“Airpower, anytime” is, as Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin recently declared, a promise the Air Force must uphold for the nation. “We have to sustain and maintain the ability to go anytime, anywhere in the densest threat environment and put ‘warheads on foreheads’ anywhere the President might want.” He is right.
The roles and missions executed by Air Force warriors are essential to the nation’s security. Yet after three decades of constant demand and minimal replenishment, our Air Force is too small and too old. It needs to be rebuilt. The Trump administration and Congress must fund that modernization to ensure that the Air Force is sufficiently equipped, sized, and ready to fight and win when necessary. The nation’s security depends on it.
Air Force Underfunded for Decades
The challenges facing the Air Force stem from executing non-stop combat operations since 1990—longer than any other service. Operations Desert Storm, Northern and Southern Watch, Deliberate Force, Allied Force, Noble Eagle, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Unified Protector, Inherent Resolve, and additional engagements demanded much from the Air Force. Other services participated in some of these, but only the Air Force engaged in all of them. Post-Cold War budgets failed to keep pace with the demands on the Service. In the wake of the Berlin Wall falling, Department of the Air Force procurement funding plunged 52 percent, deeper than cuts to the Navy, at 32 percent or the Army at 40 percent.
Later, the Air Force became the bill-payer for U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq: In the 20 years after the 9/11 attacks, national investment in the Army outstripped spending on the Air Force by $1.3 trillion; spending on the Navy was over $900 billion greater than the Air Force. Further spending reductions spurred by the 2011 Budget Control Act cut billions more from the Air Force, undermining readiness, reducing capacity, and slowing modernization.
Virtually every Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force for the past several decades has identified the risks of the consistent underfunding of the Department of the Air Force.
“Budget pressures are forcing us to be a smaller Air Force,” said Secretary Michael W. Wynne in 2007.
“We can’t continue to cut force structure to pay the cost of readiness and modernization, or we risk being too small to succeed,” said Chief of Staff Mark Welsh in 2015.
“The Air Force is too small for the missions demanded of it,” said Secretary Heather Wilson in 2017.
Doing more with less for too long will break any military service. The Air Force is on that precipice. It is now the smallest, oldest, and least prepared in its entire history—a dangerous reality given the scale and scope of the threat environment. Worse, Biden’s last budget plans—still in effect—have the Air Force scheduled to get even smaller by 2030. Now Gen. Allvin has made it clear that “America needs more Air Force.”
At the end of the Cold War in 1989, the Air Force had more than 4,300 fighters; today it has just over 2,000—less than half as many. The Air Force had 410 bombers in 1989, but just 140 today—over 65 percent less. Airlifters, aerial refuelers, command and control types, plus intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft are also down substantially.
It is not just that the Air Force is smaller. It is also less ready. On any given day, only 54 percent of all of its aircraft are available due to maintenance issues and parts shortages worsened by ever increasing age. Apply that reality and those 2,000 fighters and 140 bombers drop to just 1,093 and 76, respectively. The fact is, when needed, 46 percent of all USAF aircraft cannot do what combatant commanders need them to do. On top of this, concurrent demands in multiple theaters—including homeland defense, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific—take a small Air Force inventory and spread it thinner. Not only do combatant commanders not have enough in their Air Force components to meet peacetime missions, but in a time of war, the capacity gaps could prove catastrophic.
Risk of War Dramatically Increasing
Yet today, the risk of major war is greater than at any time since the Berlin Wall fell. The U.S. and China are increasingly locked in a rivalry that spans economic, technological, and military spheres. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the most significant war in Europe since World War II, and Moscow’s rhetoric around nuclear weapons makes the situation even more precarious. The combination of heightened geopolitical tensions between the U.S., China, and Russia, regional flashpoints, and new threats like cyber warfare, all contribute to an intensely dangerous international environment. The risk of miscalculation, aggressive posturing, and the breakdown of diplomatic channels all increase the potential for conflict.
Since the end of the Cold War, Air Force leaders across multiple decades received insufficient funding to buy enough new aircraft. Divestments of aging airframes outpaced new aircraft procurement for too long. The service now finds itself in a force structure nosedive. In the Biden administration’s 2025 budget request, the Air Force sought to divest 250 aircraft, while buying just 91. That math becomes terminal at some point, which is how the nation risks losing the next war.
Rebuild the Air Force America Requires
Among the Air Force’s 140 bombers, just 19 are stealthy B-2s that can rapidly strike targets anywhere on the planet with virtually no fear of detection. The largest USAF bomber fleet is comprised of 76 B-52s—jets that average 63 years old. Only 28 percent of the Air Force fighters are fifth-generation aircraft, which possess the stealth, sensors, processing power, electronic warfare capabilities, and connectivity necessary to survive in the modern battlespace. The mobility and training fleets are also long in the tooth: T-38 trainers and KC-135 tankers predate the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, and airlifters are on average a quarter century old.
Getting healthy will involve accelerating acquisition rates for aircraft like the F-35, F-15EX, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), KC-46, T-7, and others. The Air Force must also continue to modernize types like the MQ-9, F-22, F-16, B-52, C-5, C-130, C-17, and KC-135. On top of this, the Air Force needs to recapitalize two legs of the nuclear triad with the Sentential intercontinental ballistic missile and the B-21 bomber.
Rebuilding the Air Force involves more than new equipment. Underfunding is also causing dangerous risk when it comes to the readiness of pilots and other crew members. At the recent AFA Warfare Symposium, Gen. Allvin shared a chart showing that the Air Force has been unable to meet its total “required flying hours” since 2017—gradually degrading overall pilot proficiency. With fewer aircraft available, pilots cannot fly the training sorties needed to maintain mission qualifications.
Current Air Force leaders, like so many of their predecessors, are committed to fixing these deficiencies, but they cannot do so without additional resources. President Trump’s goal of peace through strength demands an Air Force with the capacity, capability, and readiness to meet our collective combatant command requirements for America’s defense. This is not just for the Air Force’s sake—it’s about ensuring the U.S. does not lose the next war. No form of U.S. joint power projection is possible without some element of the Department of the Air Force.
Gen. Allvin sums up what is at stake: “I think we need more options for the President. And that’s what more Air Force provides. It means everything from rapid response all the way to decisive victory.”
It is time to heed this call for action before it is too late. It is time to rebuild the Air Force the nation requires.
David A. Deptula is a retired Air Force lieutenant general and dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and Douglas A. Birkey is the Mitchell Institute’s Executive Director.