Air Force Fighter Roadmap Projects Slow Growth for F-35 Fleet

The Air Force is projecting relatively limited growth for its main F-35 fleet for the rest of the decade, according to the new fighter roadmap it provided to Congress. That roadmap also calls for the overall fighter fleet to shrink for two more years before starting to grow.

The service did not include the exact number of aircraft it plans to buy each year in the unclassified version of the report, completed in August and made public in October. But it did project changes to fleet size based on procurement, attrition, retirements, and long-term modifications.

For the F-35 in particular, the roadmap shows a base fleet of 344 aircraft in fiscal 2026, followed by increases of:

39 aircraft in 2027
18 in 2028
32 in 2029
39 in 2030

The numbers “do not represent procurement targets but are the desired overall USAF possessed inventory on the ramp,” the Air Force said in text explaining its charts. “Recapitalization of aging platforms due to early lot obsolescence (e.g. F-35) diminishing parts availability (F-35 and F-15E) and other factors will drive procurement of aircraft above the [total aircraft inventory] requirement.”

Still, the projected growth suggests the Air Force won’t be purchasing more than the 48 F-35s it bought in fiscal 2024, to say nothing of the 72 aircraft some experts have suggested.

The fighter roadmap numbers are based on the new “Combat Coded Total Aircraft Inventory” metric, which replaces Primary Mission Aircraft Inventory. CCTAI counts all the fighters the Air Force has, while the previous yardstick didn’t count airplanes that were considered backup inventory or attrition reserve.

The Air Force is setting a priority on upgrading F-35s with Technology Refresh 3 and 4, while the jets equipped with TR-2 “will fall behind,” the report states. Eventually, that will “drive eventual replacement of those aircraft due to low utility for the USAF, compared to newer-block fighter aircraft.”

Air Force officials explained the service’s smaller purchases of the F-35 in the 2010s as due in part to their preference to wait for the fully realized Block 4 version, which had all the capabilities leaders wanted from the Lightning II. The Air Force said it preferred to wait, rather than face a large bill to later retrofit those earlier jets with Block 4 capabilities.

However, TR-3, which underpins the Block 4 upgrades, has encountered delays. And in its 2026 budget request, the Air Force asked for just 24 F-35As. Congress has made no moves to boost that purchase as it has in years past, not even in the massive reconciliation package earlier this year that included billions of extra dollars for other fighter programs like the F-15EX and F-47.

The total fighter inventory roughly matches the pattern for the F-35, with 1,271 fighters overall in 2026, dropping to 1,271 in 2027 and bottoming out at 1,215 in 2028, then rising in 2028-2029 to 1,250 and 1,304, respectively.

The report said the service needs to increase its fighter fleet to 1,558 jets by 2035, which it said can be done if it “maxes out” F-35 production to 100 a year and increases F-15EX acquisitions by 36 per year.

Those first few years of the roadmap sees the divestiture of the A-10 by the end of 2027 and sharp reductions in the F-15C/D and F-15E fleets. The F-15C/D fleet in particular drops from 42 in 2026 to 21 in 20229, and those aircraft remain as “Platinum Eagles” serving as homeland defense jets into the early 2030s. The F-15E Strike Eagle fleet falls from 133 in ’26 to 78 in ’28 and hovers there through the end of the decade.

The F-15EX fleet is the only other named aircraft showing an increase, rising from 27 available in fiscal 2026 to 111 by the end of 2030.  

The Air Force assumes it will be allowed to divest some 32 of its oldest and least-upgraded F-22s, leaving a fleet of 134 jets from fiscal 2026 into the 2030s. The F-16 fleet remains at 488 aircraft throughout the same period.

No figures were supplied for how these numbers will be offset by bringing on the new F-47, data for which was restricted to the classified annex. Even so, the Air Force said in the report that those figures “are still being determined.”

The report did not include Collaborative Combat Aircraft in its tallies of fighter jets, saying CCAs, when they become available, will be “additive” to the fighter inventory.