theory exists to improve military judgment. A new concept should therefore be evaluated not by clever terminology but by whether it enables decisions that enduring theory cannot. The article never demonstrates that redefining low-altitude airspace changes a commander’s options, authorities, or operational choices.
Adaptation Is Not Evidence of Obsolescence
None of this suggests that warfare is static. Military history is a record of continuous adaptation. Radar transformed air defense. Precision-guided munitions revolutionized strike warfare. Stealth altered penetration tactics. Today, cruise missiles, one-way attack drones, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and increasingly sophisticated sensor networks continue that same pattern of technological evolution.
Successful military organizations respond by revising tactics, techniques, procedures, force structures, concepts of operation, and capabilities. Adaptation is not a concession that enduring theory has failed; it is how sound theory is translated into practice under changing operational conditions.
Conflating adaptation with theoretical obsolescence is the central error underlying the authors’ argument. Change can occur by adapting how military force is employed while adhering to the enduring principles that optimize its employment. The appearance of new operational challenges does not, by itself, demonstrate the need for a new theory. It demonstrates only that new operational circumstances be addressed in conjunction with enduring theory. Throughout military history, successful organizations have adapted the means of warfare while preserving the principles governing its employment.
That is precisely Lt Gen Deptula’s point. He does not argue that emerging threats should be ignored or that operational methods should remain static. He argues that a platform’s altitude, signature, autonomy, or mode of employment does not by itself redefine strategy. New threats demand new capabilities and methods—not the reflexive assumption that every technological advance requires a new theory of warfare.
A New Theory Must Explain More Than It Replaces
Military professionals should welcome new ideas. Airpower theory has evolved because thoughtful practitioners challenged assumptions, tested concepts against operational experience, and refined doctrine when evidence demanded it. Innovation should remain a hallmark of professional military thought.
Innovation, however, does not suspend the burden of proof. A proposed theory must explain warfare better than the theory it seeks to replace. It must improve operational decision-making, account for observed reality in ways enduring doctrine cannot, and provide commanders with greater explanatory power.
The Breaking Defense response identifies genuine operational challenges confronting modern air forces. Still, it does not demonstrate that enduring concepts such as air superiority, offensive counterair, integrated air and missile defense, command and control, or air battle management have lost their relevance. If anything, the Iran conflict demonstrates the opposite. These enduring functions remain essential precisely because their governing doctrinal principles provide a stable framework for adapting their application to evolving technologies and changing threats.
The character of warfare changes continuously; its enduring logic does not. Military professionals should therefore resist abandoning its proven tenets in favor of terminology and propositions that repackage familiar operational problems without producing clearer analysis or better military decisions.
Changing threats demand adaptation. New ideas demand proof. By that standard, the “air littoral” and the author’s associated rhetoric remain unconstructive, while enduring airpower theory continues to provide commanders with the conceptual foundation required to understand, organize, and successfully employ military force.
Col Grant “SWAT” Georgulis, U.S. Air Force, is a Master Air Battle Manager and currently assigned to Headquarters NORAD and U.S. NORTHCOM. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Department of War or the Department of the Air Force.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
