Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, has become a term increasingly heard around NATO’s air arms strategy. It is, according to a senior officer with a NATO state's air arm, “an operational scheme of maneuver designed to improve resilience and survivability while generating air combat power from both home bases and geographically dispersed locations.”
To achieve such a plan, forces have gotten better prepared to move at short or no notice, with reduced, more agile footprints. A key element involves deploying multi-skilled support personnel. Perhaps, though, the most important facet centers on the employment of dispersed operations, particularly for defensive needs.
Operations away from peacetime military bases were a major feature of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain. With the end of that conflict, dispersed operations were largely forgotten as they no longer had strategic relevance other than for out-of-area counter-terrorism campaigns.
However, first with the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, and then Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, the specter of potentially fighting from and on NATO soil loomed, and some countries began to take dispersed operations seriously once more. Having large elements of one’s forces surviving an initial attack represents a strong deterrent in itself. The capability appeared validated during the opening attack by Russia on Ukraine in February 2022: the air force aircraft that had dispersed away from the main bases survived the opening rounds to then provide a stout defense against further attacks, but those that stayed put suffered hits.
This stark reminder spurred NATO into pursuing ACE concepts more aggressively. To learn more, the alliance and its members became very interested in the way Sweden went about force dispersal. The Nordic country enjoyed a reputation as the world leader in such operations, which had at one time seen jet fighters operating off frozen lakes in winter. They evolved into complex “war base” operations with a disused military airfield or regional civil airport acting as the central hub for a network of highway strips.
During the 1990s Sweden only sporadically trained for road-based operations but in the 2010s they came back into vogue, and today once again serve as a routine element of air force training. The operations have evolved to take advantage of advances in communications technology, and today permit a very fluid form of warfare that is difficult to detect and disrupt.
That fluidity is the key to survivability. “If you operate from anywhere for long enough, a bomb will eventually find you,” said Adam Nelson, chief of the Swedish air force’s F7 wing at Såtenäs. “You have to keep on the move.”
Each “base” consists of numerous highway strips of a nominal 800-meter length and 17-meter width (around 2,624 feet by 56 feet). The strips serve as everyday roads but with some treatment to the surface applied to prevent them breaking up and causing foreign object damage. Discreet hard standings have emerged alongside the roads in the general vicinity, not only to provide parking stands for aircraft but to accommodate trucks and fuel bowsers when not required.
Everything is kept small to minimize detectability and enhance survivability. A single strip might only be activated for a short time, the support personnel retreating to the safety of the woods some way away when they are not needed. Local police shut down the highway for only as long as required. Typically a Swedish Gripen will stay on the ground for around 15 minutes between sorties—time for it to be serviced, refueled, and rearmed by a team of just three trained conscripts and one full-timer.
Aircraft aren't necessarily allocated to one strip but, instead, they will operate from locations where fuel or missile reloads are available, or depending on which strip aligns with the wind. Communications between the fighters and the air traffic controller working the strip are kept to an absolute minimum, and contact is not normally made until the aircraft have already entered the landing pattern. The controller mainly ensures that there are no runway incursions by ground vehicles and broadcasts basic runway landing conditions based on portable wind-measuring equipment.
For the pilots, highway ops do not present a major issue, as they train for them regularly. New pilots fly several approaches to a painted highway strip on the main base runway before their first road landing. A steeper, 14 deg AoA instead of the normal 12 deg approach accounts for the primary difference from landing on a standard runway.
Currently, the Swedish Gripen is the only fighter in NATO cleared to operate from such short strips, but other NATO nations—notably neighboring Finland—fly larger aircraft from longer road runways, and the basic concepts of agile maneuvering remain the same.
The advent of the Lockheed Martin F-35 as NATO’s primary fighter does pose some issues, however, due to its need for a sizeable ground support element. Maintenance requirements—especially for its low observable coatings—prove considerable. The type has demonstrated highway ops in Finland, but the engine remained running throughout.