FelipeChannel

Forwarded from /CIG/ Telegram | Counter Intelligence Global (FRANCISCVS)

↖️ 🇺🇸 🌏 The Pacific’s Tyranny of Distance: The General Problem

Campbell on X: I once flew from Hawaii to Guam on a KC-10. Roughly 3,300 nautical miles. Eight straight hours at about eight miles a minute. I stared out the window the entire time. No land. No ships. Nothing.

Just empty ocean in every direction.

This map shows what that distances actually looks like for air operations across the theater.

In the Gulf War, the U.S. could generate well over 1,000 strike sorties per day from bases relatively close to the fight.

In a Pacific conflict against a peer adversary, sustaining anything close to that tempo becomes dramatically harder.

Distance changes everything — not just for fighters, but for the entire force.

This means our air refueling tanker fleet becomes exponentially more important.

In the Pacific, tankers must fly much farther just to reach the refueling tracks.

That transit burns a large share of their own fuel before they can offload anything useful.

As a result, you need significantly more tankers in the air to deliver the same amount of fuel to the aircraft that actually need it.

This isn’t mainly a tanker technology issue.

A KC-46 is more efficient than a KC-135, but on these distances the gains are relatively small.

The real constraint is physics.

Every extra mile the tanker flies to the orbit is fuel it can no longer give to a fighter or bomber.

Distance multiplies the requirement.

Contrast that with Desert Storm. Most fighter strike missions lasted three to six hours.

Tankers could get on station close to the action, offload, and then loiter for hours waiting for the next wave.

Short transits meant high efficiency and high sortie rates.

In the Pacific the same mission profile looks very different.

A tanker flying from Japan to support operations near the Taiwan Strait can face a 600–800 mile transit each way just to reach a usable refueling track.

That burns fuel it can no longer transfer and reduces time on station.

To maintain continuous support, far more tankers must be airborne at once.

Distance doesn’t just increase demand — it caps how many effective strike sorties the force can generate and sustain.

This is the general problem.

The same tyranny of distance shows up across the joint force.

It hits especially hard when the Navy relies on USAF tankers for extended operations, when bombers must reach deep targets and return, when fighters try to generate meaningful sortie rates, and when we move ISR and airlift assets across the theater.

To put hard numbers behind the map, here's the distances to RCPO (Hsinchu, Taiwan):

382 nm — RODN Kadena AB
576 nm — RPLC Clark International Airport
812 nm — RJOI MCAS Iwakuni
1,155 nm — RJTY Yokota AFB
1,298 nm — YPDN Darwin, Australia
1,342 nm — PTYA Yap Island
1,398 nm — MSJ Misawa AB
1,510 nm — PGWT Tinian International Airport
1,515 nm — PGUA Andersen AFB, Guam
2,407 nm — AYNZ Lae, Papua New Guinea
2,557 nm — PWAK Wake Island
2,561 nm — AYPY Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
2,843 nm — PKWA Kwajalein
2,911 nm — PASY Shemya, Alaska
3,103 nm — PTRO Babelthuap, Palau
3,427 nm — FJDG Diego Garcia
4,424 nm — PHIK Hickam AFB, Hawaii

📝 Martin Skold: Whole reason the Pacific War was won by island-hopping and seizing airfields. And the whole reason China is aiming to do the same - ideally by just walking in when we’re busy elsewhere.

📎 Campbell

🧵 Thread • FxTwitter

Campbell (@boomers_ass)

The Pacific’s Tyranny of Distance: The General Problem

I once flew from Hawaii to Guam on a KC-10. Roughly 3,300 nautical miles. Eight straight hours at about eight miles a minute. I stared out the window the entire time. No land. No ships. Nothing.

Just…

14 views22:28