How to Make the Weather Work For You.
Sun Tzu, the great warrior-philosopher of the sixth century B.C., famously wrote: “Know thy enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered.” Less familiar, but no less important are the thoughts that followed: “Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.”
Col. Patrick Williams, director of weather at Air Force Headquarters, is all about total victory if ever the U.S. finds itself in a conflict with China or Russia. Knowing the weather, and how to use it to U.S. advantage, will be a key to doing so. First, though, weather has to return to a central place—in operations and strategic planning.
“The way weather is used today, we’re an obstacle,” Williams told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Before the pilot takes off, we’ll tell them what conditions they’ll see, which impacts how much fuel they need, how many bombs they can carry, and how to get back safely. [But] we can do so much more than that.”
Col. Patrick Williams, director of weather at Air Force HeadquartersWe can purposely force the adversary into situations … where they have to pick between a bad choice and a worse choice.
The Airmen who specialize in weather are much more than just a weather app; properly employed, they can help commanders predict and influence adversary behavior.
“We can purposely force the adversary into situations that they don’t want to be in where they have to pick between a bad choice and a worse choice,” Williams explained.
Consider stormfronts, for example. Most air forces hangar their aircraft in the face of dangerous storms to protect them from hail, lightning, and wind-tossed debris. U.S. bombers could chase that storm through enemy territory and attack enemy airfields while the planes are grounded.
“Now you’ve created an extra dilemma for the adversary,” Williams said. “Every time a stormfront comes through, they have to decide: Do I hangar my aircraft and create a nice, big target, or do I leave them out to the elements and take that chance?”
Targeting rings are another example. Surface-to-air weapons often use radar to detect threats out to a given range around them; that range expands or contracts based on atmospheric conditions. The right forecast can reveal gaps where threat rings may not overlap for a period of time.
“Now I’ve determined a time frame, an ingress point and possibly an egress point so our aircraft can get back to safety,” Williams said.
Space weather offers a third example: The sun can have a significant impact on communication and navigation. Because an electromagnetic attack can cause similar effects to solar flares, getting the two to coincide can leave adversaries confused as to the cause of a satellite communications blackout.
Of course, accurate forecasting can also alert friendly forces that solar flares might throw off GPS guidance—and by how much—or identify when supply routes are socked in by snow.
But unless the Airmen who study weather and environmental sciences are inside the planning cells, the insights they can provide won’t be fully understood by planners.
“Take them out of execution, out of tactical, and place them in the planning cells and the exercise cells, back in the traditional roles that we haven’t really done the past 20 years,” Williams said.
Fly the Unfriendly Skies
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took place under desert skies that were usually clear of enemy resistance, rain, sleet, hail, snow, and the like. That won’t be the case if war broke out in overcast and rainy Eastern Europe, or in the typhoon-prone South China Sea.
In World War II, it took more than two years for the U.S. and Britain to achieve air superiority over Germany once the U.S. joined the war, and overcast, stormy weather proved a major impediment for much of that time. In a conflict with China, nonstop air superiority may not be possible, but U.S. strategy requires asserting air dominance at specific times and places.
Col. Bradley Stebbins, former commander of the 557th Weather Wing at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., said weather can be leveraged to help achieve such “pulses” of air superiority.
“If you establish such a pulse of air superiority over a particular location in order to create an effect or meet the intent of the combatant commander, it might all be for naught if the weather doesn’t allow you to complete the objectives,” Stebbins told Air & Space Forces Magazine in June, before transitioning to become associate dean at the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Proactive weather planning requires re-familiarizing commanders with the decisive role weather can play in warfare. Stebbins pointed out the recent 80th anniversary of D-Day, revisiting when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower delayed the invasion a day to await a break in the storm. The German army, relying on less-capable forecasting tools, did not see that break coming.
“Combatant commanders, component commanders, and on down intuitively understand that the environment impacts them,” Stebbins said. “But do they know how decisive it can be?”
That’s not clear. The military likes to say it trains as it fights. But Williams said bad weather typically throws a wrench into exercise plans.
“The easy button is ‘we’re going to go do something else because the weather’s in the way,’” he said. “What we’re advocating is: You can still get that training done to an extent, but now you’re actually prepared against real-world weather events. Just because the weather is there, the war does not end, so how do you use the weather to your advantage?”
Wicked Weather
Weather forecasting has long been intertwined with computing power: The more powerful the computer, the more complex and accurate the prediction model. In fact, the headquarters building for the 557th Weather Wing was purpose-built around the powerful data center in its basement. Rising computer power and automation in the form of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) should enable Airmen to devote more brainpower to answering more difficult questions than the baseline mechanics of weather prediction.
“They hone their tradecraft by developing forecasts: talking to pilots, doing those tactical-level skills,” Stebbins explained. “But their most valuable contribution is applying critical thinking from an environmental perspective to a wicked problem.”
Indeed, two Harvard University researchers wrote in a March blog post that as AI advances and data pools grow larger, meteorologists may “one day be able to forecast weather with even greater precision, finer resolution, and over longer time horizons.”
In the military, that could mean calculating the effects of El Niño on a future area of operation, for example. But as the speed of warfare increases, commanders must make decisions faster, which means weather Airmen will have to start coding solutions.
“I tell Airmen this, and they say, ‘Sir, I don’t know how to code,’” Stebbins said. “And I say, ‘You’re not necessarily going to need to know how to code expertly because the generative AI tools that you keep hearing about: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, will produce code.’”
Weather Airmen will need to understand coding well enough to employ secure generative AI tools to create solutions for commanders. For example, a tool might automatically alert leaders when the crosswinds are too strong for enemy aircraft to launch from a particular location, offering insight at speeds that would not be possible otherwise.
AI/ML could also empower weather Airmen who find themselves cut off from larger networks due to the nature of an operation or to enemy jamming. The Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment strategy relies on Airmen dispersing in small teams to generate sorties from far-flung locations. AI/ML and pre-staged data dumps make that Airman at an austere airstrip with a laptop and a handheld Kestrel weather meter much more capable than his or her predecessors, Williams explained.
“Where AI/ML comes in is when I can generate a full-on forecast necessary for tactics on my laptop,” the colonel said. “If they have the ability to reach back and get fresh data, great, but if they don’t, they have more than enough capability at their fingertips to do what they need to for that specific mission.”
Decision Advantage
The Air Force weather enterprise wants to better integrate with decision-makers across the board, Stebbins said, with an emerging focus on information warfare, where a range of career fields including cyber, weather, and intelligence work together to reduce uncertainty and influence adversary behavior. Stebbins pointed back to the D-Day example, where reconnaissance, deception, and weather forecasting combined to give the Allies better information and therefore better decisions than the enemy.
“Information advantage enables decision advantage by commanders at every echelon,” he explained. “And if we do that correctly, enough times and in enough places, then we gain a continuing advantage for America and her allies.”
Weather is another element in the information warfare portfolio, Stebbins said, because it affects human behavior: Freezing rain might keep enemy aircraft socked in and a solar storm could wreak havoc in the ionosphere.
“The idea is to stay in the competition phase, and that’s where information warfare is perhaps most effective,” he said. “How do we project a strong deterrent message to the enemy: ‘You do not want to take on the United States of America and her allies today.’”
Challenges Ahead
It’s not all sunshine, of course. “The challenge is that we need to stay ahead of the enemy,” Stebbins said. “If they know the weather at a particular time in the future to a certain level, we need to know it further in advance, and we need to know it better. We’ve got to have that environmental information advantage. Just like every other weapons system, the Air Force weather weapons system must be better than the other guys.”
That will require investment, since supporting research and transferring it to operations takes money and talented Airmen.
Another challenge: 500 miles above the Earth, only two of the military’s 60-year-old weather satellites are still functioning, leaving troops dependent on commercial and foreign satellites for weather insights. While those partnerships are essential, it’s risky to depend on others for such important intelligence. Experts argue the military needs its own modern weather satellites to maintain access to data during a conflict.
The future “weather decision advantage is wholly dependent upon a new set of space-based environmental monitoring technologies—and the investment required to underwrite this crucial capability,” according to a policy paper published by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in November 2023.
Williams agreed. Adversaries gain a critical advantage if they have satellite coverage over parts of the world where the U.S. and its allies do not.
“Not having weather satellites up there is a huge, huge problem,” Williams said.
The Space Force needs resources to fund new weather satellites, but in an era when the Air Force must fund new fighters, bombers, tankers, trainers, ballistic missiles and more, replacing the weather satellite infrastructure has not gained the traction necessary to generate the funding for a program of record. Investing in that technology, however, could help build an Air Force weather enterprise that, like Mother Nature herself, would be difficult to stop.
“We’re going to figure out how the adversary is going to react to weather so we can take advantage of it and impose a cost,” Williams said. “That’s where weather is going.”