In a September 2007 Capitol Hill speech, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne warned that “the Air Force is going out of business . . . . [A]t some time in the future, [aircraft] will simply rust out, age out, fall out of the sky.” Coming from the usually understated political appointee, Wynne’s dire assessment amounted to a red cape waved before the Defense Department’s civilian leadership and supporting bureaucracy. Tension mounted as Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley continued to speak out on this topic, and a few months later, ostensibly for unrelated reasons, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired both Wynne and Moseley—the first simultaneous firing of a service secretary and chief of staff in history. Officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense subsequently asked Air Force leaders not to speak publicly about the state of their service. After several outspoken Air Force generals failed to heed the warning and were asked to retire, the problem disappeared from the public sphere.
The problem itself, however, remains. The average age of the refueler and bomber fleet, which forms the foundation of U.S. air power-projection capability, now exceeds fifty years. Most of the Air Force’s fighters were built in the 1970s. Virtually all Air Force aircraft are decades past their planned retirement dates. Technology designed to overcome Vietnam War-era surface-to-air missiles and fighters is becoming obsolete in the face of emerging air-defense capabilities. Air Force bases built half a century ago are poorly placed to meet emerging deterrence missions. Today, a large portion of the Air Force exists only on paper, its aircraft too old to fly in combat but requiring enormous sums to maintain. If current procurement practices continue, the readiness and effectiveness of U.S. airpower will steadily worsen over time, with serious consequences for U.S. national security.
The Air Force’s tailspin began well before Wynne’s remarks in 2007. It began in the early 1990s, when, as the Cold War drew to a close, Congress sought to wring a peace dividend out of the military budget at the same time that a series of Presidents began to call upon the Air Force far more often than programmers had anticipated. Between 1989 and 2003, the United States went to war five times, and throughout most of this period the Air Force also maintained intense operations in no-fly zones over southern and northern Iraq. With limited budgets, the Air Force ate up its seed corn. It spent its recapitalization budget on current operations, expecting to end this practice when the wars ended. But the wars did not end...
Big-ticket procurement decisions generally play out over a course of two to four decades. If the United States continues on its current trajectory, within that period U.S. conventional deterrence will lose much of its value abroad. The United States will not necessarily become incapable of defending its friends, but the costs and risks of doing so will grow much higher. As this occurs, U.S. deterrent threats meant to protect Taiwan, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia, Israel, South Korea, Australia and Japan [what? no Canada?
] will become increasingly unbelievable...
Since the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the Air Force has mainly used jet aircraft to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and airstrikes to support U.S. ground forces. This method has been tactically effective: The vast majority of enemy forces killed in Afghanistan, for example, have been silenced by Navy and Air Force bombs called in by ground forces. Unfortunately, the costs in fuel and maintenance for these actions have been prohibitively high, and even tactical success has not translated into strategic success. For the past few years, the Air Force sought a large fleet of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) that are both better suited to this role and substantially less expensive to operate. This shift of emphasis is wise and should form the basis of the Air Force’s approach to supporting counterinsurgency operations against opponents that do not possess air defenses [what about Canada?
we really don't seem that interested in armed UAVs for such missions, which might also include UN peacekeeping]...
The United States sorely needs those savings. The service plans to continue to rely on legacy Cold War F-15 Eagles and F-16 Falcons supplemented by a small number of fifth-generation F-22 Raptors and, potentially, F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, but this strategy is fiscally unsustainable. Most Eagles and Falcons are already decades past their planned retirement dates, have low mission-capable rates and are expensive to maintain. Even worse, emerging land- and air-based defenses are likely to render them incapable of participating in conventional conflict.
Joint Strike Fighters are more capable on the modern battlefield, but they rely too heavily on stealth at the expense of avionics. The United States plans to build F-35s over the next three decades. Given the rate at which radars and computers in the hands of potential adversaries are improving, those F-35s might not remain effective deterrents for much more than ten or twenty years [emphasis added].
In light of these limitations, the Air Force needs to reopen the F-22 line and fund research into new, possibly hypersonic and unmanned fighters with upgradable engines and computer development paths that can absorb changes in information technology. Today,
the F-35 is approaching the unit cost of the F-22 [emphasis added]; the F-22 is coming off the production line with “zero defects”, something that is unlikely to be the case for the F-35 for many years to come. More importantly, the F-22’s avionics makes it many times more capable than the F-35, even at the F-35’s core missions. In the evolutionary contest between expeditionary airpower and regional air defenses, this capability will almost certainly allow it to remain an effective deterrent for decades longer than the F-35. Beyond the F-22, funding research on a new 6th-generation fighter is a hedge against an unknown future. The Air Force should pay the bill for these new fighters by standing down legacy fighters as new platforms come online...
