Modern air superiority is won in the air, but it is generated and sustained on the ground. Deploying a squadron of combat aircraft to a forward operating location requires simultaneous movement of diverse support assets. This includes Ground Power Units (GPUs), hydraulic benches, jet air starters and weapons loaders, among others. While combat aircraft fly directly to their destinations, their supporting aerospace ground equipment (AGE) must travel via strategic or tactical airlift. Whether it travels easily depends on choices made long before it ever reaches a ramp.
The primary challenge in this process stems from conflicting design priorities. The flightline environment demands equipment with compact wheelbases, tight manoeuvrability around airframes, low profiles to clear aircraft surfaces, and robust manufacturing using heavy materials to withstand jet blast and the elements. Airlift demands the opposite: high ground clearance to climb steep ramps, wide tracks for stability, minimal weight and a uniform footprint that locks into the aircraft’s cargo handling system. Equipment optimised for one is, almost by definition, poorly suited to the other.
The friction between equipment geometry and airlift capacity is not merely an engineering inconvenience; it is a direct threat to NATO’s core operational doctrine: Agile Combat Employment (ACE). Developed to counter peer adversary anti-access/area-denial capabilities, the ACE concept discards an air force’s reliance on large, centralised main operating bases in favour of a highly distributed network of smaller, austere forward operating locations. Under this philosophy, success hinges on two metrics: rapid redeployment as conditions dictate and the ability to project combat power quickly once in place. AGE bottlenecks directly compromise both pillars of the ACE philosophy.
The first penalty falls on agility. When a distributed deployment depends on cumbersome equipment like a hydraulic bench or older jet air starters, the requirement for manual shoring, wooden heel blocks and slow winch configurations introduces delays precisely when delays are least affordable. If an airfield must be evacuated under threat, a complex loading process leaves aircraft and personnel exposed on the ramp.
The second is a volumetric tax on combat readiness. Because a single GPU or weapons loader consumes two pallet positions rather than one, space is taken from ammunition, spare parts or personnel. Planners are forced to choose between delaying the deployment of combat aircraft to their forward operating location while awaiting delivery of heavy maintenance equipment or launching detachments of personnel and aircraft that arrive without the tools needed to sustain high sortie rates. These penalties are not abstractions. They are the product of specific, physical constraints: at the ramp, on the pallet, and in the restraint system. Each is worth examining.
The first obstacle in the airlift pipeline occurs at the threshold of the aircraft: the cargo ramp. Loading heavy, small-wheeled machinery using the aircraft’s internal winch or a towing vehicle introduces severe geometric limitations. The first difficulty is the crest itself. As a vehicle transitions from a steep ramp to the horizontal cargo floor, its undercarriage is vulnerable to striking the apex of the ramp. Low-profile, specialised machinery designed for constant operation on a flat surface aircraft ramp suffers from extremely low ground clearance. This design trait makes it very difficult to ascend an aircraft ramp without high-centring.
Wheel size compounds the problem. Smaller wheels create sharp approach and departure angles. Older models of jet air starter and standard GPUs feature compact, high-pressure tyres, optimised for flat concrete hangars but poorly suited to handle the abrupt break-over angles of aircraft ramps. While newer iterations feature larger tyres to improve ramp accessibility, operational inertia and wider safety margins often prevent crews from utilising direct drive-on loading.
Crews work around these limits with field expedients such as step shoring and custom heel blocks. For example, some hydraulic benches require precisely placed wooden shoring blocks to artificially modify the ramp angle during winching. However, relying on these manual adjustments slows loading times, introduces human error and increases risk in high-tempo deployment environments.
If the ramp is the first obstacle, the cargo floor is the second. To standardise loading and protect aircraft floors from highly concentrated wheel loads, logistics units often rely on standard military air cargo pallets. This practice introduces a significant trade-off between operational speed and aircraft volumetric efficiency. Pre-securing cargo onto pallets allows logistics teams to build, weigh, and secure loads before the aircraft arrives. This method minimises aircraft turnaround times.
Many critical AGE assets, like hydraulic benches, exceed the length or weight capacity of a single platform. Logistics crews must link two or more pallets together to form ‘married’ pallets. But while married pallets solve the footprint issue, they create a major spatial penalty, halving the return on that space. This reduction in capacity forces logistics planners to split deployments across multiple flights, which increases fuel costs, expands the operation’s footprint and delays tactical readiness.
Once inside the aircraft, cargo is exposed to severe dynamic forces during take-off, flight turbulence, and tactical landings. It must be restrained to withstand extreme forward, aft and lateral forces, along with increased gravitational stress.
Wheeled rolling stock presents a distinct problem for loadmasters. Equipment riding on pneumatic tyres or suspension systems is prone to bouncing when exposed to turbulence, inducing slack in tie-down chains, creating the risk of cargo loads shifting in flight. Low-clearance profiles compound this risk, making it difficult to run chains from equipment tie-down rings to the aircraft anchor points at proper restraint angles. Palletising these units directly isolates their suspension systems. The remedy, it turns out, is married pallets, the very practice that costs so much space. By winching the asset onto married pallets and chaining it directly to the pallet’s perimeter ring system, crews can ensure the load behaves as a single rigid mass. The assembly can then safely lock into the aircraft’s cargo floor rails.
Ultimately, the challenge is not to develop better loading techniques; it is to design more agile and adaptable AGE. The equipment must function within two different mobility regimes, yet it is currently designed for only one. Should equipment continue to be designed and built solely for flightline use, airlift operations will continue to absorb the delays, workarounds and volumetric penalties described above, and the agility that ACE demands will remain out of reach. Closing that gap means treating aircraft generation and support equipment as primary air-cargo assets from the outset, with geometry, weight distribution and restraint interfaces suited to loading, transport, and unloading while preserving the attribute that matters most: the capacity to generate sorties in an agile combat environment.
True combat readiness is achieved only when the equipment required to arm a missile or power a cockpit can move from a hangar floor to an aircraft fuselage with zero modification, zero shoring and zero wasted volumetric space. This logistical edge is one of NATO’s new frontiers, and the Alliance will hold it only if it can move support equipment to the point of need as readily as it moves the aircraft and personnel. One of the questions for this panel is whether the Alliance is prepared to treat deployability as a design requirement rather than an afterthought, and what it will cost if it does not.
