A-10s at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey

WASHINGTON: The SASC is demanding the Air Force “strive to” maintain 386 operational squadrons — a major increase of personnel and weapons and money — while limiting the service’s ability to retire aging aircraft, complicating the service’s modernization efforts.

The draft 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which sets policy, specifies the numbers of operational aircraft the Air Force should try to maintain, as well as the minimum number of aircraft the service must retain in the Primary Mission Aircraft Inventory (PMAI). While the authorizers may want the Air Force to get bigger, that will require money, quite a bit of it. There’s been little evidence appropriators will come up with a big spending increase.

“Much like the 350-ship Navy, the 386 squadron Air Force is an aspirational goal at best,” Todd Harrison, director of the Defense Budget Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Breaking D.  “But the bottom line is that the Air Force is not resourced for, and is not likely to receive the resources required to maintain 386 squadrons—unless they redefine what constitutes a squadron.”

At the same time, the Senate defense committee takes aim at what may be the Air Force’s most important modernization effort. Like their counterparts on the other side of Capitol Hill, Senate Armed Services Committee members are skeptical about the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). In effect, SASC is perpetuating the service’s long-running Catch-22 between funding the future and maintaining present capability with ever-more expensive maintenance of outdated equipment.

“More of what we’ve always seen, I’m afraid,” said long-time aircraft analyst Richard Aboulafia, of Teal Group. “The Senate is saddling the service with unsupportable funding requirements. The result is that the difficult choice between sustaining legacy fleets and funding new technology systems gets kicked down the road. And since defense budgets will either plateau or decline, the problem will worsen. But that’s in the future, and kicking problems down the road is easy.”

ABMS construct

The committee’s draft bill would require Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett and Combatant Commanders by April 1 to “develop an analysis of current and future moving target indicator requirements across the combatant commands and operational and tactical level command and control capabilities” that ABMS will “require when fielded.” It would also require that those requirements be certified by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), headed by Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Hyten.

Its draft NDAA goes so far as set specific requirements for minimum numbers of PMIA aircraft — as well as tasking the service to “strive for” those 386 operational squadrons. (The service is currently struggling to maintain 312 operational squadrons.) The PMIA minimums are set as follows:

  • 1,182 Fighter aircraft
  • 190 Attack Remotely Piloted Aircraft
  • 92 Bomber aircraft
  • 412 Tanker aircraft
  • 230 Tactical airlift aircraft
  • 235 Strategic airlift aircraft
  • 84 Strategic Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft
  • 106 Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) aircraft

The Air Force can cut those numbers only if Barrett certifies “that such reduction is justified by the results of the new capability and requirements studies,” and congressional defense committees have 30 days to review that certification. In addition, Barrett determine, on a case-by-case basis to be “no longer mission capable because of mishaps, other damage, or being uneconomical to repair.”

In addition, due to the limited availability of the troubled KC-46 tanker, the SASC restricts the Air Force from divesting KC-10 and KC-135 aircraft “in excess of” the following amounts:

  • 6 KC-10 aircraft, including only 3 from primary mission aircraft inventory (PMAI) in 2021;
  • 12 KC-10 aircraft in 2022; and
  • 12 KC-10 and 14 KC-135 aircraft in 2023.

The HASC’s seapower and projection forces subcommittee, for its part, prohibits the retirement of any KC-135s until 2025.

In its 2021 budget, the Air Force asked to retire 13 KC-135s and 16 KC-10s.

The SASC version of the NDAA requires Barrett to delivery by Oct. 1 a “strategy” for a “complete, one-time solution” to the KC-46 remote visual system (RVS) operational limitations.” However, the SASC would fully fund the program.

KC-46 on Boeing factory floor

HASC’s seapower subcommittee is more specific about its concern that the Air Force is moving to full rate production while concurrently trying to fix all the problems, including the RVS. HASC’s NDAA draft points out the KC-46 has “three category one deficiencies: the remote vision system, the boom telescope actuator, and a new excessive fuel system leak.”

The subcommittee would limit production of the KC-46 to “no more than 12” in 2021 and wants Barrett to brief them by Sept. 1, “before the KC-46A program goes into full rate production,” as to how the service “intends to mitigate the concurrency of development associated with these category one deficiencies with a full rate production decision.” However, the markups released by the HASC so far do not include funding levels.

On top of all that, SASC bars the Air Force from retiring a single A-10: “in order to ensure ongoing capabilities to counter violent extremism and provide close air support and combat search and rescue in accordance with the National Defense Strategy.” This is despite service efforts to let some of the 1970s-era planes go gently into that goodnight. In addition, SASC also would bar retirements of the U-2 spy plane and the RQ-Global Hawk unless and until Combatant Commanders certify that a replacement with equal or better capabilities is available. Likewise, the NDAA draft prohibits the Air Force from divesting any F-15Cs from the European theater until the F-15E/F is ready for use there.

The defense policy body is raising a collective eyebrow at Air Force plans for protecting foreign US sites, mandating that by March 1, 2021, the “Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF), in consultation with the Chief of Staff of the Army (CSA),” shall submit to the congressional defense committees a development and acquisition strategy to procure a capability to protect air bases and prepositioned sites in contested environments highlighted in the National Defense Strategy. The strategy should ensure a solution that is effective against current and emerging cruise missile and advanced hypersonic missile threats.”