Deterrence depends on more than rhetoric
Deterrence does not rest on sensing alone. It rests on whether the joint force can execute delegated command-and-control (C2) authorities and orchestrate combat power quickly enough to deny rapid success. Non-organic sensing can support that function. It cannot replace it.
That is the real issue for air battle management.
John Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion is useful here not because it says anything directly about airborne early warning aircraft or ground control nodes, but because it warns against building strategy on comforting assumptions rather than political and military reality. Its central argument is that liberal hegemony failed because it ignored the enduring force of nationalism and balance-of-power politics. Serious strategy, in that view, begins with the world as it is, not the world policymakers wish existed1.
That same warning applies to deterrence. A force does not deter because it sounds advanced. It deters when an adversary believes aggression will fail, stall, or cost too much. For the joint force, one part of that credibility lies in air battle management. Air battle management helps build the picture, prioritize threats, direct aircraft, deconflict airspace, synchronize timing, and translate delegated authorities into coordinated force employment. If an adversary believes it can disconnect the joint force’s ability to bring order to chaos in the air domain, then it has already taken a significant step toward victory. That is why pieces like The Arsenal of Democracy Needs an Air Battle Management Plan matter. They make the point clearly: air battle management is not a niche support function. It is part of the warfighting architecture that keeps a force coherent under pressure.
Better sensing is not a substitute for air battle management
That is also why the current debate over non-organic sensing matters so much. Non-organic sensing is useful. It can expand awareness. It can add resiliency. It can strengthen a platform’s sensing architecture. In a sensor PACE construct, it can help fill in the contingency or emergency layers, and in some cases, reinforce the alternate. But no serious force design should begin with the assumption that the primary, and likely not even the normal alternate, sensing function of an air battle management platform will be non-organic.
A force design that starts there risks improving awareness while weakening the joint force’s ability to orchestrate combat power in the air domain.
The fighter analogy makes the point clearly. A fighter could fly farther, higher, and faster without carrying its own radar, relying instead on off-board sources for targeting and weapons employment. But once disconnected, that fighter would no longer be what it was designed to be. It would still be an aircraft in the air, but it would no longer be a credible instrument for attaining air superiority. The same logic applies to air battle management. A platform that depends too heavily on non-organic sensing may still receive information, but once disconnected, it loses the organic ability to execute delegated C2 authorities and to orchestrate action in real time. It remains present in the battlespace, but it is no longer fully credible as an air battle management node.
AMTI is not air battle management
That distinction matters because AMTI is not air battle management. The phrase appears directly in the podcast discussion on The Airborne Layer of C2ABM, and it gets to the center of the issue. AMTI is a sensing and tracking function. Air battle management is broader. It includes building and updating the operational picture, assigning priorities, directing aircraft, synchronizing timing, managing communications pathways, and translating information into coherent force employment across a theater. Replacing or augmenting a single sensing function does not replace the broader command-and-control role.
That is the bigger risk in treating non-organic sensing as a substitute for recapitalized airborne and ground-based air battle management. Off-board sensors may expand awareness, but they do not by themselves prioritize aircraft, restore coherence, synchronize timing, or reimpose order when the battlespace begins to fracture under attack. A force that leans too heavily on non-organic sensing while allowing organic air battle management to atrophy risks building an architecture that can observe disorder without mastering it. From a deterrence standpoint, that is dangerous. An adversary need not blind every sensor to gain an advantage. It only needs to convince itself that it can disrupt the joint force’s ability to translate information into coordinated action.
Air battle management requires a layered enterprise
That is also why the argument cannot be confined to one airplane. Air battle management requires a layered enterprise, not a single exquisite node. The (Political) Future of the E-7 Wedgetail makes that point from the acquisition side. A capability gap can emerge not because the mission disappears, but because political and budgetary drift allow recapitalization to lag behind operational need. No Matter the Kit: Focus on the Development of the Air Battle Manager Weapon System further pushes the point. The future fight requires far more than replacing one platform with another. It requires crews who can operate layered voice and datalink architectures, intelligently integrate non-organic sensors, and work within the limits of whatever kit is actually available.
That layered approach matters for deterrence. A credible deterrent architecture does not depend on a single platform, feed, or pristine network path. It depends on whether the joint force can preserve its ability to execute delegated authorities and orchestrate combat power after the first plan breaks down. That requires airborne platforms, ground-based air battle management nodes, resilient radios and datalinks, layered communications, deployable kits, trained crews, and enough capacity to absorb disruption without collapsing into confusion. The point comes through especially well in C2 of ACE: Egress and Recovery, which shows that air battle management is not simply about sensing or controlling a tactical intercept. It is also about recovery, regeneration, airfield awareness, and the practical C2 work that keeps combat power in the fight over time.
Realism still matters for deterrence
This is where Mearsheimer’s realism becomes especially useful. The Great Delusion warns against strategies built on assumptions that collapse when tested against the structure of international politics. Applied here, the relevant delusion would be assuming that more distributed sensing automatically produces a more credible deterrent. It does not. Deterrence depends on whether the force can deny a quick success. That means it must do more than see. It must preserve the ability to bring coherence to the fight when the network is degraded, when communications are strained, and when the adversary is explicitly trying to fracture the joint force’s decision cycle2.
That does not mean air battle management can rescue a bad strategy. It cannot. No air battle manager, no platform, and no sensor architecture can compensate for incoherent political aims or a weak theory of victory. But the reverse is equally true. A sound strategy becomes less credible when the force lacks the means to execute it coherently under pressure. Deterrence depends on both logic and instruments. Strategy provides the logic. Air battle management helps the force execute it.
Air battle management is a deterrence function
That is why air battle management should be understood as a deterrence function rather than a boutique support enterprise. It sits at the seam between force employment and strategic credibility. It helps ensure surprise does not become paralysis. It helps prevent complexity from becoming confusion. It helps deny an adversary the kind of rapid dislocation needed to convert initiative into a fait accompli. In that sense, air battle management is not merely a support activity that becomes useful after the opening hours of a war. It is part of the reason those opening hours may go badly for the aggressor in the first place.
The policy implication is straightforward. The Air Force should not allow airborne or ground-based air battle management to be conceptually reduced to a narrower sensing mission, nor should it defer recapitalization on the assumption that future non-organic sensing will solve the problem on its own. Non-organic sensing should strengthen air battle management, not substitute for it. It can reinforce the contingency or emergency layers of a sensor PACE plan, but it should not become the foundation of the primary war-fighting function itself.
A force that can still see but no longer orchestrate action has not solved its deterrence problem.
The larger point
That is the real warning here. Deterrence still depends on whether an opponent expects a quick success. Air battle management helps make that success harder to achieve. It does so not merely by collecting data but by enabling the joint force to exercise delegated C2 authorities and to orchestrate combat power in the air domain when the situation becomes confused, compressed, and contested. That requires a layered airborne and ground-based air battle management enterprise, not just a better feed from somewhere else.
References
1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 1, 12, 222–23.
2. Mearsheimer, 140–41, 222–23.
Col Grant “SWAT” Georgulis, USAF, is a Master Air Battle Manager and currently assigned as the Deputy Chief of C2 Inspections as part of the Headquarters NORAD and NORTHCOM Inspector General team. He most recently finished a year-long Air Force National Defense Fellowship at The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies for the academic year 2024-2025. He entered the Air Force in 2007 through the ROTC program at Texas State University–San Marcos. SWAT has served on a combatant command component staff, was an Air Force Weapons School instructor, and graduated from the Naval War College’s College of Naval Command and Staff and Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. He previously commanded an E-3G Squadron, the 965 Airborne Air Control Squadron, at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.
Photo by Rahime Gul on Pexels
Leave a Reply