Allvin Makes the Case for More Airpower
It’s all about ‘more options for the President,’ CSAF says.
By Chris Gordon
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin dialed up the intensity of his calls for “more Air Force” in March, laying out a bold and compelling case for why investing in U.S. airpower today delivers a more lethal, effective and flexible military now and into the future.
Allvin emphasized flexibility.
“That’s what airpower provides: more options for the President—everything from rapid response all the way to decisive victory,” he said, walking the stage at the AFA Warfare Symposium and speaking extemporaneously, with slides as prompts but no predefined script. “That is what ‘Airpower Anytime, Anywhere’ means. It’s not just an aspiration. It’s a promise that we have to uphold.”
The Air Force has met its promises over the decades, he said, and done so convincingly, citing the heroics of Airmen under fire during last year’s missile attacks on Israel, in which Air Force jets rose up to shoot down incoming rounds and help ensure none reached their intended targets. But the Air Force has also “made it look easy,” he said, fueling capability at the leading edge by leveraging readiness across the rest of the force.
That’s not sustainable, Allvin said. The Air Force must chart a new course with enhanced technology, modernized doctrine, and a new force design.
“More Air Force doesn’t just mean more of the same,” Allvin said.
THE FUTURE IS HERE
Within the month of March, Allvin revealed the Air Force’s first-ever unmanned fighter aircraft, or Collaborative Combat Aircraft—General Atomics’ YFQ-42 and Anduril Industries’ YFQ-44—and then, just two weeks later, the Next-Generation Air Dominance manned fighter, the F-47.
The commitment to these new capabilities demonstrate a transformation in the works to a future generation of manned-unmanned teaming that goes far beyond the kinds of low-cost drones that have made their mark in the Russia-Ukraine war, for example. Although technology mogul and Trump adviser Elon Musk has argued that drones should supplant crewed aircraft, the Air Force says it is the combination of unmanned drones with crewed fighters that will give the U.S. the air superiority needed to deter and, if necessary, defeat peer rivals in the future.
“It’s telling the world that we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare,” Allvin said. The first CCAs are expected to fly this summer; the F-47, built by Boeing, is expected to fly within less than four years.
YFQ-42 maker General Atomics, a privately held and proven supplier, cut its teeth in unmanned aircraft with the pioneering MQ-1 Predator and follow-on MQ-9 Reaper. Anduril, on the other hand, is an investor-funded startup created to disrupt the defense industry with a radical new approach to aerospace development. Its business is built on promising the Pentagon a 21st century, venture-capital funded means to develop less costly, more competitive weapons systems than traditional defense companies have been able to deliver.
CCAs will be a force multiplier for the Air Force, a means of generating “affordable mass”—the drones will cost between a quarter and a third of an $80 million F-35—while increasing dilemmas for an adversary. By bestowing the F designation on these first two CCAs—collectively dubbed Increment 1—the Air Force is making clear they will be offensive in nature, carrying weapons and operating in concert with manned aircraft.
“It’s a recognition that we’re moving into a new era of manned human-machine teaming,” Allvin said in an interview.
But the CCAs are just one part of the solution. CCAs will fly with F-35s, initially, and with the F-47 later. Manned fighters will team with multiple CCAs, with Air Force leaders increasingly confident that a single pilot can control four or even more unmanned CCAs.
The 6th-generation F-47 will supplant the F-22 Raptor as America’s premier air superiority platform. The cost is classified, but officials indicated they will acquire more F-47s than the 186 F-22s the Air Force bought in the early 2000s. Frank Kendall, the former Air Force Secretary, pegged the cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars per aircraft; the Trump administration did not share cost details. The administration said the new aircraft will outperform the F-22 in speed, payload, maneuverability, and stealth.
Just as the F-15 and F-16 presented a high-low mix of capabilities when they were introduced in the 1980s, the F-47 and F-35—not to mention CCAs—present a modernized version of that exquisite and workhorse kind of capability.
Lt. Gen. David A. Harris, Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Futures said this is the modern iteration.
“I still contend there is the high-low mix,” Harris said. “You still need some of the exquisite and then you still need a lot of the war-winning mass as well. It’s the combination of those together that really create the effect.”
Brig. Gen. Ryan P. Keeney, director of Concepts and Strategy for Air Force Futures, framed the issue in more historical terms.
“We’re in the third wave of how we provide airpower,” said Keeney. “World War II was mass: We sent formations of B-17s over and our [circular error probable, a measure of a weapon’s accuracy] was measured in miles, not in tens of feet.”
Next, the Air Force emphasized precision, making individual platforms so capable, their weapons so accurate, that they could make up for any lack of mass with their precise accuracy.
Now the Air Force is entering the third wave, where precision remains paramount, but mass is again gaining in import as a means to overcoming increasingly sophisticated defenses. The aim is to mass-produce affordable systems, Keeney said, that can still deliver precision accuracy but to a far broader target set.
The F-47 NGAD platform, still to be named, will complement its planned fleet of 100 or more B-21 Raider stealth bombers. The Raider, now undergoing evaluation at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., has been flying there since late 2023. Sometimes called the first 6th-generation aircraft, the B-21 offers advanced stealth and electronic warfare technology but was always intended to operate alongside a family of penetrating systems built around the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter.
Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, the Air Force’s director of force design, integration, and wargaming, said every study and wargame he’s participated in underscores the value of air superiority. “What we found is not only in the past, not [only] in the present, but in the future, air superiority matters,” said Kunkel. “What this study told us is we tried a whole bunch of different options and there’s no more viable option than NGAD to achieve air superiority in this highly contested environment.”
Allvin argued likewise. “In this dangerous and dynamic time, I want to give the President as many options as we possibly can,” Allvin said, two weeks before standing in the Oval Office with the President and Defense Secretary as they unveiled the first peak at the F-47. “So that means, yes, keep on the modernization. Yes, NGAD. Yes. CCA. Yes, survivable bases. Yes to all that. And yes to taking care of our Airmen, because that’s what it’s going to take.”
PAYING FOR IT
Kunkel, Harris, and Allvin recently authorized a classified force design to spell out what the Air Force needs to succeed. That plan clearly includes B-21s and F-47s, CCAs, but an unknown number of F-35s, and with an uncertain future for the Next-Generation Aerial Refueler (NGAS), a next-generation airlifter, and more.
The Air Force’s design approach is markedly different from the force designs offered by the other military services; the Marine Corps, by contrast, offered a highly detailed road map, trading heavy tanks and other weapons to become a lighter, more agile force better equipped to operate in the Pacific theater.
In contrast, the Air Force design is far less prescriptive, instead providing a framework intended to inform decision-making as the service works to counter evolving threats and navigate the challenge of constrained resources.
Allvin cited cuts to squadrons, the aircraft inventory, reductions to pilot training, and reducing operational readiness. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the Air Force cut 60 percent of fighter squadrons, 40 percent of Airmen, but only 15 percent of its installations. “That math doesn’t work,” Allvin said. “We have too much infrastructure. … 20 to 30 percent too much. … That is infrastructure that needs to be maintained, sustained, and doesn’t necessarily provide more combat lethality. And oh, by the way, we need more Airmen to do that as well.”
The age of the USAF airplanes now averages over 31.7 years each, up from 17.2 in 1994, he said. Aircraft availability meanwhile has plunged from 72.9 percent to 53.9 percent. And he said the Air Force is now understaffed by some 25,000 military and civilian jobs. Weapons system sustainment costs are also on the rise, Allvin said, citing data that showed the cost to sustain each aircraft had risen 23 percent in just five years.
“We are not getting more weapons sustainment for the dollar,” he said. “When [planes] are older, you have to do more maintenance actions on them.” Maintenance actions per flying hour more than doubled since 1997, from 1.8 to 3.6. The result, he said, is fewer flying hours: “This is not sustainable.”
Such transparency about these challenges is unusual in a can-do Air Force that consistently delivers on what it is asked to do. “You wouldn’t know this on the front line,” Allvin said, “because of the miracles that are going on from our maintainers and those who are sustaining. We’re making it look easy.” But left unchecked, he suggested, the bills will eventually come due, and the force will not be able to deliver.
BUDGET CUTS
Restoring readiness will take a combination of modernization, investment, and remedial effort—and most likely require some level of changing priorities at the Pentagon. The Air Force will require new funds to overcome its shortfalls and may have to withdraw from some missions it can no longer afford.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instructed all the military branches to identify 8 percent cuts to parts of their budgets, with the intent to redirect those savings toward Trump administration priorities including the Golden Dome homeland missile defense project, nuclear modernization, and emerging technologies, such as autonomous systems. Separately, Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has indicated he plans to try to increase defense investment by at least $55 billion annually.
The administration’s budget request for fiscal 2026 was still under wraps in March, but Hegseth has indicated he anticipates increased investment in the Air Force, Space Force, and Navy, and analysts indicate the Army is the likely bill-payer for new investments in those service branches.
Allvin said the Air Force is in a good position to appeal for more force structure and stepped-up funding given what it has to offer and the unfunded requirements facing the Air Force.
The Air Force plays crucial roles in homeland defense, nuclear deterrence, traditional deterrence, and, when necessary, combat operations, Allvin said, and those align directly with the administration’s priorities. So does modernizing the nation’s nuclear arsenal and developing autonomous CCAs.
The Air Force is modernizing its two-thirds share of the nuclear triad—bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the cost of the new Sentinel ICBM is far exceeding budget. The B–21 bomber, which will be both conventional and nuclear capable, and modernizing nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) are also huge costs to bear, as is the E-4C Survivable Airborne Operations Center. Those three programs were all exempt from Hegseth’s 8 percent cuts.
Yet while those programs and missions are clearly in the administration’s good graces, that heaps deeper cuts on other areas.
“With an 8 percent cut, you cannot … take a percentage of this and take a percentage of this,” Allvin said in an interview. “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 have reached that baseline [already], so there will be hard decisions on what the nation wants the Air Force to stop doing.”
The Air Force force design is more flexible than other services’ future designs, USAF leaders said, because it was “fiscally informed.” As Allvin noted, every decision has a trade-off.
Range is a key aspect of the F-47 and B-21; but if the Air Force sacrificed range, it would need to invest more in refueling aircraft that can get closer to the fight.
U.S. Transportation Command boss Gen. Randell Reed recently visited the Omaha, Neb., headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command’s Gen. Anthony J. Cotton.
“We got a really deep understanding in terms of how they intend to employ their new aircraft,” Reed told the Senate Armed Services Committee recently. “And that will drive a slightly different way in which we are to support them, which actually means that it’s going to be a little bit higher requirement specifically in the fuel transfer.”
In other words, “more Air Force” will have wide-ranging implications on the other parts of the defense enterprise.
“More Air Force means more of what the nation needs to meet the priorities the President has set, and the Secretary has set,” Allvin said.
Yet he also said it’s hardly a question of simply asking for more. The goal is to ask for the right additions to be a more effective, more powerful Air Force, one that can attain air superiority when and where it needs to, anyplace on Earth.
That’s a fight, Kunkel said, that takes place across the Potomac from the White House, inside the Pentagon. “The Pentagon Wars are about how do we get the money to fund the Air Force that our nation deserves and that our Airmen are privileged to operate,” Kunkel said. And how do you win that fight?
“You have to have a coherent narrative, and that coherent narrative has got to be backed up by solid analysis,” Kunkel continued. “We’ve built the narrative, we’ve done the analysis, we know where it works, we know where it fails, we know how to mitigate those failures.”
Now the Air Force is taking that story on the road—to the Secretary of Defense, to the White House, and to Congress.