When the balloon goes up in time of war, history has shown strategically important fixed targets take a beating. Just ask the Iraqi Air Force about January 17, 1991, the Pakistani Air Force about May 7, 2025, or Admiral Kimmel about the morning of December 7, 1941.

Breaking news! The enemy has the precise coordinates of every two-mile runway in the world, knows the location of a majority of our fuel farms, and possesses the stick to reach them.

Carl von Clausewitz — a scary brilliant 18th-century Prussian General — called a force’s source of strength from which everything flows the center of gravity (COG). You don’t need to slog through his On War to spot air power COGs: runways, fuel farms, hangars. They’re at the top of the enemy’s Day One target list and will attract missile salvos like magnets.

Staticity is vulnerability. And vulnerability is fatal.

Early in the 20th century, U.S. Navy ships pulled into established ports to refuel and resupply, making the U.S. Fleet predictable and targetable. Ensign and eventual 5-star Admiral Chester Nimitz saw this as a problem and pushed a radical idea: replenish at sea. That single logistics shift changed naval warfare, and today, the U.S. Navy reloads, refuels, and resupplies while moving at sea — anywhere on the planet. This mobility confounds the enemy’s ability to target the Navy’s supply lines.

There is a saying in naval fighter aviation, and I have to assume in the Air Force too: “speed is life.” Sure, Mav and Goose in Top Gun “felt the need for speed” but that was because a Hollywood writer put the cheesy line in the script. Their goofy pre-flight high-fives convey that in aerial combat, a fighter aircraft that gets slow is predictable and becomes a “missile sponge,” which can result in getting shot down to become a Prisoner-of-War, eating shitty pumpkin soup in a 4’x4’ cell with no windows. The absolute worst case for getting slow is becoming a killed-in-action statistic. Fighter pilots who want to see their families again and not go on a pumpkin soup diet must keep a “bag of knots” (stay wicked fast) on the jet, stay unpredictable, and attack and re-attack viciously.

A 5th/6th Gen fighter at altitude carrying a “bag of knots” has game and is the definition of lethality. But when you chock and chain that jet on deck at zero knots, the game changes. It’s the epitome of vulnerability. Mobility is more than a tactic. It’s life-saving unpredictability that gives the enemy the skull-splitting headache of targeting uncertainty.

Want to get a close-up view of “hypersonic missile rain”? Cool. Go hang out on a two-mile runway or a 200-acre concrete tarmac flight line on Night One of the fight. You might as well be standing in a coffin.

A peer adversary doesn’t have to beat our pilots. They just have to keep them on the ground by cratering runways and annihilating fuel farms. A few precision airfield impacts from a Mach 6 missile can turn the best pilots in the world into side-line advisors and our fighter aircraft into a multi-billion-dollar air power park.

What are some options? Beef up airfield defenses. Sure, and that’s in work, but how long will that take? And at what cost?

Or…we can pull back, aka “retrograde” (a fancy word to not sound like the dreaded “R****t” word) to stay clear of the archer’s arrow. But this adds more miles to the “1000-mile problem” and increases transit time and fuel requirements. A retrograde also conflicts with how we like to impose our will by being up in the enemy’s grill.

Shield AI has developed a unique answer: runway-independent airpower. A vertical-takeoff/landing (VTOL), fighter-class aircraft that launches from roads, clearings, or underway vessels. Mobile, lethal, kick ass, X-BAT is an “airfield-in-a-box” that can project legit air power from basically anywhere. You can spend a cazilion dollars on integrated point defense systems. Or you can spend $100,000 on a truck to move your airfield wherever you want every 15-30 minutes.

Shield AI’s X-BAT is a bad-ass autonomous combat platform that smashes the status quo and shitcans the needs for traditional basing. It’s a multi-mission aircraft built around a thrust-vectored strike fighter engine. This is an air-to-air and air-to-surface killing vehicle built for the future of war.

It launches straight up from a mobile launch and recovery vehicle (LRV), a towable transporter-erector-launcher that reduces runway length from 12,000 feet to just 40 feet. After liftoff, it transitions to forward flight and 60 seconds later levels off in the high fifties. X-BAT cruises at high subsonic speeds and is a 2000+ nautical mile solution to the 1000-mile problem. With four internal weapons hard points and two external weapons racks, X-BAT carries loadouts that match or exceed most manned fighters. It runs on the proven, powerful, and reliable GE F110 engine, the same afterburning beast in the F-16 and F-15 (and the F-14B/D back in the day). Slick, X-BAT can fly 3000 miles.

No tankers? No runway? No problem. X-BAT doesn’t need them.

Each LRV carries ground power, starter gear, and exhaust plume blast deflection. It can be towed with a truck, loaded in a C-130, or rolled on-off a ship. Set up, launch, relocate, repeat. You can’t kill what won’t sit still. For underway operations, folded wings reduce ramp size by a third, so three X-BATs fill the footprint of one legacy fighter.

X-BAT’s secret-squirrel autonomy magic sauce is Hivemind. Shield AI’s digital pilot flies X-BAT like a salty wingman who really paid attention during the 60-minute mission brief and rehearsed the mission a thousand times.

A fighter pilot’s reaction time is around 250 milliseconds (a quarter second for the millisecond conversion challenged), which is an eternity for an AI Pilot. In that quarter-second, Hivemind can process the battlespace, evaluate hundreds of courses of action, and execute the best one — without hesitation, fatigue, or fear. It knows how to win.

Under a single human-ON-the-loop operator, multiple X-BATs execute missions in denied environments, so when GPS goes dark and the electronic spectrum boils up, they don’t start sucking their thumb, they press on. Denial does not lead to defeat.

Because X-BAT runs on proven parts and a common, reliable engine, sustainment is very manageable. Flight-hour cost sits closer to an attack helo than a stealth jet. You don’t need a hangar the size of a football field or a battalion of contractors, just a handful of maintainers and a laptop will do. This is fighter-class lethality with NASCAR pit row turn-around times.

Land and sea-based VTOL airpower will substantially expand the United States’ axes of attack and give the enemy hundreds of potential X-BAT points of origin to consider. Their threat sector becomes 1000s of miles wider and 1000s of miles deeper, which dilutes their intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) effectiveness and ramps up strategic decisional uncertainty. Having the enemy mired in analysis paralysis is EXACTLY what we want. The enemy will see X-BAT ghosts and commit whack-a-mole missile launches into LRV launch sites that are already gone.

X-BAT isn’t a solo act. It plugs straight into today’s joint and coalition networks — Link-16, JADC2, JFN, and whatever acronym comes next year or even next decade. It can fly as a raging single, an Electronic Warfare escort, or the most experienced wingman on the planet.

X-BAT operates from an aircraft carrier, an amphib, a destroyer, or a pickle ball court anywhere in the world.

This is airpower that gets off the bullseye, moves at the speed of AI and makes decisions quicker than the battlefield changes. No airfields, no crew rest, no fear. You operate from where you need, hit what matters, and reposition before the enemy can hit back. When the next war rolls, there won’t be time to build bases, get diplomatic clearance, or fix runways. It’s mobility or mortality.

I spent 32 years flying off of nuclear-powered airfields that moved through the water at 30+ MPH, so mobility and survivability were a part of my life for three decades. I’ve flown fighter missions over Iraq and Afghanistan and watched air power flow in and out of multiple theaters, and X-BAT brings that same speed and violence but now with lethal autonomy and artificial intelligence.

X-BAT gives military leadership their own dynamic, morphing network of airfields and potentially hundreds of “aircraft carriers” with software purpose built to protect service members, savage the enemy, and give our adversary’s pause. When the arrows start flying and the fixed targets start dying, remember…concrete is a coffin; mobility is life.

X-BAT is badass, and it’s how we will win the next war.

About the Author:

J.J. “Yank” Cummings is the Senior Director, Strategic Engagement for Navy Programs at Shield AI. A retired Navy Captain and TOPGUN graduate, he spent 32 years as a fighter pilot, aircraft carrier Captain and leader in strike fighter aviation. He flew F-14 Tomcats and FA-18F Super Hornets on five overseas combat deployments, commanded Strike Fighter Squadron 11, and later served as Executive Officer of USS NIMITZ and Commanding Officer of both USS ANCHORAGE and the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, USS GERALD R. FORD. He was also the first Technical Advisor for Top Gun: Maverick. After transitioning to industry, J.J. worked for Boeing Defense before joining Shield AI.