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Western airpower debates are increasingly driven by grim math. Analysts tally missile inventories, strike ranges, and sortie-generation capacity against a small number of critical runways, fuel systems, and aerial refueling aircraft. The prevailing conclusion is that U.S. and allied airpower could be severely disrupted early in a conflict with China. While China’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities place U.S. and allied air operations in the Indo-Pacific under sustained, lethal, and consequential threat, the belief that this numbers game guarantees victory is a fallacy — something Russia is learning the hard way in Ukraine. The 2026 Iran War showed why: Real combat is interactive, shaped by friction, adaptation, and reciprocal counter-air operations.
The U.S. and Israeli war against Iran made these dynamics more concrete as Iran struck U.S. and partner military facilities across the Middle East, damaging aircraft, infrastructure, and radars. They did this with ballistic missiles as well as with munitions that many people call drones (like Shaheds) but are more accurately understood as cruise missiles. At the same time, American and Israeli forces targeted Iran’s leadership, missile launchers, weapons warehouses, naval facilities, and air defenses. The conflict demonstrated that missile campaigns are not one-sided exercises in dominance, but interactive contests of strikes, dispersion, interceptor depletion, shoot-and-scoot, repair, adaptation, and tempo.
A 2024 Stimson Center report illustrates the scale of the problem. Repeated missile attacks could constrain fighter operations at U.S. bases in Japan for two weeks and disrupt tanker operations for a month, with smaller impacts at Guam. New Chinese missiles with ranges exceeding 5,000 miles also place at risk aircraft carriers and even bases in Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. West Coast.
Distances across the Pacific make this dependence unavoidable. Most U.S. fighters have combat radii of roughly 500 to 900 miles. The closest major U.S. base to Taiwan, Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, sits about 370 miles away. Fighters can reach the fight without refueling, but without tankers, they have minimal operational time on station. From Guam, the distance exceeds 1,500 miles, requiring multiple refueling events per sortie. In practical terms, operational reach in the Indo-Pacific is a tanker-limited problem long before it is an aircraft-limited one.
The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force fields hundreds of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missile launchers capable of striking U.S. and allied operating locations across the Pacific. Estimates place China’s inventory at roughly 1,800 medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, supported by growing stocks of cruise missiles. Against this force structure stand about 20 major U.S. air bases in the region.
This is a sobering reality for planners, leading the U.S. military to establish more air bases and harden the ones they already have across the Indo-Pacific. Current missile math suggests that relatively finite missile salvos, if applied against critical nodes, could impose disproportionate operational costs. Yet inventories, ranges, and timelines alone do not determine outcomes. They are means that may define the initial shaping phase of a campaign — not necessarily the end-state. Strategy emerges not from missile counting, but from the ways in which forces conduct offensive and defensive operations and how they adapt under pressure.
There is an analytical risk to missile-centric assessments. As Carl von Clausewitz cautioned in On War, combat cannot be treated as a set of mathematical rules due to the complex interplay of people, governments, militaries, politics, passion, and even chance. Wargames that assume one side can execute repeated, large-scale strikes under permissive conditions, while the other just absorbs blows and conducts repairs, are a two-dimensional understanding of combat. War is interactive, not a static vignette. It is shaped by adaptation, disruption, deception, initiative, and counteraction. When models deny one side its agency, the calculus of war is substituted for strategy.
This matters because missile-centric logic often treats air base denial as a binary condition. In reality, it is a dynamic contest between attack tempo, repair capacity, dispersal, and operational adaptation. The question is not whether bases will be attacked — they will be — the question is whether those attacks translate into sustained loss of combat power and what is done about it at the tactical and operational levels.
Missiles depend on intelligence, targeting, command and control, logistics, and time. Every missile allocated to one target is unavailable for another. Every salvo requires an accurate battle damage assessment to justify follow-on strikes. Road-mobile launchers must relocate, refuel, and rearm. Reload systems, missile depots, and command nodes are fixed, vulnerable, and finite. Sustaining repeated large salvos, therefore, imposes real organizational and logistical demands, such as reload times, that static models tend to smooth over. Understanding that distinction requires looking beyond models and toward combat experience. Static assumptions describe theoretical vulnerability. Campaign interaction determines operational reality.
Since 2022, Russia has attacked Ukrainian airfields continuously with various types of missiles. The effect on Ukraine is disruption and adaptation rather than permanent elimination, with Russian hit rates staying around 20 percent. Airfields have been damaged, operations displaced, and basing schemes adjusted, but Ukraine has adapted by improving air defenses and dispersing assets — with no Ukrainian air bases permanently put out of action. Russia is also updating and adapting its airfield repair approach due to Ukrainian attacks.
Modern air forces fight as systems. Dispersal, deception, interception of projectiles, rapid repair, alternate operating locations, and shifting sortie-generation practices complicate the simple logic of “cratered runways equals no more sorties.” Ukrainian adaptations have limited the long-term operational impact of frequent Russian strikes, while Russia has also adjusted its own targeting and repair practices in response to Ukrainian attacks. The military with a better strategic culture, from headquarters to air bases, uses its faster learning advantage to outfight a slower rival force.
The war against Iran illustrates the dynamics of how missile and drone raids can damage air bases, sensors, and other enabling systems. But offensive counter-air, counter-missile/drone adaptation, and strikes against the systems that generate attacks can alter strike tempo. Together, Ukraine and Iran show that air base suppression becomes an interactive campaign shaped by adaptation, disruption, and recovery.
However, the analogy has limits, and those limits matter. China is not simply a larger Russia or Iran: The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force fields purpose-built anti-ship ballistic missiles with maneuverable reentry vehicles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and an integrated maritime intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance-to-strike architecture designed to close the targeting loop at ranges exceeding 1,500 kilometers. That architecture is supported by the Yaogan ocean-surveillance and ship-tracking, over-the-horizon radar optimized for maritime targeting, and data-fusion systems built for maritime strike.
Russia has over-the-horizon radar and satellite networks, and Iran demonstrated an ability to leverage Chinese satellite data during the 2025 conflict, but neither has replicated the scale, integration, or maritime-strike specificity of China’s kill chain (the sequence of steps required to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess an enemy target). The Chinese case is therefore not just bigger — it is more difficult. That distinction strengthens rather than weakens the argument, because even a more integrated kill chain remains an interactive system vulnerable to disruption, deception, attrition, and adaptation.
This differentiation matters for the Indo-Pacific debate. China possesses far more capable missiles and drones than Russia or Iran. Yet sustained airfield suppression still demands repeated success under conditions of uncertainty, reciprocal risk, battle damage assessment, and the ability to generate follow-on salvos over time. The side that better manages this interactive contest with faster adaptation, repair, dispersal, and counterattacks will dictate the terms of the conflict.
Air base attacks may be viewed as decisive events: a munition hits concrete, and air operations may halt. In practice, runway denial is better measured across the spectrum. Damage imposes friction and slows tempo, but it rarely produces permanent closure. The reality is a balance of attack tempo and recovery capacity.
After more than four years of repeated Russian attacks on Ukrainian air bases — using hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, sabotage, and other means — Russia has failed to permanently close or destroy Ukraine’s air base network. Individual runways, taxiways, radars, aircraft, and facilities have been damaged, and some bases have been temporarily disrupted, but Ukraine’s use of dispersal, deception, mobility, rapid repair, and alternate operating locations has kept its combat aviation force in operation.
During the Cold War, Sweden designed its air force around dispersed basing and rapid runway recovery, operating combat aircraft from highways and austere strips. Swedish fighters such as the Gripen were explicitly designed to operate from short, unprepared surfaces with minimal ground support, reinforcing the logic that runway damage need not mean operational paralysis.
Modern U.S. doctrine reflects a similar understanding. U.S. Air Force civil engineering planning emphasizes rapid airfield damage repair. Benchmarks developed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers envision repairing on the order of 120 runway craters within approximately 6.5 hours using multiple repair teams. The objective of runway repair is not restoring perfect infrastructure but reestablishing minimum operating surfaces for flight operations.
From a campaign perspective, this creates a resource exchange problem. To maintain runway denial, an attacker must repeatedly attack the same targets at sufficient density to outpace repair. As dispersion expands and repair cycles accelerate, the cost per unit of disruption rises.
This does not minimize the challenge. Repair capacity is finite. Personnel, equipment, and logistics remain vulnerable. But the effect is cumulative degradation rather than instantaneous exclusion. Air operations become more constrained, not extinguished — and new developments are leading to concrete technologies to accelerate runway repairs.
Thus, runways shape tempo rather than determine outcomes. Treating them as binary targets obscures the campaign logic at work and overstates the decisiveness of early strikes. For airfield defenders, it means ensuring that other critical infrastructure, such as fuel and power, is dispersed and hardened to ensure it is not a critical center of gravity for airpower projection that is easily taken out by a small drone strike.
Tankers are what allow fighter aircraft to extend beyond a few hours of flying time. If they are pushed back or disrupted, fighters become less operationally and strategically relevant. During the Iran war, waves of Shaheds and other missiles damaged key enablers at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia —specifically, an E-3 airborne warning and control system aircraft and multiple KC-135 refueling tankers. This is precisely the vulnerability U.S. planners must confront in the Indo-Pacific: Adversaries do not need to destroy every fighter if they can disrupt the command-and-control and refueling architecture that makes airpower operationally effective.
The post-Cold War model of concentrating aircraft at a few large bases is efficient, but not necessarily effective when dealing with a threat like China. This model works for airlines, but it is a major liability in maintaining a resilient and capable air force in a near-peer fight. If runways are repeatedly cratered, tankers may be forced to operate from distant locations. Compounding this problem, China is now developing hypersonic air defense missiles with a 1,200-mile range to target critical aircraft like airborne warning and control systems (AWACS) and tankers. This combination makes sustaining theater-wide airpower effects a significant challenge.
Agile combat employment is one way of changing the missile math. Dispersal increases the number of targets an adversary must identify, complicates their targeting, and dilutes finite missile inventories. However, China can easily read the American playbook on agile combat employment and use that knowledge to inform the employment of its air force as well.
Dispersal also has costs. One RAND study noted that without proportional maintenance and sustainment, highly dispersed postures can degrade sortie generation. Dispersal is not a panacea, as there are compounding trade-offs of costs, risks, resilience, efficiency, and lethality. The right question is not whether to disperse, but how much dispersion gets the right blend of sustainable combat power once the realities of combat losses and infrastructural damage are included.
Airpower survivability in the Indo-Pacific is increased by hardened bases, dispersed aircraft, rapid runway repair, and interception of incoming missile salvos. These measures are necessary, but insufficient. Defense alone treats adversary strike capacity as a fixed input rather than a variable that can be shaped. The most effective way to reduce demands on base defense and missile interception is to systematically degrade the adversary’s ability to generate those attacks in the first place.
The war against Iran has demonstrated this logic in practice as U.S. and Israeli systems defended against incoming missiles and drones, while also attacking the systems that launched them. Coalition air operations struck over 13,000 Iranian targets, and after four days of intense salvos, Iranian missile and drone attacks dropped over 80 percent. That is the operational meaning of demand reduction — fewer launchers, degraded sensors, disrupted command nodes, and reduced salvo density translate into fewer missiles to intercept and fewer runways to repair. At the same time, it shouldn’t be that more Iranian attacks “leaked” through air defenses because the countries under Iranian attack were unable to maintain an air defense doctrine of committing up to 10 interceptors against one missile or eight Patriot missiles against one drone.
This is the core logic of offensive counter-air operations. Offensive counter-air operations are not about chasing air superiority as an abstract condition. They mean imposing attrition, disruption, and uncertainty on the adversary’s kill chain. They were a key element of the success of Operation Desert Storm. By attacking these systems, offensive counter-air operations reduce the volume, tempo, and effectiveness of incoming strikes, thereby changing the very missile math that drives pessimistic assessments of U.S. airpower survivability. Furthermore, they enhance and establish a means of successful deterrence.
Chinese long-range strike operations are more than just missile inventories — they rely on a complex system of launchers, transporter-erector-launchers, fixed infrastructure, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, networks, data fusion nodes, and command authorities that must operate coherently and persistently to generate repeated salvos. Mobile launchers must move, hide, communicate, and reload. Sensors must survive and transmit. Command-and-control must remain timely and trusted. Every launcher destroyed, every sensor suppressed, every command node disrupted increases the cost of sustained missile pressure. It forces the attacker to expend additional resources on protection, deception, mobility, and recovery rather than on strike generation.
This logic directly affects forward basing and tanker vulnerability. If an adversary’s strike capacity is degraded, the demand for perfect base defense declines, runway repairs become more forgiving, and tanker orbits can move closer, increasing fighter persistence. Offensive counter-air operations create operational breathing room by reducing the density and predictability of incoming attacks.
Critically, offensive counter-air operations do not require immediate or total success to be effective. Partial degradation matters. Even modest reductions in adversary strike tempo can compound over time. This mirrors historical air campaigns, where cumulative effects — not singular decisive blows — shaped outcomes. Not all attacks can be prevented, but it is better to ensure an adversary cannot sustain the level of pressure assumed pre-conflict.
Framing offensive counter-air as “escalation” misses the point. When long-range strikes are in play, counter-air is a campaign necessity. A defense-only posture allows sanctuary, while an integrated posture contests the attacker’s ability to strike.
That said, applying this logic against China would also require deliberate escalation management. Strikes against China’s Rocket Force launchers, sensors, and command nodes on the Chinese mainland would cross a qualitative threshold both because China is a nuclear-armed state and because some Chinese missile systems are dual-capable. Conventional attacks on such systems could be misread as attempts to degrade China’s nuclear deterrent. However, Ukraine’s conventional attacks against Russia did cross that threshold and specifically attacked nuclear-capable Russian bombers. Russia did not respond with nuclear weapons. The operational logic of demand reduction still holds, but it should be paired with planning, signaling, and target selection that reduce the risk of inadvertent nuclear escalation. Yet this consideration should not be a deterrent to planning and, if necessary, executing such attacks.
Offensive counter-air operations are best understood as demand reduction. They reduce the number of missiles that must be intercepted, the frequency with which runways must be repaired, and the extent to which tankers must remain distant from the fight. They convert missile math from a static inventory comparison into a dynamic exchange shaped by attrition, disruption, and adaptation.
Complacency is not an option. Air superiority is not an American birthright. U.S. and allied airpower can no longer assume uncontested access to forward bases in a major conflict. Runways will be cratered. Fuel systems will be struck. Tanker operations will be disrupted. Aircraft carriers will be put at risk with long-range missiles. Early disruption is not a theoretical risk — it is a defining feature of modern war in the Indo-Pacific.
But disruption is not defeat.
Missile math identifies where pressure will be applied and why early salvos matter. It highlights the vulnerability of concentrated infrastructure and the centrality of aerial refueling to operational reach. What it does not determine is whether those pressures translate into decisive outcomes. That question is resolved through battlefield interactions.
Airpower does not succeed or fail in a single exchange — it evolves through cycles of action and counteraction. Runway repair compresses disruption windows. Dispersal complicates targeting. Defensive systems impose uncertainty and cost. Offensive counter-air operations reduce demand by degrading strike capabilities and capacity. Over time, these interactions shape tempo, constrain options, and impose cumulative costs that simplistic modeling cannot.
This distinction carries real strategic consequences. If U.S. planners accept inevitable early paralysis, force design will drift toward passive survival rather than initiative and operational innovation. That approach risks conceding the campaign logic that deterrence is meant to shape. It invites an adversary to believe early salvos can deliver a fait accompli before adaptation, recovery, and counteraction take hold.
A more grounded approach begins with two simultaneous truths. First, missile threats to bases, tankers, and infrastructure are real, and demand sustained investment in hardening, dispersal, repair, and defense. Second, a significant contribution of U.S. and allied airpower in a fight with China is its ability to contest China’s strike enterprise as a system across all domains. In the Indo-Pacific, airpower will be competitive. Success depends on keeping air operations functioning under fire, maintaining operational reach through contested refueling, and integrating offensive counter-air operations that reduce enemy abilities to maintain salvo rates.
Missiles are a powerful tool of modern war, but they do not substitute for strategy.
Strategy emerges from integrating defense with offense, resilience with disruption, and survivability with offensive counter-air operations that reduce adversary capacity rather than merely enduring it. Designing U.S. posture, sustainment, and campaign concepts around that reality is the difference between deterrence grounded in capability and deterrence eroded by fatalism.
David A. Deptula is a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general and currently the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and senior scholar at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Institute for Future Conflict.
Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, Ph.D., is a U.S. Air Force command pilot and a research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, senior fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy, and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University. The views in this article are his own and do not represent those of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
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