Report: Restoring Air Force to Dominance Will Take Sustained $20-$30 Billion Per Year

To get the Air Force back to the level of dominance it possessed during the Cold War will cost tens of billions of dollars a year; funds urgently needed to rebuild mission capable rates, pilot proficiency, spares stockpiles, and the sheer numbers of aircraft to deter or fight a peer-level war, according to a new paper from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Simply put, “we need money now,” said John “JV” Venable, a retired Air Force colonel and a senior fellow at Mitchell. Venable authored the report, titled “Winning the Next War: Overcoming the Air Force’s Capacity, Capability and Readiness Crisis.”

“While the Air Force has become smaller, older, and less ready to confront today’s security challenges, our adversaries have grown their capacity, invested in new airpower technologies and boosted their readiness. These opposing realities are very dangerous,” added ret. Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute.

The Air Force needs “money to move over into the [weapon system sustainment] accounts, into the maintenance manning accounts, into the procurement accounts,” Venable said. He said research and development funding is far out of balance with what’s needed to put operational iron on the ramp, and urged that the Air Force shift an immediate $8 billion from R&D to procurement and operations and maintenance accounts.

“We need to … start getting healthy as fast as we possibly could, because you can only digest so much, so fast,” he said. “That’s for the first year. The years beyond, it’s going to take congressional intervention with much more money in order to get up to 72 F-35s, to get up to 20 B-21s, in order to get up to 20 F-15EXs, and then do all of the other things, with regard to readiness and manpower. It’s going to take another $20 to $30 billion a year. Some of that can come out of RDT&E but that other money has got to come from Congress.”

Tracking annual growth or decline in major air forces, the paper shows that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force is almost “all new,” Venable said at a Sept. 5 event rolling out the report. The PLAAF is also well supported in terms of parts, maintainers, and flying hours for its combat pilots. What’s more, it is continuing to grow at numbers that threaten to overwhelm the U.S.

By contrast, USAF pilots are getting barely enough hours to be combat proficient, Venable said, a factor driven by low aircraft readiness, in turn depressed by insufficient spare parts and maintainers. There aren’t enough pilots or new aircraft, and the paper urges a radical infusion of cash to start rebuilding the airpower needed for competition with the likes of China and Russia.

The level of flying hours Air Force combat pilots get is now well below the level flown by Soviet pilots during the Cold War, a number U.S. officials considered risibly inadequate at the time.

During the late 1980s through late 1990s, Air Force combat pilots averaged 16 flying hours per month and were rated as “peer war ready.” That fell to about 10 hours a month—“minimally combat mission ready”—in the mid-2010s. Five hours a month is considered “basic mission capable,” and that’s what most combat pilots have been getting since 2020. Venable said that at that rate, mistakes and accidents increase and proficiency in all aspects of the mission suffers.

The Air Force fighter fleet’s average age is 26 years; a slight improvement from several years ago, but Venable said that’s less because of buying new aircraft and more because the oldest fighters have been retired without replacement. About 24 percent of the U.S. fighter fleet are fifth-generation jets. By contrast, the PLAAF’s fighter fleet averages 8.6 years and is about 20 percent fifth-gen. By virtue of being young, the PLAAF fleet is likely to have a mission capability rate of about 90 percent, whereas the U.S. Air Force averages less than 59 percent. That number—several years old—is suspect, too, because the Air Force has stopped providing detailed MC rate information, Venable said.

In 2017—the last year comprehensive information was available—only four of 36 active duty units were “C1,” meaning they were rated as capable of executing all wartime missions. Nearly all the rest were in some way “C4,” meaning they required some additional resources to perform their assigned wartime mission.

He also noted that the gross numbers of Air Force aircraft are deceptive, because only those that are “combat-coded” are actually available for combat. Others in depot, training, or test may contribute to overall inventories but are not deployable, he said.

Today, the Air Force has just 750 combat-coded fighters and 121 combat-coded bombers, Venable said. Those must be parsed out among various theaters, with some 520 available for the Pacific. In contrast, China has 1,142 fighters and 197 bombers, and the quality of those airframes is increasing.  

If the U.S. has to confront the Chinese, “we’re going to have to muster everything we’ve got, and we’ll be facing odds that we’ve never known,” Venable said. “Back in the 1980s we had one major peer [adversary], one major global threat to deal with. Today, we’ve got … four, and we’ve got four different theaters that would actually be drawing assets potentially away from this fight, which means those numbers, 520 fighters would probably winnow away to something less than that. This airpower differential is critical.”

The paper argues that, among other moves, the Air Force should quit its “divest to invest” pattern of retiring older aircraft to pay for the development of new gear. Any combat aircraft considered “viable” should be retained until new iron is available to bolster the number of platforms available for a fight, Venable said.

Retired Gen. Mark Kelly, former head of Air Combat Command, said he agrees with Venable’ remarks about the first steps to reversing the Air Force’s decline.

“Step one is the readiness of the current force,” he said at the report rollout. The “readiness reset” must begin with “aircraft availability and maintenance manpower,” the number of “five-level” maintainers available to work on airplanes, and a sufficient inventory of parts for them to keep aircraft up and running. For Kelly, that would be the priority; making the existing force more available and combat-ready.

“Item two would be our sensor weapons [and] electronic warfare improvements. And then I would say, in a couple of years, what I really like to see is the robust and resilient, long range kill chain sensor” communications.

He noted that a recent air skirmish between Pakistan and India is instructive about the importance of networked sensors, and why even older aircraft can be lethal.

“That offers a really good insight into PRC modernization,” Kelly said. “You take a fourth-gen aircraft like the … Pakistan J-10, and you provide it with a fifth-gen sensor and comms architecture onboard and off board to ensure they go into a fight with information superiority. And then you add to it a fifth-gen weapon, like the PL-15. … It’s formidable.”

That threat, Kelly added, highlights how the E-7 Wedgetail airborne warning and command aircraft and the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile “are key. We’ve got to have better information dominance” and the weapons to make it meaningful.