There is risk in any endeavor: a chance of loss, danger, even harm. In business, it could mean losing money. In combat, human lives.
Geopolitically, decisions about war and peace carry unseen, unmeasurable risks, ripple effects that can stretch around the world. The war in Iran drove up global energy prices. The war in Ukraine fueled a munitions shortage. Operations in one theater can trigger opportunism in another.
When an F-15E was shot down in April over Iran, the resulting scramble to rescue the two crewmembers proved so costly, with at least four aircraft not counting the Strike Eagle lost in the effort, that U.S. leaders feared sending manned aircraft into Iranian airspace.
There is prudence to that decision, but it might also have signaled weakness, undermining deterrence. Overcaution carries its own risks.
In June 1995, Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady’s F-16 was split in two by a Serbian surface-to-air missile during an Operation Deny Flight mission, downing the jet. O’Grady’s whereabouts were unknown.
Unwilling to risk another shootdown, commanders ordered subsequent Deny Flight missions to remain outside Serbian-controlled airspace. O’Grady spent the next five days in hiding, surviving on insects and rainwater, while those looking for him couldn’t get close enough to pick up his radio calls.
But one Airman, Capt. Thomas “T.O.” Hanford, challenged the status quo. Breaking the rules, he flew into enemy airspace, picked up O’Grady’s weak distress call, and ultimately vectored rescue crews to his location. To this day, O’Grady says he would not have survived if not for Hanford’s persistence.
Hanford’s decision to ask forgiveness later rather than seek permission first is prudence of another sort. Call it doing the right thing, going with one’s gut, leaving it all in God’s hands—by whatever name or phrase, this was selfless servant leadership in action.
You can’t build peace through strength without numbers.
Former Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne, who died in October, didn’t put his life on the line, but he did put his convictions ahead of his job and reputation, and paid a price for doing so.
In June 2007, Wynne and then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley were on a collision course with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. With the Iraq occupation going badly, and insurgents inflicting real pain on U.S. forces, Gates desperately sought to stem the losses and reconfigure the military for a different kind of war. He leaned hard on the Air Force and Navy to pay the Army’s growing bills.
Wynne and Moseley, meanwhile, maintaining a clear eye on China’s growing military ambitions, refused to back down on modernization plans. Gates dismissed it all as hubris. He derided what he termed notions “of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war: where the enemy is killed, but our troops and innocent civilians are spared. Where adversaries can be cowed, shocked, or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”
In another speech, Gates acknowledged he was “balancing risk—today’s demands versus tomorrow’s contingencies”—but he dismissed the notion of peer conflict with China.
“I have noticed too much of a tendency toward what might be called ‘Next-War-itis’—the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict,” he said. “In a world of finite knowledge and limited resources, it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms.”
That was then. Today, China’s navy is the largest in the world, and its air force is on its way to surpassing America’s.
Gates, a former CIA analyst, missed the clues in front of him and failed to foresee how China would convert economic power derived from American consumers into military power to be used against American interests.
Wynne stood for what he believed, and when Gates couldn’t convince him to see things differently, he chose to oust Wynne and Moseley.
The recent war in Iran exposed how the degradation begun at that time affects operations today. Canceling the F-22 prematurely made that platform more costly and left the Air Force reliant on aging, less capable jets. It bet the future on F-35 capabilities that didn’t mature as fast as expected. All that contributed to a weaker USAF.
U.S. forces were dominant in Iran—but at a price. To sustain Operation Epic Fury, USAF diverted parts, weapons, and people from every other theater. The endeavor exposed clear gaps in U.S. security.
Air Force leaders understand the challenge. Their fiscal 2026 Long-Term Fighter Force Structure report seeks to plus-up the future force. A year ago, the Air Force targeted 1,369 combat-coded fighters by 2030. This year’s document raises the goal to 1,509 fighters by 2035.
That’s moving in the right direction, but slowly. USAF counts 334 combat coded F-35s today, en route to 502 in 2031 and 600 in 2035—an average gain of less than 27 per year. Add in non-combat jets and that rises to perhaps 36 per year—barely half of what is needed to build a healthy fighter force.
The Air Force numbers meet requirements with what the report terms “moderate risk.”
The report also cites a “low-risk” figure of 1,723 combat-coded fighters—15 percent more.
Recent history would suggest we’ve already experienced “moderate” risk and found it wanting. Gates’ legacy is a force that went to war with too few aircraft and struggled to sustain operations.
The Air Force, having accepted moderate risk atop moderate risk for decades, maintains capability. But the willingness of Airmen and Guardians to pledge life, limb, and time away from home is limited.
If moderate risk means routine 10-month Guard deployments just to fight mid-sized belligerents like Iran, what does a peer fight look like?
American military strategy calls for a sophisticated and powerful deterrent force. But you can’t build peace through strength without numbers.
Americans are largely unaware of the growing threats to their long-term security. They are also unaware of the risk calculations being made on their behalf. If they knew, few would accept “moderate risk.”