If Congress does not pass a new budget by April 30, the Department of the Air Force—along with other federal agencies—will see their budget slashed one percent from fiscal 2023 levels, a cut of billions of dollars from the planned 2024 budget. Such a result would be “catastrophic” to the department’s efforts to modernize, already years behind schedule due to slow congressional action, acting Air Force undersecretary Kristyn Jones said Jan. 24.
The sequester caps were implemented as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed last June, in an effort to ensure lawmakers passed a timely budget. Instead, Congress has repeatedly passed continuing resolutions, which keep funding levels frozen at the previous year’s level, to keep the government open. The latest CR for the Pentagon expires March 8.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Jones said a one percent reduction in funds relative to fiscal 2023 levels would be “pretty catastrophic” for Air Force modernization.
“For us, going to the ‘23 [spending levels] minus one percent … is a $13 billion decrease in buying power, and that’s not adjusting for inflation,” she said, quoting a figure that covers both the Air Force and Space Force. “It impacts 89 new starts, cancels $2.8 billion in Space Force growth, impacts seven national security space launches, 34 construction projects that would not happen. I could go on and on.
“And then, because of the fact that we’ve had a really historic increase in our pay for this year, both military and civilian, we’ve had to absorb that already, starting at the beginning of this calendar year. And so that requires us to make even bigger impacts in the non-pay areas.”
This reduction would frustrate the Air Force’s efforts to keep pace with China, Jones said. Quoting Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, she noted that the Air Force has lost four years out of the last 12 due to continuing resolutions and other budgetary delays, time that Kendall often points out is not recoverable in a great power competition.
Lt. Gen. Richard G. Moore Jr., Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, said the Air Force share of the $13 billion cut is $8.8 billion, and the sequester “is shaping up to look much like 2013 did,” when the Budget Control Act slammed the Air Force’s spending power for acquisition, operations, and sustainment.
“A decade later, we’re still not past that,” he said, referring to lingering effects of that budget reduction.
The timing compounds the problem, Moore added.
“By the time this implements, we’ll be halfway through the fiscal year, but the number doesn’t change. So that means the last two quarters of this fiscal year, we’ll have to find $4.4 billion [of] things that we thought we were going to be able to do, that we now can’t.” Those effects range from deferred but needed military construction to program advancement, he said.
“It will take us a long time to get past this. The combat capability that we need to field in order to stay relevant and to try and keep up with the pacing threat, [those things are] not possible under fiscal guidance like this,” Moore argued.
Sentinel
While the threat of sequestration looms, one of the Air Force’s most expensive modernization efforts faces another threat—last week, the Air Force announced that the Sentinel ICBM program will cost 37 percent more than expected and take at least two years longer than previous projections. Now in breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, the program needs certification from the Secretary of Defense to not be canceled.
Yet Moore said the effort is too critical to national defense to be delayed and will be funded. However, the nuclear modernization “bow wave” will slip to the right as a result, he added.
Asked about the Sentinel cost and schedule breach, Jones noted that the Air Force is modernizing two legs of the nuclear triad—bombers and silo-based ICBMS—and that the B-21 is doing well and moving into low-rate initial production.
But Sentinel is “core to national defense,” Jones said.
“We have predicted that the nuclear ‘bow wave’ for the Air Force”—the must-do modernization of the bomber, cruise missile, warheads, command and control and ICBM—“would peak in 2027,” Moore said. “We now see that that is slipping to the right: probably 2028, and maybe even 2029.”
At the peak of the nuclear modernization effort, it accounts for “a third of the investment portfolio of the Air Force. It’s not just two-thirds of the nuclear triad, by the way, it’s also 75% of the nuclear command and control that we have,” he said.
All the nuclear portfolio programs “stack up on top of each other” and are “a daunting task” to fund, he observed.
While the Sentinel missile itself is “doing pretty well” in development, Jones said the breach mainly has to do with the program’s civil engineering aspect: the silos and infrastructure of deploying the missile, which is a huge undertaking the Air Force has not really done since the 1960s.
As to covering the $40 billion-plus overrun on Sentinel, Moore said the program is not optional, and there are no workarounds.
“Sentinel will be funded,” he said. The Air Force will “make the trade that it takes to make [Sentinel] happen. We’ll see as we work through this process what the results are, but we are committed to Sentinel and that not going to change. It is funded now. And that’s also not going to change.”
Moore also ruled out any possibility of extending the service’s existing Minuteman III missiles for any lengthy period of time.
“There is not a viable service life extension program that we can foresee,” Moore said. Minuteman III was fielded in the 1970s.
“We will do everything we can to keep it in the field” until Sentinel is ready, he said. “It will remain safe, secure and reliable, but extending it for some lengthy period of time, that’s not a viable option.”