AURORA, Colo.—Chief of Staff Gen. David. W. Allvin made a forceful case for investing in the Air Force as a key to rebuilding the U.S. military and restoring U.S. military deterrence, principal objectives for the Trump administration and new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Speaking at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3, Allvin praised Airmen’s ability to keep the force ready despite rising costs for maintaining its aging fleet, now more than 32 years old on average. But he said the Air Force has the answers to those needs in the works even as Airmen achieve miracles with a force in need of overhaul.
“America needs more Air Force,” Allvin said. But “more Air Force doesn’t just mean more of the same.”
Allvin said Airmen are getting too too few flying hours and the Air Force is overburdened by excess infrastructure, having cut 60 percent of its squadrons and 40 percent of its Airmen since the end of the Cold War, but only 15 percent of its bases. One answer is to shed unneeded bases and reinvest the funds needed to maintain them in aircraft and weapons modernization, such as new autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft that can operate in concert with manned jets to confound enemies.
Hegseth has vowed to undertake a comprehensive “budget relook” that opens the door to potential funding shifts across the Pentagon. Allvin wants to show that his priorities are more flexible and effective answers to the department’s needs.
“I’m not just sitting here saying, ‘Give me more. Give me more. Give me more.’ More Air Force means more ‘tooth to tail,’” Allvin said in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine ahead of his keynote address. “More Air Force means more of what the nation needs to meet the priorities the president has said, and the secretary has said, as far as the things we reestablish deterrence and protecting our homeland.”
In his speech, Allvin laid out in blunt terms the long-held concerns experts have voiced that the Air Force and its resources are stretched too thin for the many of its missions. Allvin said the Air Force coped in the past by cutting maintenance, parts, and flying hours, but that now it can no longer afford those expediencies. Sustainment costs keep rising, as aircraft age, and overall mission capable rates are declining.
Allvin presented statistics showing the average age of the fleet rising from 17.2 years in 1994 to 31.7 in 2024. At the same time, aircraft availability rates dropped from 72.9 percent 53.9 percent. Maintenance requirements, meanwhile, are rising: The number of “maintenance actions” per flying hour have nearly doubled to 3.4 per flying hour, up from 1.8 in 1997.
“It’s not surprising. They’re older. It’s more complicated to keep them around,” Allvin said. “We’ve been less than successful in having the ability to modernize on the path that we’d like.”
That means the man-hours requirements per flying hour have roughly doubled since the mid-1990s. Pilots have experienced the impact. The last time the Air Force executed its stated requirement for total flying hours was 2017.
“If airplanes are more flyable, you get more flying hours. You get more flying hours, you get more readiness,” Allvin said. “If you can’t fly, you get less flying hours. This is not sustainable.”
The future of the Air Force will be determined as part of a broader overhaul of Pentagon spending. Hegseth has instructed all the military services to identify an 8 percent cut to their budgets so that those funds can be reallocated in line with the Trump administration’s priorities, including the Golden Dome homeland missile defense project, nuclear modernization, and emerging technologies, which could include autonomous systems.
That reallocation could provide an opportunity to expand the Air Force if some of those repurposed funds are channeled to the service, and Allvin said the Air Force is in a good position to appeal for more force structure and stepped-up funding.
As evidence, Allvin said the Air Force is well positioned to address some of the administration’s key priorities: homeland defense, nuclear deterrence, traditional deterrence, and, if necessary, conflict. Some of the specific priorities the administration has identified, specifically nuclear modernization and semi-autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft, are already integral to the Air Force.
“If we’re in this dangerous and dynamic time, I want to give the president as many options as we possibly can,” Allvin said. “So that means yes, keep on the modernization. Yes, NGAD. Yes, CCA. … That’s what’s going to take.”
The Air Force can also meet many of the requirements for homeland defense. It accounts for two-thirds of the nuclear triad, and three-fourths of nuclear command and control.
“I think we need more options for the president, and that’s what airpower provides,” Allvin said in the keynote. “Everything from rapid response to decisive victory.”
Airpower is particularly well-suited to deliver those options, Allvin claimed.
“That’s what airpower anytime, anywhere means. It’s a promise we can have to uphold,” Allvin said. “We have to sustain and maintain the ability to go anytime, anywhere in the most dense threat environment, and be able to put a warhead on a forehead anywhere the president might want.”
“When you’ve got a bad guy considering doing bad actions, the Air Force is the most responsive,” Allvin continued, likening the service to an adept boxer. “We’ve got the ability to pop the jab that might give a shot in the face, and they may think, maybe I might want to rethink my position. … We’re re-establishing deterrence, yes. But if not, we’re already back in the fighting stance. And you know what? We haven’t committed hundreds of thousands of forces over there getting entangled in something that may take us years to get out, and loss of blood and treasure. … And if that didn’t convince him, we’ve got the freaking haymaker. So we can take it across the entire spectrum.”
A larger Air Force, however, is not assured, especially if the Trump administration opts to reallocate money to other priorities.
In an interview, Allvin declined to say which missions or cuts are currently under consideration, noting that the possibilities are “pre-decisional” and ultimately up to the administration.
“I don’t fear this particular exercise that we’re going through,” Allvin said, referring to Hegseth’s instruction to identify 8 percent in cuts. “It will help us drive hard decisions that will give clear decisions going forward.”
But cutting the Air Force budget further would have far-reaching effects; the Air Force is in the midst of modernizing two-thirds of the nuclear triad, and desperate to recapitalize its various aircraft fleets. The cost of the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, the B–21 Raider stealth bomber, and next-generation command and control system known as NC3, all of which are exempt from the cuts, add pressure to justifying other programs.
“With an 8 percent cut, you cannot say, take a percentage of this and take a percentage of this,” Allvin said. “We’re talking about mission sets that we can’t do anymore. We can’t say we’re going to cut 8 percent and still try and do everything we’re doing, we’ll just do it a little bit more on the cheap. We have reached that baseline [already]. So there will be hard decisions on what the nation wants the Air Force to stop doing in order for the Air Force to start doing more things.”
Those decisions will be made above Allvin’s paygrade.
“Because of the changing character of war, which privileges the things that the Air Force has to offer—in speed and tempo, agility and resilience, lethality, the responsiveness of airpower—my sense is that the Air Force will fare well,” he said in an interview. “I will advocate for that, and then those decisions will be made, and then I will organize, train, and equip that Air Force to be the best part of the winning team going forward.”
Allvin said he is optimistic for the Air Force’s future, praising the progress made on two new CCA jets, General Atomics’ YFQ–42A and Andruil Industries’ YFQ–44A. Developed in just a couple of years, the new unmanned fighters match Hegseth’s drive to field new technologies quickly and enable non-traditional suppliers to gain a foothold in Pentagon programs. Both are longstanding but elusive goals of previous Pentagon chiefs.
Allvin walked the stage and spoke without a written script, advancing his slides himself as he spoke. But before launching into his planned talk, he went off script to comment on a quote that Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman had used in his opening keynote. The quote came from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech, officially titled “Citizenship in a Republic,” a copy of which hangs on the wall of Allvin’s Pentagon office.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” Roosevelt says. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds…”
Standing on the middle of the stage, alone under the spotlights, he urged his Airmen forward: “I would tell you that now is the time for daring greatly,” Allvin said. “And for anyone who wants to come into the arena, come on in, the water’s fine.”
