What direction the Department of the Air Force will take in the second administration of President Donald Trump remains unclear, but observers expect a shift away from long-term, leap-ahead programs to “here and now” resourcing for readiness and platforms now in production like the F-35 and B-21. They also said a small bump in funding will not heal the Air Force’s long-term resourcing problems.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump and his team offered few details about its plans for the Air Force and Space Force. But analysts at several think tanks told Air & Space Forces Magazine they expect Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s “Operational Imperatives” blueprint for new hardware and programs meant for long-term conventional deterrence will be all but discarded.
Defense sources also said the Trump transition team is at this early point leaning toward Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as a possible Defense Secretary. Waltz served in the Army as a Green Beret and chairs the House Armed Services Readiness subcommittee. He has been especially critical of Kendall’s emphasis on long-term programs at the expense of readiness, telling Kendall during a hearing in April that he views that choice as a “strategic failing,” and that the Air Force is opting for “bespoke Ferraris” when it needs “a fleet of pickup trucks.”
Some elements of Kendall’s work may live on, said John Venable, senior resident fellow at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies—he specifically cited Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the loyal wingman drone program, and said he expects the Next-Generation Air Dominance program to go forward in some form.
Another analyst at a Washington think tank said “they may drop the [Operational Imperatives], but if they do, they’ll have to come up with something organized in a somewhat similar way to deal with China.”
Trump has voiced general wariness about the People’s Republic of China but has stopped short of pledging to help Taiwan if it is invaded by the Chinese. Officially, the U.S. has since the 1970s maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” about whether it will come to Tawain’s aid in the event of an invasion from the mainland.
“If you don’t have Taiwan as the rationale underlying your Indo-Pacific posture, that frees up a lot of resources for other things,” said one longtime strategy analyst. “But that would be a big departure from what [the previous Trump Administration] said when they were in.”
The 2018 National Defense Strategy, prepared during Trump’s previous term by then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, called for keeping ahead of Chinese technological advances and continuing to deter Russia. President Joe Biden’s administration continued that theme and pegged China as the U.S. military’s “pacing threat” while Russia was branded an “acute” adversary but less of a long-term concern.
In an October paper about the strategic views of the two presidential candidates, Richard C. Bush and Ryan Hass from the Brookings Institute wrote that “Trump has consistently registered skepticism about the benefits of supporting Taiwan, whereas members of his administration during his first term were forward leaning in support for Taiwan.” They said he typically pursues a “transactional approach” with regard to defense partnerships.
“He regularly seeks sources of leverage for negotiations,” the Brookings analysts wrote. “He focuses on measurable factors such as the trade balance, a partner country’s level of defense spending, or inbound investment” from that country.
Given that the Air Force’s portfolio of new programs is directly aimed at deterring China, any shift in focus away from Taiwan could mean a less robust Air Force research, development, test and evaluation program.
Trump has also indicated that he would not sustain high levels of assistance to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion and has previously threatened to either abandon NATO or sharply reduce American commitments and forces to the Alliance.
Venable, an Air Force combat veteran who previously worked as an analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said the proportion of the Air Force’s budget devoted to RDT&E is “way out of whack. And if they take $8 billion out of RDT&E, you can do a lot, and probably as much as you possibly could … to revitalize the procurement, the readiness, and the weapon system sustainment accounts required to actually bring a ready force back to bear.”
Various think tank sources said Congress will not back any Trump effort to either disengage from NATO or abandon Taiwan. However, one said Trump would “happily” supply partners like Taiwan with any U.S.-made weapon they want to buy, regardless of what response that would engender from Beijing.
The Trump campaign has officially disavowed “Project 2025,” a blueprint for overhauling government put together by conservative thinkers at Heritage, but much of the document was penned by members of his first administration. The defense section, written by former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, called for a five percent increase in overall defense spending. It also pushed for a minimum of 60-80 F-35s a year and increasing the rate of B-21 bomber procurement as high as 18 per year. The actual pace of B-21 construction is classified, but is believed to be closer to seven a year, headed toward an inventory of “at least 100” airplanes, according to the Air Force.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin has said, however, that by the time USAF nears 100 B-21s, an improved technological approach may be ready to buy, and he has declined to push for going beyond 100 of the bombers.
Project 2025 also called for completing NGAD development, a more robust electronic warfare capability, and eliminating the “pass through” idiosyncrasy by which the Air Force’s actual budget is made to seem larger than it actually is by including in it Defense-wide special programs through an add-on account the Air Force does not control.
A boost of five percent wouldn’t go very far in fixing the Air Force’s problems, however, said Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Everything the current Air Force leadership is saying” about the threat need for modernization “was completely knowable, foreseeable and avoidable,” and the “modernization crunch…has been a long time coming,” she said.
“Now the ‘terrible 20s’ are here. It hits the Air Force fast and hard, right away … and there’s no way out of it without lots more money; not marginal, not a little bit above inflation either,” she said.
Readiness, she said, “is expensive and perishable. So you pour gobs of money into readiness, and you have nothing to show for it, unless you go to war. It’s important to do it, and it’s a worthy cause, but there’s just not” a lasting effect from sustained high levels of readiness, she said.
Conventional forces have to be modernized at the same time as the strategic forces, putting the Air Force in “a vise grip,” she added.
“We’ve never, as a country, taken risk in both our conventional and nuclear deterrents at the same time, and both are at a nadir,” she said. “That’s why this is a vise grip. It’s not just a problem. It’s a danger. If it’s not addressed, we’re taking risk in both strategic and conventional forces when both need to be modernized.”
Paying for a more robust Air Force will be a challenge, because it’s likely the Trump administration will endorse increases to troop pay. Combined with an overfull modernization to-do list and a desire for more here-and-now readiness, there’s little left to cut, Eaglen said, and munitions will likely wind up being the bill-payer.
“There’s nothing to squeeze but the weapons,” she said.
Many Republican members of Congress besides Waltz have criticized USAF’s emphasis on long-term deterrence at the expense of near-term readiness and have consistently blocked or pushed back on the Biden administration’s desire to retire older “legacy” systems and use the savings to fund new gear. Think-tankers agreed that the Trump administration—likely backed by a Republican Senate and House—will halt the retirements in order to keep more iron on the ramp.