Air Chiefs’ Conference takes place

Both the Commander and the Deputy Commander gave presentations alongside General Charles Q Brown Jr, USAF Chief of Staff, and Air Marshal Gerry Mayhew, the RAF’s Deputy Commander (Operations).

A confident and assured UAE Air Force and Air Defence hosted the tenth Dubai International Air Chiefs’ Conference at the Madinat Jumeirah on Saturday, with both the Commander and the Deputy Commander giving presentations alongside such luminaries as General Charles Q Brown Jr, USAF Chief of Staff, and Air Marshal Gerry Mayhew, the RAF’s Deputy Commander (Operations). Held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, the conference explored the expanding role of air power, space and cyber in the Multi-Domain Operations that will characterise warfare in the coming years. 

Major General Staff Pilot Rashed Mohammed Al Shamshi, Deputy Commander of the UAE Air Force and Air Defence, told the conference that for decades, armies, navies and air forces had focused operations on the single domain in which they operated, and that air power had often been applied with what he called a very service-centric doctrinal focus.

Though the advantages of combined or joint operations have been understood, ‘jointness’ has not come easy, he said, and progress has been steady rather than revolutionary. 

Joint operations have moved on from simply attempting to deconflict in time and space to further integrating the single services in action. And today air forces are starting to synchronise their actions across air, land and sea. But the General averred that joint operations now appear to have reached another inflection point. The definition of what constitutes warfighting has been revised, and there has been an acceptance that actions undertaken in one domain can have similarly decisive effects in other domains, and a recognition that the next logical step from traditional joint operations is to synchronise cross-domain and multi-domain operations.