On Its Birthday, The Air Force Needs To Fight For What It Deserves

On Sept. 17th, the Air Force celebrated its birthday with pomp, circumstance and cake. Behind the celebration, however, there are dangerous trends seen within the service, including a number of key platforms that are aging out and major expenses about to hit. David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute, says the service needs to stop being polite and start getting real if it is to function as it needs to. As the Air Force Association’s annual conference kicks off this week, Deptula lays out what he wants to hear from top leaders. 

As the US Air Force heads towards its 75th year of existence as a separate service, it faces daunting challenges, having been assigned more missions than the resources it has available to accomplish them. This fact puts the entire nation at risk of not being able to accomplish its National Defense Strategy.

Accordingly, the Department of the Air Force (DAF) requires an increase in the Department of Defense budget share. Time no longer permits beating around the bush to assuage the latest version of joint military political correctness — the threats facing America are too real not to speak plainly and honestly.

The DAF is the smallest and oldest it has ever been. It is in desperate need of modernization and recapitalization at the same time that demand for its capabilities is skyrocketing. Think about the recent Afghanistan evacuation, a push towards “over the horizon” strike capability, rapid response over long distances with high payloads for our Pacific strategy, and adequate munitions inventories to fight in scenarios with over 100,000 aimpoints.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) fiscal guidance does not reflect these demands. In fact, current DoD budget guidance is to cut, instead of growing the resources necessary to ensure the indispensable capabilities provided by the DAF. No joint force operation can be conducted without some element of the DAF being involved. Accordingly, a fully resourced DAF is required to execute the national defense strategy and associated US military operations.

The average age of Air Force aircraft is approaching 30 years, and most cannot penetrate modern enemy air defenses. Specifically, 80 percent of the Air Force fighter force consists of old 4th generation aircraft—only 20 percent of the Air Force fighter force is stealth. If we are to going to deter conflict or win in the event we are forced to fight, that ratio needs to be reversed. The youngest B-52 bomber is 59 years old, and most air refueling tankers were purchased nearly 60 years ago.

It’s not a new problem, of course. Over the past thirty years, the Air Force fighter inventory dropped roughly 55 percent (4,400 to around 2,000). Bomber aircraft fell 57 percent from 327 in 1990 to 140 in 2020. The DAF absorbed the largest budget cuts of all the departments following the Cold War. The Air Force’s procurement funding was cut by over half, losing 52 percent of its acquisition budget. In comparison, the Army and Navy procurement budgets were cut by roughly 30 percent.

In 2018, the DAF reported to the Congress that it required a 24 percent increase in its operational squadrons to meet the demands of the national defense strategy. That analysis is still accurate. Looking to the near future, in FY23, the nuclear recapitalization bow wave will hit the DAF budget like double tidal waves with necessary budget increases for two of the three legs of America’s nuclear triad — the deterrent that has successfully prevented nuclear war for over 75 years. Both the B-21 long-range bomber and the ground-based strategic deterrent (the new intercontinental ballistic missile) will significantly add to the demands on the DAF budget, as critical as they are in the face of China’s rapid nuclear modernization.

The bottom line is that our geriatric Air Force must be modernized and grown to leverage the game-changing technologies and capabilities necessary to compete and win against any adversary.

Perhaps the single biggest impediment to realizing the appropriate levels of funding required to sustain, much less grow, DAF capabilities is the continued adherence to an anachronistic practice of attempting to hide other DoD agency resources inside the DAF budget. As a result, it appears to the Congress and the American people that the Air Force is the highest funded of all the military services — when in fact, it has less funding than the Army, the Navy, and the collective of other DoD defense agencies. Only the Marine Corps and Space Force have smaller budgets. Some arguments against correcting this unnecessary guise are based on assertions that “everybody knows where that money is going.” If that’s the case, then move that allocation of resources to where it belongs — as a separate line item in the DoD budget.

Here is what needs to be accomplished, and hopefully is what we will hear out of the DAF leadership at this week’s annual Air Force Association air, space and cyber conference:

1. Recapitalize the Air Force’s geriatric air combat capacity through sufficient funding, and complete current aircraft programs of record to avoid another modernization death spiral. The DAF has major capacity shortfalls across virtually all its highest priority mission areas, putting in jeopardy the ability to conduct viable joint and coalition force operations.
2. Ensure the Space Force has sufficient funds, manpower, and authorities to integrate the numerous and disparate organizations and agencies with roles in space into the Space Force, to fulfill its mandate of providing trained and ready space capabilities to combatant commanders.
3. Provide transparency for decision makers to better understand the fiscal predicament facing all the services by moving the $38 billion annual pass-through funds, over which the Air Force has absolutely no control, to a separate category in the defense-wide budget.
4. Advocate for the DoD to adopt and apply cost-per-effect force planning analysis to ensure it makes the most prudent investment decisions across all the services, due to the fact that other services are offering competing solutions to achieve the same mission objectives.
5. If the DoD is going to be resource capped for the future, then the only way to get more “bang for the buck” and to achieve lasting efficiencies for the DoD is by conducting a comprehensive roles and missions review of the armed forces, using cost-per-effect as the baseline measure of merit and award funding accordingly. Only in this way will we be able to ensure viable warfighting options for the combatant commanders and eliminate costly and unnecessary duplications of effort.

Gen. Earle Partridge, the 5th Air Force Commander during the opening of the Korean War, reflected after that war, “One of my biggest failings…has been to take a look at the chips I have and say, how can I best accomplish my mission with what I have? What we should have done was to sit back and scream for more and get what we needed to fight a war and accomplish our mission.”

Gen. Partridge was behind the power curve during the Korean War, with too little of everything. There is a reason why he concluded that straight talk was the best choice. That sentiment is required today to ensure that the Department of the Air Force does not find itself in the same predicament upon the conclusion of the next major conflict.

David A. Deptula, a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, is a retired Air Force lieutenant general with over 3,000 flying hours. He planned the Desert Storm air campaign, orchestrated air operations in the Pacific and during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a senior scholar at the US Air Force Academy.