News coming out of the White House since President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20 is striking in its velocity. The subjects of his Executive Orders and policy memos were unsurprising, fulfilling oft-repeated campaign promises, but the speed, volume, and details—or lack of them—caught everyone by surprise. The President executed a battle plan intended to overwhelm his adversaries with speed, force, and complexity.
It worked. Using the military to patrol the border and fly repatriation flights; removing portraits of former Chairman of the JCS, Army Gen. Mark Milley and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper from the Pentagon; shutting down every office and program tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion sucked the air out of the room. What it didn’t do was make the military more ready, more lethal, and more capable to deter or defeat a peer foe in battle.
To achieve the President’s stated objective of “peace through strength,” the nation needs to change its investment priorities and methodology to reinvest and rebuild an atrophied force.
America needs more Air Force … America needs more Space Force.
“America needs more Air Force,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said in a January op-ed, a rare but gutsy acknowledgment that cuts over the past decades have left the Air Force undersized and under-resourced for its mission. The Chief acknowledged that the high-end combat training that once gave USAF pilots a defining edge over China and others “has closed dramatically.”
He’s right. Our Air Force is old, its air fleet averaging 30 years of age—the oldest in history. It is small, retiring more planes annually than it acquires. And it is unready for peer conflict—pilots aren’t getting the flight hours they need and aircraft maintenance is in the tank. Mission capable rates for combat aircraft are under 60 percent. If it had to go to war today, the Air Force could launch fewer than 50 bombers against China—and only a few of them would be stealthy.
America likewise needs more Space Force. Outgoing Secretary Frank Kendall has said the budget should double or triple to meet its requirements. Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman has laid out a theory of competitive endurance that makes sense because warfighters in every domain depend on space for intelligence, communications, navigation and timing, missile warning and alerts, targeting, and more. America’s entire way of war depends on having a robust, resilient space architecture. Likewise, the nation needs offensive counterspace weapons that can hold at risk those, like China and Russia, that already have fielded weapons that threaten U.S. space assets.
New Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and presumptive Air Force Secretary Troy Meink have a unique opportunity to deliver on the President’s promise to “rebuild our military” and restore “peace through strength.” Their window for action is now, and their path to success is in air and space.
The Air Force needs an immediate cash infusion to more rapidly acquire manned fighter aircraft while simultaneously developing and fielding new Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). This is not an either-or proposition. The Air Force needs both.
New developments disclosed in January—and likely lost amid all the political news coverage—indicate pilots in F-35s can manage more CCAs than previously thought. Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, working on the Air Force’s future force design, said the ratio of unmanned to manned aircraft will be “bigger than we thought.” How much bigger? Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet pegged the number at “up to eight autonomous drones.”
That many CCA can radically change the complexity adversaries will face when trying to fend off a U.S. attack. But the key limiting factor is not solely the number of CCA, but rather the number of crewed F-35s. The Air Force should be buying 80 a year. For 2025, its order will be fewer than 40.
CCA are being developed as part of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems, which is also supposed to include a manned platform, the Penetrating Counterair Aircraft (PCA). That aircraft, expected to cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or perhaps half of what a B-21 bomber costs, is also central to modernizing the Air Force and deterring China. The Air Force paused its PCA decision last summer, reviewed its options, and an expert panel of former Chiefs and top defense experts concluded it’s needed. None of these systems operate in a vacuum. To maximize effectiveness—and therefore deterrence—the Air Force needs B-21, PCA, more F-35s, and CCA.
Don’t believe those who tell you we can do it all autonomously. Fully autonomous aircraft operating in concert at the speed of sound are possible someday. But the Air Force needs these aircraft now and someday may still be decades away—if not longer.
Paying for that will take new money. The Air Force has already spent its proverbial pennies under the couch cushions, and you can’t buy all that new kit, not to mention the weapons they will need to carry—and pay for— nuclear modernization, T-7 trainers, E-7 Wedgetail AWACS replacements, more tanker aircraft, and the needed flying hours for all those people and planes without increasing the budget. The requirement is over $30 billion a year for the Air Force alone.
The Space Force needs are also clear (and detailed elsewhere in this issue). The good news is that the baseline numbers are small. The Space Force budget today is a scant $29 billion a year—a bargain considering how essential it is for every other military service. Building a comprehensive missile defense system for the United States and military bases overseas, including space-based interceptors, could easily triple that number. Enhanced communications and jam-free global positioning and timing, space situational awareness enhancements, and monitoring cislunar space between the geostationary orbital region and the moon—necessary to ensure China doesn’t achieve its aim of accessing and controlling that regime first—add to the requirement.
The Space Force will need something close to 10 percent annual budget growth for a decade to achieve all these objectives.
President Trump came to Washington committed to fixing our military. It can’t all be done by Executive Order, though. The hard work starts now.