The UPL, which was obtained by Air Force Magazine but not released by the department, lists eight priorities the service wants but couldn’t afford in its 2023 budget request, released in late March. The F-35 is fifth on that list.
Budget
The Air Force will retire or divest 250 aging aircraft in 2023 if given a greenlight by Congress, and acquire 82 others.
The Air Force plans to divest nearly 650 aircraft over the coming five years while purchasing fewer than 250, reducing its fleet by exactly 400 tails, a pair of congressmen said during House Armed Services Committee hearings April 27. Those cuts would include a much-reduced ...
The manned fighter aircraft that will form the centerpiece of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance program will cost hundreds of millions of dollars per plane, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told members of Congress on April 27—but the service can reduce costs in ...
The Air Force expects to spend close to $20 billion on producing the B-21 Raider through fiscal 2027, but it doesn’t say how many of the advanced bombers it will buy for that money. Including research and development, USAF will spend more than $32 billion ...
Although the overall military construction request decreased slightly from fiscal 2022 to 2023, spending on infrastructure for the Air Force's new intercontinental ballistic missile more than quadrupled, according to newly released budget documents. In 2022, the department requested $2.38 billion for projects across its Active-duty, ...
The Air Force slashed the F-35 buy in its 2023 budget request to just 33 jets—15 fewer than it bought in 2022 and 27 fewer than 2021, saying it preferred to spend that money on other needed modernization programs and wait until the Block 4 ...
The Air Force may be planning to divest more than 1,400 airplanes over the next five years, with a net reduction of more than 1,000 after new ones are added in, a Nebraska Senator said in a budget hearing April 7. The Air Force would ...
With many lawmakers already pushing to increase the top line of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2023 budget, top defense officials acknowledged April 5 that their budget request was based off inflation rates that were “incorrect.” At the same time, they argued, the $773 billion request would ...

