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Western Security Collective Unveils Major Doctrine Shift to Deepen ‘Navy-Air-Force’ Integration By Our Defence Correspondent London—A coalition of Western nations, operating under the banner of the Western Security Collective (WSC), has announced a sweeping new military doctrine aimed at fundamentally merging naval and air power capabilities. The initiative, titled Integrated Maritime-Air Supremacy (IMAS), represents one of the most significant bureaucratic and operational reforms in modern defence policy, designed to eliminate traditional inter-service silos and accelerate decision-making in contested global environments. The move underscores the growing strategic imperative among major powers to address the challenges posed by new, high-speed threats—particularly in the maritime domain—which demand real-time coordination between sea and sky assets. The core premise of IMAS is that future conflicts will be defined by the speed of command and the resilience of multi-domain networks, making the traditional separation between naval aviation and dedicated air force long-range strike or surveillance units obsolete. Under the new directive, naval and air component commanders will no longer operate in merely supportive roles to one another, but will instead be required to fuse their respective intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data streams into a single, shared operational picture. This is explicitly intended to counter the proliferation of sophisticated, sea-skimming anti-ship missiles and hostile long-range maritime patrol aircraft. “The nature of contemporary deterrence has changed,” stated General Alistair Vance, the WSC’s Chief of Defence Integration, in a briefing from the alliance's operational headquarters in Brussels. “The time available to react to a threat is now measured in seconds, not minutes.
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To achieve the required lethality and survivability, our naval and air assets must function as one cohesive weapon system, regardless of whether the aircraft belongs to the Navy, the Air Force, or a joint command. IMAS is the technical and doctrinal framework that ensures speed of decision translates immediately into speed of action across the entire maritime battlespace. ” A central pillar of the doctrine involves mandated cross-training and personnel exchanges. Senior officers from the Naval Staff will serve mandatory tours within the Joint Force Air Component Command (JFACC) structure, while Air Force fighter and surveillance pilots will be cross-assigned to naval carrier groups and maritime patrol squadrons. Furthermore, the WSC is heavily investing in a shared Cloud-based Command and Control (C2) architecture, moving away from incompatible legacy systems that historically slowed data transfer and restricted the cross-targeting of threats. This common operating environment aims to enable an Air Force F-35 operating hundreds of miles inland to seamlessly receive targeting data from a remote naval destroyer and share its own surveillance feeds with a submarine commander. However, the road to full integration is fraught with significant institutional and technical hurdles. Defence analysts note that while the concept of "jointness" has been a goal for decades, true integration often meets resistance from service cultures protective of budgets and traditional roles.
Dr. Eleanor Quinn, a Senior Fellow at the Global Security Institute, noted the inherent difficulties involved. “This level of navy-air-force merging is strategically necessary, especially for maintaining supremacy in areas like the North Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific,” Dr. Quinn explained. “But integration is intensely political. You are asking two large, deeply entrenched bureaucracies to cede authority and sacrifice proprietary assets for the greater good of the joint force. The key challenge will be standardising training protocols and achieving true data interoperability—not just making two different computer systems talk, but ensuring they speak the same tactical language and follow the same rules of engagement without ambiguity. ” Funding for the necessary digital overhaul is also expected to be a major point of contention in upcoming defence budget reviews across the WSC member states.
Reports suggest that the full implementation of the IMAS architecture, including the integration of new unmanned surface and air vehicles (USVs and UAVs) into the joint network, could cost hundreds of billions over the next decade. These systems are crucial to the new concept, as they are designed to extend the sensor and strike range of carrier battle groups and land-based air defence networks far beyond current capabilities, creating a highly distributed and difficult-to-target force. In practice, the doctrine is expected to revolutionise anti-submarine warfare (ASW). Currently, ASW efforts rely heavily on dedicated naval frigates and specialised maritime patrol aircraft. Under IMAS, the WSC plans to integrate the detection capabilities of these naval units with the deep-strike capabilities of strategic bombers and Air Force reconnaissance drones, allowing for quicker prosecution of underwater threats identified by naval sonar arrays. The WSC leadership has set an ambitious target of achieving Initial Operational Capability (IOC) for the IMAS framework within the next three years, focusing first on joint logistics and common intelligence picture generation. Full operational readiness, capable of deploying an integrated navy-air-force task force anywhere in the world, is projected for the end of the decade. The shift represents a clear acknowledgment that the future of naval and air power lies not in separate campaigns, but in their seamless, unified operation.
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