On the occasion of the coming 100^thAnniversaries of both the RAF and the RAAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier, the Chief of Staff of the RAF addressed the Williams Foundation Seminar on the shift from the land wars to high intensity conflict and highlighted he saw the challenges and how best to deal with the challenge.

His presentation underscored that even though he was asked to speak about the challenge within the European theater, that in his view the challenges faced by both Australia and Europe are quite similar.

“You asked me to speak about high-intensity warfare in Europe.

“Perhaps I’ve not really provided that much of that specific geographical context.

“But then as I said right at the start, I don’t believe that what I’ve described can be bracketed within a particular geography.

“The challenges I’ve described are truly global and truly common to us all. I believe that airpower’s inherent characteristics and capabilities make it especially able to respond effectively to those challenges.”

A clear driver of the shift is that airpower advantage will have to be fought for and not assumed. 

And his way ahead focused very much on leveraging what new platforms we are acquiring but to build out from them to shape new ways ahead to regain strategic advantage.

“But the asymmetric advantage airpower has given us for the last three decades at least, is narrowing.

“The integration into our air forces of fifth generation capabilities such as the F-35 Lighting will only redress the delta to a degree.

“Of equal importance in maintaining our combat edge is this ability to manage vast amounts of information, and make decisions more quickly and more accurately.

“Technological developments will be a key element in ensuring that the lever of the best possible output from our air and space platforms, but our C2 structures, processes, and approach to information sharing will be a decisive factor.”

“The human factor will remain incredibly important, but we should strive to maximize our people’s decision-making space by relieving them of the trivia.

“And perhaps most important of all, will be our allies and our cooperative efforts to establish the C2 and information-sharing architectures necessary to deliver decisive combat airpower to the right place at the right time.

“This has been our hallmark as air forces and should remain so well into the future if, together, we successfully address the challenges and seize the opportunities.”

The Air Marshal provided both an overview of the challenges as seen from his perspective as well as key elements for shaping a way ahead to deal with those challenges.

What follows is an unofficial transcript of his remarks.

I’m delighted also to be here at a time when the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Air Force are celebrating their anniversaries, and reflecting on our shared histories. In just 10 days’ time the Royal Air Force will be 100 years old. And it offers a moment to reflect on all that we have learned over the past 100 years and the need to look ahead at where we are likely to be in the future.

The focus of this seminar is on future high-intensity warfare, but I think it’s perhaps worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the extreme intensity of the warfare in which Britain and Australia and our airmen were engaged exactly a century ago; for they were fighting desperately to halt the German Spring Offensive of 1918.

And the scale of that battle has largely been overshadowed by the even greater scale of earlier First World War losses….

That was then, and I’m not about to suggest to you today that we’re likely to see a return to high-intensity warfare of that scale and that sacrifice. But we must accept the fact that the threats to our security and the costs of defending ourselves are rising faster now than at any time since the Cold War. And the Cold War was a period in which we understood the strategic context and our potential adversary pretty well. Things were constantly rather more predictable then than they are now.

It’s also rather more complex now, as has been well covered by the earlier presentations. And it’s this rapidly shifting strategic developments that make my task today of providing a vision of the future an especially challenging one. As is often said, prediction is hard, particularly about the future.

Now this audience is very well informed about what this new strategic environment looks like, not least from the conversations over the last few days. But let me offer some examples of how this feels at the moment from a British perspective. Just over two weeks ago, a foreign country, Russia, used military-grade nerve agent in an attempt to murder people on the streets of the United Kingdom.

Not only an extraordinarily aggressive and reckless act, but the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since 1945.

Russia’s also illegally annexed Crimea, the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly annexed territory from another in Europe. This is in addition to the appalling destruction, which has been visited on the Syrian civilian population by the Russian military itself, and the criminal activities of the Russian state under Putin in cyberspace and elsewhere; they’re well known.

So the post-Second World War consensus that has provided the basis of the rules-based international order and, I might say, peace in Europe, is being challenged and undermined. We must respond, collectively, to reassure our citizens that hostile acts by Russia against our countries, our interests, and our values, will not be tolerated. And closer to home here, we can see many of these same issues and concerns being played out in relation to, for example, North Korea.

So the world is becoming more complex, and threats emanating from state and non-state actors alike are becoming more insidious and unpredictable. And whilst I don’t claim for some supernatural foresight, these and other trends offer some useful insight into the operating challenges, which will confront in the near future. They will influence the character of combat and how we perceive and employ air capabilities into the future.

Now although I’ve been asked to speak about the future of high-intensity warfare in Europe, I’m very conscious, and I’m sure you are, that applying geographical boundaries tempts us to view things in terms that have limited utility in today’s geopolitical environment. Airpower doesn’t recognize such boundaries, nor do cyber or states. Our adversaries, certainly, do not. So we need to look at the world as it is, rather than how we might wish neatly to divide it.

If for example we were to look at Russia through a European lens alone, we would fail to see the links between what it does in Ukraine, the High North, the Eastern Atlantic, Syria, and East Asia; and in cyberspace. They’ve given us plenty of clues that their activities are connected. One example, a long-range bomber fight mounted, not only to irritate NATO, but to exercise military effects in Syria and promote Russian influence throughout the region. A flight in November of 2015, for example, Blackjack bombers making an 8,000-mile round trip around Western Europe, through the Straits of Gibraltar, fire cruise missiles at targets in Syria, and then route back via Iran to base in Russia.

And Iran’s activities across a wide arc through the Middle East, to the shores of the Mediterranean, are not designed to enhance Western influence and security. For the UK, this adverse influence presents a substantial challenge. Up to 92% of our natural gas imports originate from Qatar, and around a quarter of our crude oil comes from countries with coastlines along the Persian Gulf, commodities which are at constant risk of interdiction by Iran.

These myriad threats, which extend beyond traditional geographical boundaries, place an imperative on air forces to become ever more adaptable, resilient, and nimble, if we are to preempt threats and react decisively, perhaps over lengthy periods of time, in an increasingly time-constrained decision-making space. And we need to get rid of the notion that we can control conflict timelines in the way we’ve done over the last 30 years. As military planners, we need to treat every moment of peace as a period of grace to use to prepare as well as we can to meet the demands of the next major conflict.

That conflict may not arrive, I hope it doesn’t, but it will almost certainly arrive if we do not invest conceptually, physically, and morally in the capabilities that will deliver the required power to deter our adversaries. And to deter, you need to have, and be known to have, the capability and the will to fight. Indeed perhaps that will is the first and most fundamental requirement of high-intensity warfare.

So what does all this mean from a UK and an RAF perspective?

Well perhaps I could offer firstly another fundamental requirement of high-intensity warfare from our perspective, and that’s alliances. It’s already been touched on earlier today, but for the UK, NATO is fundamental. It gives us our decisive advantage. It’s not always easy to work with 27 other nations, but it’s something that we have that our adversaries don’t. Our adversaries are trying to undermine those coalitions and alliances. We collectively need to work hard to maintain them; they are our strength.

Turning to airpower, we’ve become rather used, I think, in the post-Cold War era, to the preeminent role of airpower, and combat airpower in particular, has constantly played in advance and protecting our national and multinational vital interests. Its key attributes of speed and reach, and I think it can be argued, the political advantage of impermanence, mean that the deployment of airpower has tended to be the first military response to international crises.

But our successes have imbued too much of our military thinking with the belief that control of the air, and of space, can be an assumed condition for interventions. British forces have not known what it’s like to operate without the freedom of maneuver conferred by persistence control of the air since the Falklands Conflict 36 years ago.

The world is changing.

Our strengths have been well and truly spotted by our potential adversaries. Everyone is waking up to the fact that control of the air and space is now contested to a degree that we have not witnessed since the late 1980s. Highly lethal long-range double-digit SAMs are proliferating, and operational fifth generation fighters are no longer the sole preserve of our allies. Indeed Russia have recently deployed an Su-57, its latest generation, to Syria.

And if evidence was needed of our potential adversaries’ increasing will to contest the air environment, it was provided in June last year, when Russia declared that coalition aircraft operating west of the Euphrates would be targeted, following the shooting down by a US Navy F/A-18 of a Syrian regime Su-22 that was itself targeting coalition forces.

So we need to get used to the idea that in any future environment, high-intensity warfare or not, control of the air is going to have to be fought for, and fought hard for, if we are to establish that vital freedom of maneuver.

The consequences of failing to achieve this foremost duty of air forces are severe. As Field Marshall Montgomery observed in the Second World War, “If we lose the war in the air, we lose the war, and we lose it quickly.” Nothing has changed since, except that today, we could freely substitute “air” with either “space” or “cyberspace,” or all three; the sense of the statement remains the same.

Now as airmen, we need to ensure that our joint force colleagues appreciate the importance of control of the air, and the implications for airpower mass and the apportionment of airpower effort….. Our political leaders and our joint colleagues have the right to expect their air forces to dominate the high ground as integral parts of the multi-domain capability range of air forces.

If airpower’s relevance and usefulness have never been greater, for this to remain the case into the future demands that we confront some of the emerging threats to its ascendancy. To maintain the combat edge in the Royal Air Force, we are implementing a strategy that will deliver the right technology, the right people, the right processes, to allow us to respond rapidly and decisively to changing threats at all levels of warfare.

We cannot rely on the freedoms that have made our air forces so successful in the recent past. Our potential enemies are becoming too adaptive to give us that luxury.

And we need therefore not only to innovate new technologies, but processes too.

But before I move on to how we might achieve this, it’s perhaps worth looking at the emerging challenges to combat airpower’s effectiveness further, in high-intensity warfare and more generally.

I’ve already mentioned the proliferation of advanced fighters, SAMs, counter-space, cyber, and electromagnetic threats. Our adversaries seek to offset our strengths by raising the potential cost of action, and restricting our freedom of maneuver, through the adoption of anti-access and area-denial capabilities.

Our adversaries also seek to degrade our air capabilities by taking advantage of the legal and ethical constraints placed on us by our values, which are pleasingly higher, but are still more restrictive, than those accepted by our opponents.

 There are implications from all of this.

Hybrid warfare as we know will continue to be a significant feature of strategically contested environments, in which actors will see to blur the boundaries between peace and war and engagement of attributable and non-attributable activities below the threshold on force conflict. The theme today is clearly high-intensity warfare.

My question might be, how and when do we know we’re in one?

So against this strategic backdrop, we have to fight hard to maintain the asymmetric advantage that airpower has conferred on us for so long. But as we’ve discussed in great detail and quite rightly, important as pure combat capabilities will be, of equal and arguably now of greater significance, is the information platforms that collect, disseminate, and integrate as part of this greater information management whole.

One of the key ingredients of success in combat will be, as indeed it’s always been, to ensure that the right capabilities are in the right place at the right time. It will just be more so, much more so, in the future. Our successes will hinge on that decision superiority and being able to exploit technological opportunities.

The pace of that technological change is self evidently accelerating, and the most significant changes are likely to come from the rapid development of these new sensors; novel weapons, including directed energy; artificial intelligence; and automated and remotely operated systems.

I suspect that these developments are indeed likely to be most profound in the air domain, which has always been at the vanguard of technology. As airmen we shouldn’t be afraid of this challenge. The Royal Air Force tackled similar problems in the 1930s, which paved the way for the successful defense of our country during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Then as now, information superiority underpinned air superiority and by extension every military endeavor.

 But this tsunami of information that ever more sophisticated systems generates presents a challenge that can only be addressed through vastly more agile and adaptable C2 architectures. Against that backdrop of increasing data volumes, the OODA Loop as we’ve discussed essentially is indeed spinning faster, and we’ve got to maintain that tighter, faster loop than our adversaries. We need C2 networks that are adaptable, distributed, secure, and assured.

The successful flow of information across joint and multinational boundaries demands that greater collaboration, automation, and integration must be achieved.

We know we need to adopt an information-centric rather than a platform-centric approach to our future capabilities.

This swift and accurate decision-making cannot be the sole preserve of C2 architectures and technological advances. Warfare will be, as it has always been, primarily a human activity, and the making of decisions primarily a human activity, particularly those that involve the use of lethal force.

The important aspects here are to ensure that humans are unburdened by the trivial and presented only with the decisions to which legally, morally, and intellectually they remain uniquely best suited to make.

Which brings me of course to our people, who are already outstanding, and who will continue to give us our decisive edge into the future. The challenge of senior leadership, of a certain generation like mine, is to give our people the opportunity, the freedom, and the incentives to think their way around the problems we face, and allow us to capitalize fully on their enormous powers of innovation.

And finally I would say again, that our successes will depend on like-minded allies sharing values and will as well as capabilities. Our potential adversaries struggle in this respect; I’m delighted that we do not.

So in drawing to a conclusion, we face a world, which is more challenging, and threatening than it has been for a generation. Air, space, and cyber power will remain at the forefront of political choice when our national, or collective interests are at stake.

But the asymmetric advantage airpower has given us for the last three decades at least, is narrowing.

The integration into our air forces of fifth generation capabilities such as the F-35 Lighting will only redress the delta to a degree.

Of equal importance in maintaining our combat edge is this ability to manage vast amounts of information, and make decisions more quickly and more accurately.

Technological developments will be a key element in ensuring that the lever of the best possible output from our air and space platforms, but our C2 structures, processes, and approach to information sharing will be a decisive factor.

The human factor will remain incredibly important, but we should strive to maximize our people’s decision-making space by relieving them of the trivia.

And perhaps most important of all, will be our allies and our cooperative efforts to establish the C2 and information-sharing architectures necessary to deliver decisive combat airpower to the right place at the right time. This has been our hallmark as air forces and should remain so well into the future if, together, we successfully address the challenges and seize the opportunities.

You asked me to speak about high-intensity warfare in Europe. Perhaps I’ve not really provided that much of that specific geographical context. But then as I said right at the start, I don’t believe that what I’ve described can be bracketed within a particular geography.

The challenges I’ve described are truly global and truly common to us all.

I believe that airpower’s inherent characteristics and capabilities make it especially able to respond effectively to those challenges.

Finally, again, you asked me to speak about these requirements of high-intensity warfare. The sense I think is that this refers to a potential future state. But perhaps I can offer the recent thoughts of Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute in London. He said recently that the RAF is currently experiencing its longest period of high-intensity operations since the Second World War, especially in the fight against Daesh.

Well he’s right. We are busier than we’ve been for generations.

But that has to be a cause for concern.

Because if my current force is being pushed by a sustained fight against a terrorist organization, we have much work to do if we are to be technologically and in process and people, and resilience and sustainability, with much to do if we are to be ready to deal with the scale and the breadth of threats which we really mean when we speak about high-intensity warfare.

As was so rightly said in one of the earlier presentations, this is a national effort.  

Featured photo credit:

https://www.forces.net/news/no-rest-until-final-nail-terrorists-coffin-says-defence-secretary

By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake

When journalists and many policy makers discuss an area like missile defense they often do so from the perspective of catalogue shopping.

What items in the catalogue are of interest?

And what do they cost?

This is often reflected in presenting the reporting and analytical focus on “order of battle” data.

It is an important component but only goes so far in understanding effective weapon employment and human dimensions of combat.

Traditionally with only an “order of battle” look/see at the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, one would identify the separable programs, and discuss their modernization strategies and how to make each key element better in terms of themselves and to add up a modernization bill.  Each item in a “modernization catalogue” and putting it in a commercial analogy would add shipping costs and a service contract to keep the catalogue item in service during the covered period.

But the Air Defense Artillery (ADA) Proponent at Fort Sill internally does not have just an “order of battle” mindset.  Of course, all technology in the ADA fighting inventory has to always respect the truism that all military technology is relative against a reactive enemy and the other truism “quantity has a quality of its own.”

All solders we engaged with at all ranks fully understand the imperative for cross cutting modernization that going on in ADA. Effective cross-cutting modernization better integrated with an appreciation for evolving con-ops development and ever improving all dimensions of Command and Controls including an artificial intelligence  (AI) research effort can all shape a war winning transformation of core capabilities, rather than  only focusing on stove piped platform modernization.

As we refocus on the challenges posed by peer competitors and engaging in higher tempo and higher intensity operations, it is often not just back to the future. 

Russia is not the Soviet Union.  And China is not Mao’s PLA.  There are lessons learned from the past and domain knowledge, which can be leveraged in the migration in back to the future to harvest the best but leave the rest, such knowledge is to be leveraged not slavishly copied.

We must also try and learn what we don’t know. 

Effective military organizations around the globe respect what Secretary Rumsfeld once sagely focused on “the unknown unknowns”

This problem was put very clearly in a recent interview with the Royal Australian Air Force head of their Air Warfare Centre which is totally focused on joint warfare as the driver for change.

Throughout the interview, he was very clear on the importance of breaking out of legacy patterns and thinking and finding ways to train for the future fight with the force you are crafting and respect what one doesn’t know.

“Our senior leadership, including myself, has never grown up in the combat environment which is now evolving rapidly. We need to unlearn as well as learn to shape an effective way ahead.”

The change is to effectively shape a future force structure based on where you need to go, rather than what you have inherited?

During our visit to Fort Sill, we experienced a Command clearly thinking through ways to deal with all of these challenges.

The Command is led by a soft spoken but clear leader in empowering his Command to think through how to break through to the next level, rather than training to the past.  During our visit we had a chance to talk with Brigadier General Randall A. McIntire a couple of times and he set in motion an opportunity to talk with several members of his staff who provided us with a clear sense of the work underway to train with the force they have and the one which is emerging.

When visiting the Command, it strikes one that the ADA warriors have much in common with the US Navy’s silent service on a strategic deterrence patrol– always ready.

Sargent First Class Nicholas Martin and Sargent First Class Johnathan Pace put this point to us about their life as ADA warriors:

“Whether you’re stateside, whether you’re deployed for overseas, whether you’re in a combat zone, or you’re in a friendly nation, you have to be ready for action. No matter where I am, the question is the same: are we ready to start?

“Can we heat up the missiles now and fire them? Are we watching the skies correctly? Even if you’re in an area that’s not in a combat area, you’re always watching the sky, because in a scenario where nobody’s fighting, the air defense is still watching.

“There’s always been that intensity that if something kicks off, we’re the first ones to see it. We’re the first ones to react. And you’re on the line, they coming after you.”

Colonel David Baxter, Brigade Commander, 30th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, underscored as well the complexity of getting troops ready for the “always ready” mission set.

“We require our operators to be extremely knowledgeable of threat and to understand the weapons systems.

“It’s not just a one man crew, it is three people who hone their skill sets together and have to think and operate as a rapidly responsive team.

“We have to be prepared at all times but the challenge is that our skill set is not developed overnight. It takes four to six months to develop what in my opinion would be a well-trained crew.

“By which I mean, a crew that is cognizant of the operating environment, of the enemy, of their weapons system, and that can perform. And it take more than one crew per battery. You have to build a minimum of three. You can only sit in the van for so long looking at the scope.”

And we learned during our visit that the Command has already been training for the transition from the land wars in the Middle East to a new global strategic situation. 

For example, the Patriot batteries train to two core situations.  The first being to prepare to the area of interest to where they are scheduled to be deployed with the simulators targeted on the real combat situation likely to face the operators.

Captain Matthew Ludemann a former Patriot battery commander and current staff officer in the ADA School with two deployments to the Middle East, underscored that there was a second type of training as well, namely for what they call Global Response Force or GRF scenarios.  These scenarios are very flexible and involve preparing for rapid deployment to a crisis area, which might pop up worldwide.  Here, they are training against a variety of threats and within a variety of scenarios.

In a 21st Century U.S. Army “back to the future” effort increased emphasis has been placed on ramping up Short Range Air Defense (SHORAD) for the U.S. Army forces. SHORAD initiatives for an Army on the move was a good example of a Command leveraging the past but not being captured by it.

The core competence in operating SHORAD in the U.S. Army resides in the National Guard. That competence along with those of the allies is being leveraged as the Army brings new SHORAD capabilities into the force.

Because the most urgent priority for SHORAD is in Europe, the Army made a clear decision to go with a wheeled vehicle to support the initial modernization efforts around SHORAD. 

Rather than letting the vehicle choice and the historical battles over tracked versus wheeled vehicles derail the pace of progress, the Army has chosen a Stryker variant for the initial modernization efforts.

As BG McIntire put it: “We got the platform figured out.  Now what is under debate today are the ornaments to be placed on the platform. And when we do that we will spiral develop the capability.”

One Army officer highlighted the role of the allies in rather blunt terms.  “The Czech the Romanians, the Danes and the Germans have all kept their SHORAD capabilities operational.  They have provided officers onto the NATO staff and when we deploy on operational maneuvers in Europe we have those officers with us providing their SHORAD expertise. And as for me, I learned from a Czech officer about SHORAD integrated into the maneuver force.”

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A key challenge facing the Air Defense Artillery community as a more integrated approach to defense is shaped, and with it greater integration with offensive capabilities, is to focus on the network as an integrated weapon system.

A key driver of change here is working Patriot with THAAD integration via the new Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS). 

Here the focus is upon shaping a common operational picture to drive an integrated firing solution set.

As IBCS is continued to be tested and refined the ADA branch is also looking at how the military specialties will change as well. With the enhanced integration of THADD with Patriot envisaged under IBCS, there is a planned transition in the military specialties.

As one Army officer put it:  “So instead of identifying oneself as a Patriot operator or a THAAD operator they will be radar operators or launch operators.”

And when the Army deploys IBCS, the Army has the opportunity to drive fundamental change in how it transforms and modernizes the force.

As BG McIntire put it: “This will allow us to componentize acquisition in the future. We can prioritize sensors or weapons and hang them on the network, rather than having to drive stove piped modernization of a particular defensive system. We need to ensure that every requirement we write for a future system is IBCS compliant in order to drive such a fundamental change.”

The goal for enhanced ground defense capabilities is to empower the joint maneuver force able to operate in the integrated battlespace. Again the Commanding General captures the forte of the American military as operating as a joint force globally.

“The goal is to be able to open up operational space for the maneuver force, whether led by the Air Force or the Army, and to be able to go into the objective area and dominate the adversary.  We can debate forever what we think the multi-domain battle means.  But at the end of the day, my tactics have to change and my ability to collarbone I the battlespace enhance with my other service mates.”

After important individual discussions with Sargent First Class Nicholas Martin and Sargent First Class Johnathan Pace, Colonel David Baxter, CW5 Eric Maul and CW5 Christopher Wehmeier, we were given the opportunity to discuss with ADA officers who had different weapon experience or a battle system connectivity focus during a round table.

These officers have operated Patriot, THADD, SHORAD for many years, but the focus was talking through the future of ADA not focusing simply on the platforms.

Our ground rules were not to try and capture individual quotes but let a free flow of ideas drive the understanding of the Air Defense Artillery team working together.  So we are grateful to Captain Keller Howell, Captain Jessica Perales, Captain Andrew Clark, Lt. Col. Ron Niedert, Major Blake Seibold, and Lt. Col. James Reese.

As the session ended the Fort Sill former combat officer now historian made a brilliant point about the challenges the U.S. Army faced in moving ADA into the missile age after World War II. In this case, as single innovative Army Officer drove that revolution and today the U.S. has a world class ADA community of innovative warriors at the cutting edge of technology by coming up with a way to develop the Nike missiles.

In August of 1944, Lieutenant Jacob W. Schafer submitted a memorandum proposing a new antiaircraft weapon system.  His proposal which brought together rocket guidance, and radars linked to computers was evolutionary and catapulted U.S. as the leader of air defense.  Bell Laboratories took on this initiative and LT Schafer lead the newly formed Nike project as an officer working with industry.

After WWII the U. S. Army Air Defense witnessed the genesis of the missile age through its defense against V-1 and V-2 rockets.  As Wernher Von Braun worked through Operation Paper Clip, the U.S. Military’s development into the rocket age, a young lieutenant was working through the scientific methods associated with missile defense.

At the heart of change is reworking how the Army will do maneuver warfare, with defense at the heart of reshaping the offensive and defensive relationship. 

As BG McIntire put it and the officers at the round table fully grasped  “We are reworking the tribal differences between those responsible for defense and those responsible for offense in the brigades.  We need an integrated mix of offense with defense for the maneuver force to be effective in the conflicts we are likely to fight going forward.”

In short, the Air Defense Artillery is working the challenge posed by the question; “How do you shape a future force structure based on where you need to go, rather than what you have inherited?

We wish to thank BG McIntire and his staff for their time spent with us.  This article could have not been written without their insights and forward looking vision while also capturing the current challenges faced by an Army team essentially at war since 9/11.

Editor’s Note: Featured photo shows U.S. soldiers from the 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, conduct emplacement and system validation for the MIM-104 Patriot air defense missiles battery at an Israeli exercise site during Juniper Cobra, Feb. 26, 2018. Juniper Cobra 2018 is a ballistic missile defense joint U.S.-Israel exercise that uses computer simulations to train forces and enhance interoperability. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Matthew Plew