Air Dominance is out. Air Denial is the new Airpower goal?

 via Defense News

Through a strategy of air denial, the United States would not seek to gain air superiority but instead work with allies and partners to implement a smarter defense-in-vertical depth approach, layering the effects of cyber disruptions, electromagnetic jamming, ground-based air defenses, drones and counter-air operations in increasing degrees of strength, from higher to lower altitudes.

Here 

Wow.

You do know what this really means don't you?  It means that the Air Force is (and consider this a rollout of the new concept) giving up on the idea of air superiority against a peer threat (namely China).

Instead of seeking air superiority or the more arrogant form...air dominance, they're lowering expectations and telling us all (to include American Ground Forces) that air denial will have to be enough.

This is huge.

US ground forces should prepare poste haste for the reality that they're going to face not only artillery, missile artillery and drones...BUT ALSO air attacks by manned aircraft.

Can you imagine the carnage that a Chinese equivalent of a B-52 arc light strike would have on an armored, mech or infantry division?

Is the nation even capable of bouncing back from a massive attack on our ground forces (because the Air Force couldn't stop them) from the air that eradicated an entire division?

Heads would roll in the Pentagon.

Note.  This article is pushing the deterrence narrative but the reality is that if deterrence doesn't work then the fight is on.