Let's look at potential futures, and consider their implications for Total Air War.

As far as I can see it, the so-called "Military-Industrial" complex will face a crisis in the next few years. Why?

Well, Augustine's Law will come home to roost. Western Powers will no longer be in a position to continually buy newer and better weaponry for their soldiers, so the focus will have to change. The very last bunch of fighter aircraft for a long while are in production at the moment. The Joint Strike Fighter, the F-22, the F-117, the B-2, the Eurofighter, the Rafale.

Once these are in service, money will be spent maintaining them, and producing replacements, but nothing new. It is likely that military spending will increase soon, but for a limited time. Force requirements will be reviewed, then implemented. Britain may very well construct a new fleet carrier, and the US will return its carrier groups to the much hoped for 20 carrier level. Military recruitment will increase for a while.

And then nothing. Military budgets will by necessity have to become maintenance budgets rather than purchasing budgets. If America has 20 carrier groups, it will be hard pressed to maintain them all and research new technologies. Research budgets will suffer. Military operators will no longer be able to sell a proposal to their Governments asking for a new tank or ship or plane to replace an "ageing" older model which is not much more than five years old.

NATO will have to make do with what this boom will give them. We will see a lot more cross-usage of weaponry. There will be navalised versions of the Eurofighter, F-22, F-117 and Rafale fighters, rather than anything else.

The world is not going to get less dangerous; in fact it will grow more so. A Balkanised Russia, an expansionist China, and the economic powerhouses of South East Asia will represent likely theatres of conflict. The entire continent of Africa could very well be the theatre for a new colonialism, where NATO and others will be forced to intervene to protect scarce resources from hostile governments, or the ravages of civil war.

Consider: an Africa divided between a Pro-western North and South, and a neutral West, and a hostile East, perhaps dominated by a newly powerful former Zaire. As western economies begin to run out of fuel or minerals or whatever, military intervention will become necessary. It doesn't take much to imagine whole continent fighting over an as yet undiscovered oil reserve in somewhere like Chad. Consider also that AIDS will have probably decimated the population of every central African country in the next fifteen years, leaving whole areas underinhabited.

Wars in the future will not be "total wars" between super powers, they will be what the west would consider to be regional crises, but on the ground they will be "total wars." By total war, I mean a war fought with every resource of each combatant. High casualty, high weapon usage conflicts.

Most worrying, these conflicts will be played out using cheap modern weapons. If western arms manufacturers cannot get a buyer at the current prices, the market will dictate that they cut their prices, increase supply, in order to turn a profit. So maybe an air-to-air missile than costs $100,000 today may cost as little as $2,000 in ten years time. And this 2 grand weapon will be no less deadly for its reduced price tag.

In this case, conflicts of the future could be high-technology tribal conflicts.

What's more, Western arms manufacturers will be able to, by threatening job losses, sell what they like to who they like. Recently there was an example of this in Britain, where Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary and Jack Straw, the British Home Secretary had to back down on the Labour government's pre-election promise to stop the sale of Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia, for the very reason outlined above.

The Indonesian government had a contract with the company, with the approval of the British government. The fact that it was with a different government was immaterial, to break the contract would ensure job losses, due to the closing of production lines and possible rationalisation due to cost incurred by breaking the contract.

So, modern front-line fighters will not get any cheaper, but the current crop will be going for a discount, so the idea of a civil war in North Africa fought between two sides both armed with F-16s is not fanciful.

On a brighter note, if such it could be called, we will see whatever military spending is available will be spent on upgrades not brand new equipment; today's classic warplanes will not go gentle into that good night . In the United States there are literally thousands of warplanes sitting in the desert doing absolutely nothing. They are covered up against the elements and occasionally scrapped, but they are there.

It would not be difficult for Western Air Forces to make up shortfalls by reactivating and upgrading older fighters. New radars, new avionics, perhaps Fly by Wire or Fly-by-light technology installed in everything from old A-6s, F-4s and F-15s. Israel currently specialises in this, but it will be THE military growth industry in the future.

Why?

Which is cheaper, do you think? Designing, testing, producing an aeroplane, which may or may not do what you intended, or retrofitting a plane you know will fly and do as you intend, only make it better?

A super-cruise, thrust vectoring capable Tomcat? Well, maybe. Certainly an F-14 Tomcat with a powerful mini-awacs, JTIDS compatible radar system and a strike capability. Or maybe an F-16 with deep strike capability. Or a truly multi-role Tornado fighter-bomber that does all the work of all its sub-variants.

Click to continue

Drones probably will not become anything more than a clever gimmick. Drones may be seen as the way forward, but it is unlikely that they will ever fully replace human pilots.

One thing that TAW does not model, that the future will become increasingly reliant on: stand-off weaponry.

Yes, every so often, you are asked to go take out a SCUD launching battery. I have yet to see these things firing - I assume they do not. But stand-off weaponry are such a part of modern warfare that they cannot be ignored. If, in a TAW scenario, air strikes are considered problematic against an important military target, the USN or the Royal Navy should enter the littoral waters and unleash a slew of Tomahawks against that target, then withdraw.

Or, alternately, RAF Tornados should fly towards the border and launch a BAe / Matra Storm Shadow at the enemy position, or a B-2 launch a JSOW at that troublesome airbase. To digress, SCUD hunting is, historically, a singularly unsuccessful occupation. All the "SCUD launchers" destroyed during the Gulf Conflict were not in fact Maz launcher vehicles, but oil tankers….

However, if this is to be modelled, there has to be strong rules governing their usage. After Operation Desert Fox, the US Tomahawk stocks are almost depleted. There are not, obviously, many of these things in the world.

A useful correlation with TAW was the highly charged Operation Desert Fox. Desert Fox had a TAW-type goal system, and a TAW-type prosecution. A series of targets were marked out, and a percentage damaged goal was applied, and in went the bomber. Most of the work was done by Tomahawk missiles. RAF Tornados did a lot also. Eventually, the "percentage damaged" goals were achieved and off they all went home.

Did they win the war? Of course not. Did they achieve much? Well… sort of. To be fair, much head scratching went on over this. Sky News in the UK thought this was the greatest thing ever, and were dreadfully disappointed.

The moral of the story. When the Hurly-Burly's done, when the battle's lost and won…. You need ground troops to gain and hold ground, and ground troops are terribly exposed and vulnerable.

And here, TAW falls flat on its face. Without a ground war, all we are playing are surreal Desert Fox replays.

III Gameplay: Thoughts and Conclusion.

The Forcecom general sighed, and looked at his computer screen. Superimposed on a theatre map, straight from a NRO satellite, the war played out. He wondered why he had to be here, precisely. He could just as easily be at home in Washington, with this thing. The software was straight-forward, it could run on any old laptop, all you needed was a military access code, and you, too, could watch a war.

The Data on the screen was filtered in from the patrols of NATO E-3 Sentry aircraft, USN E-2Chawkeye aircraft, USAF E-8 JSTARs, USN F-14E "Datacats," coalition JTIDS and from the ground links with each allied airbase. From here, he could see the war, in almost every trivial aspect, and he could see, too, the war was not going well.

The weather that afternoon in Addis Ababa was hot, humid and endless. He was sweating. His dark skin shone in the harsh overhead lamp.

The Sudanese were overwhelming allied CAPs frequently, simply by weight of numbers. Their upgraded MiG-21s were as dangerous as an old F-16. They couldn't take the Viper's punishment, but they were cheaper and more plentiful. They were losing F-22s.

The fact burned in his head. They had lost 9 so far. Nine of America's brightest and greatest fighter.

This did not bode well. LMTAS were struggling, due to endless and foreseen problems with the JSF programme. Only the USAF order had been, so far, even begun to be honoured. And now that wonderful, super technology was showing a perfectly predictable problem: it's hi-tech complicated logistics endlessly.

Their bright star, the F-22, had been their touchstone, something to point to when the JSF caused more and more trouble. "We made that," they would say, "you can't fault that." Congress was seriously considering wiping the JSF programme. The NATO nations involved with the programme were faltering. The Royal Navy was looking rather lustfully at a choice of a navalised EF2000, or a license built F/A-18E Super Hornet. And now the F-22 was showing that it, like every other fighter plane in the world, had feet of clay.

Go to Part IV