Op-ed: The Combined Air Operations Center, an Abbreviated History

This is an opinion piece written by external contributors. All views expressed are the writer's own.

High North News recently reported that Bodø made the final list and may be selected as the location for the third Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) for NATO. The CAOC is a planning and command and control (C2) element for the air component commander leading our combined air forces.

Air power is critical to modern combat. NATO must dominate the air, space, land, and sea for us to remain a viable deterrent to aggression or win the war if deterrence fails. Our leadership needs staff who can plan future operations and execute missions. The goal is not just air dominance but also air power in support of our land and sea forces.

NATO’s Air Forces will soon have three CAOCs, with the latest one assigned to Norway. This proposed new addition means an increase in our capability. The others are in Uedem, Germany, and in Torrejon, Spain. The plan should be to have redundancy so that if there is a problem with one, the others can continue unaffected. CAOCs have a critical mission during peace, crisis, and conflict.

NATO commands

Providing overall command is NATO headquarters, giving strategic guidance. There are three Joint Force Commands (JFC): in Norfolk, VA. USA, Brunssum, Germany, and Naples, Italy. Our air, land, and sea military personnel and their equipment compose our tactical war-fighting capability. The mission is to deter and defend against all threats, to preserve freedom and national sovereignty.

The need for a CAOC

Military training at numerous exercises indicates that future wars will have fewer combat aircraft to handle even more complex weapons and threats. In short, air power is a valuable asset, the challenge is to plan and use it effectively. Not only do we need the best aircraft, crews and maintainers, but CAOC mission planners must excel at their art as well. We should demand the maximum benefit from every sortie flown, in training or combat.

History is my thing, so let’s take a brief look at why we have CAOCs and what they are designed to accomplish. The first Gulf War resulted from Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Numerous coalition combat aircraft from many nations rushed to Saudia Arabia. First, to prevent further aggression and then, to return Kuwait to its rightful owner.

How in the world do we plan and coordinate air power from various countries, in unfamiliar airspace during day and night? To complicate matters, most of the coalition aircraft had never trained together, nor were all weapons compatible. A total lack of interoperability.

The U.S. Navy also deployed six aircraft carriers with their accompanied Air Wings. Can you imagine, how difficult this must have looked to air
commanders trying to organize this? The solution was to set up the Combined Air Operations Center.

What happens in the CAOC?

The CAOC does not contain a bunch of guys looking at computer screens, waiting for something to happen. We learned the importance of producing an Air Tasking Order (ATO) to tell each unit where and when to execute missions. 

Altitudes, ingress, egress routes, and a hundred other details must be coordinated. Logistics people need to make sure the right ordinance (bombs, missiles, etc.) fuel and spare parts are ordered and moved to the correct forward-deployed airfields.

A lot must happen for a combat aircraft to take off on time. The ATO needs to also project into the future. Aircrews need time to plan and brief, and maintenance crews need to know when and what to load, refuel, and which aircraft to get ready for take-off.

Operations officers must plan crew rest and other last-minute updates such as threats, weather, etc. Remember, this war will be executed 24 hours a day for several weeks or more. Crews must brief-fly-eat-rest-brief… you get the picture, everyone is either sleeping, working or flying continuously. Not much time for planning, thankfully the team at the CAOC is doing that for them.

Liaison officers (LO) in the CAOC bring together important perspectives and ways to accomplish their service’s mission. An Army LO may help to explain the need for an air interdiction mission that can help the ground force commander accomplish his mission. 

The goal is to have air power available to affect the battle at the right place and time. A last-minute request for airpower can cause chaos. Planning the mission in advance does allow some last-minute flexibility by changing some things. This means the ATO prepared hours before can be modified, but coordination is needed with the CAOC.

Imagine this, you are facing hundreds of Russian tanks approaching our NATO border. Rather than waiting to engage tanks one at a time, air power can conduct numerous interdiction missions to destroy fuel vehicles and tanks, still hundreds of miles away. 

By the time the enemy gets to our territory, there is not much left, and they are out of fuel. A key element of modern warfare is to seek every advantage to win and protect our forces.

At the same time, the air component will be flying other missions to make sure that NATO owns the airspace above the battlefield. Our Maritime Command is maintaining control of the seas, and our Land forces are maneuvering to launch a counterattack if needed. This all will happen with the help of our mission planners who have hopefully worked together for years in the CAOC.

Peacetime mission

In peacetime, the CAOC will also observe the airspace of the High North to look for unknown or terrorist aircraft threats. NATO aircraft take off to intercept and escort Russian aircraft in or near our airspace. The operational tempo in peacetime will normally be light in the CAOC. To prepare for war, exercises should always include the CAOC to train for the upscale combat momentum.

The modern CAOC is a place where a group of assigned military people will come together to think, coordinate, and collaborate to plan and execute a variety of air operations. The missions that can be accomplished are numerous and some of them include:

Intelligence analysis and fusion, Master Air Attack planning, including air-to-air, air-to-ground, close air support (CAS), deep interdiction missions, electronic warfare, and air movement of troops and cargo, to name a few.

This could have happened at the exercise Joint Viking 2025. The CAOC had an urgent request to send a helicopter to move ammo for the Norwegian Nord Brigade. Two U.S. Marines, CH-53’s will be inserting Marines into an LZ and returning to base empty. The current operations cell coordinates with the Marine liaison officer in the CAOC, and the helicopter is re-tasked to accomplish the ammo mission for the Norwegian Army.

The goal of mission planners is to plan everything in advance. However, the Nord Brigade did not know their supply vehicles would be attacked by enemy missiles. The ability to think through problems faster than our enemy and provide a common-sense solution will be the hallmark of our battlefield success.

Lessons Learned:

• Experienced aircrew members, maintainers, logisticians, intelligence officers, and liaison officers will form the core of those working in the CAOC. Our best people should be assigned here.
• The CAOC is a large mission planning cell, not a forward-deployed air base. Connectivity is key, as are redundant, secure data and communications, linking the CAOC to commanders, forward-deployed units, and bases, including other CAOCs.
• In peacetime, aircrews do their own mission planning, as it should be. For combat operations, initial planning and synchronization happens in the CAOC, however unit operations officers and aircrews can modify the ATO including updates for threat, weather, and last-minute changes.
• The Supreme Commander and the air component commander, need a highly trained staff that can develop air tasking orders and transform their vision into air dominance and victory. A trained CAOC team gives our commanders that staff.
• The success of future operations will depend on our ability to train and operate together. In times of peace, prepare for war.

Note: The examples used here are theoretical to help illustrate the interactions that could have happened in the CAOC.