By the report’s accounting, the U.S. military has added two hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) and 41 of what it refers to as “unhardened individual aircraft shelters (IASs),” at airbases within 1,000 miles of the Taiwan Strait since the early 2010s. Expansion of those same facilities has been otherwise limited, with the addition of only one runway, one major taxiway, and 17% more ramp area overall. “Since the early 2010s, the PLA has more than doubled its hardened aircraft shelters (HASs) and unhardened individual aircraft shelters (IASs) at military airfields, giving China more than 3,000 total aircraft shelters — not including civil or commercial airfields,” the new report from Hudson says. “This constitutes enough shelters to house and hide the vast majority of China’s combat aircraft. China has also added 20 runways and more than 40 runway-length taxiways, and increased its ramp area nationwide by almost 75 percent.”

“In fact, by our calculations, the amount of concrete used by China to improve the resilience of its air base network could pave a four-lane inter-state highway from Washington, D.C., to Chicago[, Illinois],” it continues. “As a result, China now has 134 air bases within 1,000 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait — airfields that boast more than 650 HASs and almost 2,000 non-hardened IASs.”

explaining scale of construction to an American: "imagine a really big highway..."

The report does acknowledge that IASs do not provide anywhere near the same level of protection as true HASs, which are costlier. It also makes clear that shelters, hardened or otherwise, are just one part of a larger base defense equation. However, its authors argue that robust passive defenses are the most cost-effective single measure that can be taken to provide critical added resiliency against attacks and help provide a key foundation for other concepts of operations. Hudson’s report estimates that buying just one fewer B-21 every year for the next five years could free up enough funds to construct 100 HASs. A similar reduction in purchases of F-15EXs or F-35As could yield the resources required to build 20 more HASs annually. ... “IASs may also make it more difficult to determine the number and types of aircraft at a base, potentially masking a pre-conflict surge of aircraft, and make both strike planning and post-strike damage assessment more challenging.” ... As TWZ highlighted in the past, the ability to better shield planes exposed on the flight line from even more limited threats like shrapnel, including that produced by relatively small warheads on kamikaze drones and cluster munitions, is still very valuable. By targeting aircraft sitting out in the open, an adversary could well prevent them from ever entering the fight, even with limited attacks, such as ones involving weaponized commercial drones. .. Furthermore, **while “passive defenses may seem at odds with a predominantly expeditionary U.S. approach to warfare … unless U.S. forces can defend airfields at home and abroad, they will be unable to support US and allied interests in a conflict.” As illustrated below, Hudson’s report assesses that it could take just 10 missiles with warheads capable of scattering cluster munitions across an area with a 450-foot diameter to neutralize all exposed aircraft on the ground and fuel storage at key airbases like Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, or Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

The report also highlights the ever-growing threat posed by drones, and how uncrewed systems and missiles could threaten airbases within the continental United States, as well as overseas. For years now, TWZ has been sounding the alarm on these issues, especially when it comes to the dangers of increasingly more capable drones that are steadily proliferating globally, and noting the continued lag on the part of the U.S. military in addressing them. “Recent Air Force requests for information about ‘enclosures to defend F-15Es from drone attacks’ at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and F-22 jets at Langley Air Force Base suggest the Air Force is starting to consider the threat more seriously,” Hudson’s report notes, directly citing some of TWZ‘s past reporting. “However, it is again pursuing low-cost solutions (such as canvassing existing open-air shelters or applying nets), which counter-measures such as shaped charges can easily overcome, rather [than] building proper HASs.” Still unexplained drone incursions over Langley that continued for several weeks in December 2023, which TWZ was first to report, became a particular watershed moment for the discourse around drone threats, including to domestic U.S. military bases.

...

As already noted, the report from Hudson stresses that HASs and other infrastructure improvements are not a ‘silver bullet’ solution. It also includes two other recommended lines of effort centered on a potential conflict with China in the Pacific. The report also calls for increasing the ability of U.S. forces to similarly hold Chinese bases and other critical infrastructure, including facilities deep inside the country, at risk. That, among other things, will require increasing the production and stockpiling of strike munitions, and the development of types that are cheaper and easier to produce at scale. ... How the U.S. Air Force and the rest of the U.S. military might actually proceed, especially when it comes to base infrastructure, remains to be seen. Last month, the Air Force notably released a new base modernization strategy that included a focus area on increased resiliency and that pointedly said that the service’s facilities “can no longer be considered a sanctuary.” However, it did not explicitly mention HASs or similar passive defensive measures, last month. Air Force officials have also pushed back on the value of more extensive physical hardening in the past. “I’m not a big fan of hardening infrastructure,” Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, then head of Pacific Air Forces, the top Air Force command for that region, said at a roundtable at the 2023 Air and Space Forces Association symposium. “The reason is because of the advent of precision-guided weapons … you saw what we did to the Iraqi Air Force and their hardened aircraft shelters. They’re not so hard when you put a 2,000-pound bomb right through the roof.”

Hudson’s report includes an entire section rebutting arguments like Wilsbach’s, including highlighting how physical hardening would force the PLA to expend more and better weapons in attacks on airbases to try to ensure success. ... Lengthy traditional contracting processes and concerns about future U.S. defense budgets, together with competing priorities, present additional issues. The Air Force has been increasingly warning about the affordability of various new advanced aircraft and other modernization efforts, including plans for a new sixth-generation stealth combat jet, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones, and new stealthy tankers, for months now. ... “To comprehensively harden airfields, the DoD [Department of Defense] will need to shift from treating each construction project individually to conducting a campaign of construction,” Hudson’s report says. “When facing similar challenges in the past, the DoD addressed them, building 373 HASs in Vietnam over a three-year period and roughly 1,000 HASs in Europe in the 1980s. With decisive action, the DoD can address this problem.” In the meantime, while the debate in the United States about the value of HASs and other physical defenses continues, China is vastly outpacing the U.S. military in this regard and other countries are also taking note.

A fuel venting issue has emerged in some of the U.S. Air Force’s new F-15EX Eagle II fighters, which has reportedly left them sidelined. The root cause remains under investigation, but manufacturer Boeing is already testing multiple potential fixes. Aviation Week was first to report on the F-15EX fuel venting troubles in a larger story published last Friday about the Air Force’s progress in fielding the jets. As of May, Boeing had delivered nine Eagle IIs out of what is now a planned fleet of 129 of the aircraft.

“Fuel venting occurs when fuel overflows from the tanks inside the aircraft and, by design, then flows overboard through special ports near the tips of the wings on the F-15,” a Boeing spokesperson told TWZ today. “It occurs occasionally on various aircraft, including all F-15 models.” “Some F-15EX aircraft have vented fuel at a higher-than-expected rate, which has a joint USAF and Boeing team investigating the root cause,” they continued. “We have several potential solutions we are testing, including new factory work instructions requiring verification of proper torque on connectors to ensure that’s not a factor, and the team is investigating if we may have a batch of valves showing problems.” TWZ has also reached out to the Air Force for more information.

Well, guess the production line already existing didn't help much, huh. Deindustrialization comes for us all in the end

As noted, aircraft, in general, are equipped with vents for their fuel tanks. In addition to providing a way for fuel to escape if the tanks are overfilled or overpressured, they also allow air in to maintain pressure. Fluctuations in pressure will occur as the fuel in a plane’s tanks expands and contracts due to changes in pressure and/or temperature in the air, including during rapid maneuvers, especially when inverted or on the ground. In flight, fuel venting may look like wing vortices or smoke. Problems with the vents can potentially lead to more serious issues. The fuel venting issues with the F-15EXs have been significant enough to keep some of them “on the ground,” at least temporarily, according to Aviation Week‘s Brian Everstine. How many of the Eagle IIs delivered to date are impacted is unclear. It is also not clear why this has only emerged now, as the basic EX airframe has been flying for years.

It’s also unknown how a strike by approximately 3,200 machinists within Boeing’s defense business unit, which just began on Monday [the article is from August 5th, so it's been a month now], may impact work to resolve the F-15EX fuel venting issue.

See, this is the kind of shit workers in the imperial core could be doing, Now, obviously these workers aren't doing it out of commitment to the anti-imperialist cause or anything, but just pure self-interest on the part of American workers, in a thoroughly neoliberalized economy where the ghouls at the top are looking to squeeze out every last cent of profit, could grind the war machine to a near halt. Especially now with all the munitions and equipment that have been expended in Ukraine and Israel - this stuff is going to need to be replaced, but that process could be significantly slowed down by stuff like this. Of course, with unions devastated and no meaningfully organized left to drive action like this...

“We’ll manage through this. I wouldn’t worry too much about the implications of the strike. We’ll manage our way through that,” Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s CEO, said during an earnings call last week when asked about the potential implications of a strike.

yeah dude, no worries about your workers walking out right as you need to fix a glaring issue with your product! surely bringing in scabs is totally not going to exacerbate any potential quality control problems that may have led to this in the first place!

Though the F-15EX fuel venting issue appears to be relatively limited at present, it does come at a time when Boeing is just starting to rebound after years of serious upheaval and problems on both the commercial and defense sides of its business. This includes technical and quality control issues that have caused delays and cost growth across a number of major programs for the U.S. military, including the future VC-25B Air Force One jets, T-7A Red Hawk jet trainers, and KC-46 tankers. Boeing did notably win the Air Force’s sixth-generation stealth fighter earlier this year with what is now designated the F-47.

From all indications, the F-15EX has otherwise been a model program, at least on the testing and evaluation front, helped in part by the well-established underlying design. The Oregon Air National Guard’s 142nd Fighter Wing has been leading the way in fielding the F-15EX operationally within the Air Force, as you can read about more in this past TWZ feature. The California, Louisiana, and Michigan Air National Guards are also in line to get a squadron each of Eagle IIs. The F-15EXs will also be assigned to two active-duty squadrons forward deployed at Kadena Air Base in Japan. The Eagle II test jets just made their first-ever trip to the Pacific in July as part of the Resolute Force Pacific 2025 large-scale exercise. Boeing has also been securing export sales, and otherwise seeing interest, in further F-15 variants that build off of the EX configuration. In the meantime, Boeing is now testing multiple options to at least mitigate the excessive fuel venting some F-15EXs are experiencing.