At a time when the United States faces heightened tension with both China and Russia, the head of U.S. Air Mobility Command (AMC) has told Newsweek that his forces were well-prepared to overcome the daunting task of simultaneously supplying aid to Ukraine and building up capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.
In one of his first major media engagements since his leaked memo predicting a U.S. war with China by 2025 made international headlines in January, Air Force General Mike Minihan emphasized his belief that "war or conflict isn't inevitable," but that "the best thing I can do for my chain of command, for the leaders over me both civilian and military, is give them a force that's ready to take the field and dominate."
"We display the readiness that drives deterrence so that any potential adversary would look at us and say, 'I don't want a piece of that today. It's not my day. I'm not ready for the readiness that they're showing,'" Minihan told Newsweek. "And readiness is also foundational to decisive victory."
Charged with moving every kind of asset from troops, weapons and equipment to fuel, medicine and refugees across the span of the largest military network on Earth, AMC is uniquely positioned "to take forces very far away, very quickly" with its roughly 1,100 aircraft and 100 times as many personnel, according to Minihan.
"We break down the tyranny of distance, we break down the tyranny of water and the mobility team can really explode out of the U.S. and do anything," he said. "I can deliver hope. I can deliver power. I can deliver whatever our nation's elected officials decide that we do."
And yet Minihan acknowledges that "there's always tension" in operating with such intensity in more than one theater at the same time. Doing so, he said, "certainly is a challenge, but it's not something that surprises us."
"We exist for others' success, so there's always that tension every single day. My team is trying to make everybody happy, so you get pulled in different directions," he added. "And it's a good pull."
Nearly two years after AMC executed one of the largest airlifts in history out of Afghanistan as Kabul was seized by the Taliban in August 2021, Minihan pointed to the ongoing flow of U.S. assistance being supplied to Ukraine amid war with Russia as a "great example" of what his forces can do today. Such aid deliveries came as AMC conducted its largest-ever readiness exercise being held for the first time across a 3,000-mile span of the Asia-Pacific region, known to the U.S. and select partners as the Indo-Pacific.
The "Mobility Guardian 2023" drills, which began July 5 and are set to wrap up Friday, involve thousands of personnel and dozens of aircraft from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in addition to the U.S. The exercise pressed on despite the overlapping logistical challenges of not only delivering support to Ukraine but also transporting President Joe Biden to Europe for last week's NATO summit in Lithuania and navigating two storms raging in the Pacific.
"We intentionally did it in the middle of all the other things going on so that we could address [this]," Minihan said. "The investment I want is the investment of understanding, the investment of the real geography that we would have to operate in if it this were to happen."
"And so, we understand very intimately what it takes to not only deliver that deterrence lens, but also deliver the decisive victory should it come to that," he added.
He points to the Pacific theater as a particular point of focus given the heightened attention paid to it over the course of the three most recent presidencies, beginning with President Barack Obama's initial "pivot to Asia," intensifying greatly under President Donald Trump and continuing under President Joe Biden. All three leaders did so with the rapid rise of China specifically in mind.
"Three presidents in a row have alerted us to China as our pacing challenge," Minihan said. "What you see with the execution of Mobility Guardian is a strong acknowledgement of what three presidents have said and what this team thinks we need to do to get after victory."
When it comes to real-life military scenarios, Minihan offered an example of how the inverse is also true.
"There's no shortcut to the logistics part," Minihan said. "You see this play out with Russia's Ukraine operation. If you shortcut logistics you embrace failure."
Still, Minihan notes that gaps remain that need to be filled, especially those "related to urgency and action." The general asserted that "there always needs to be investment in our inventory, but the biggest investment now is to articulate the urgency for which we need to be ready and the actions required to do that."
There's also room for improvement in "connectivity" between assets, as Minihan stated, both among AMC operations in the sky as well as with systems such as devices connected to the Starlink satellite constellation on the ground.
"I want my airplanes to be able to communicate as well as our cellphones and our cars do," he said.
These needs run in parallel with the relentless demands of a broader pacing challenge. Already AMC is looking to anticipate future issues by seeking more sophisticated next-generation systems, including those used for critical refueling missions.
A primary objective, according to Minihan, is that "your investment in the intellect of what you need is done in advance of the old stuff not meeting the standards."
"So, we do need advanced airplanes, we need things that can handle the highest of threats," he said. "Investment in Air Mobility Command has been good, but we think it can be better and we're trying to approach it from a different way so that we can be more aggressive with our recapitalization."
The ultimate goal, Minihan argued, is to not only be prepared for a potential fight once it erupts, but also to deter one from ever manifesting in the first place.
"America is awesome after getting slapped—December 8, September 12, June 26, 1950," Minihan said. "The day after the alignment, resourcing and collaboration always comes. But the goal is to not be slapped in the first place."
