The Space Force needs more money to tackle its growing mission and support the joint force—but the Pentagon can’t raid the Air Force’s budget to pay that bill, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said Dec. 19.
With one month left in his tenure before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, Kendall repeatedly pressed for more resources for both services during an appearance at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
“We’ve made reasonable progress on getting the funding we need, but more is needed, I’ll be blunt about that,” Kendall said.
Top Air Force and Space Force officials have increasingly warned in recent months that they cannot deliver capabilities vital to the nation’s security without a plus-up to their budgets. Republicans are poised to take Congress and the White House in 2025, raising the prospects for increased defense spending—and the open-ended question of how much the Air Force or Space Force will get out of any potential increase.
“How much money is the new administration going to allocate to DOD, and how much of that is going to get allocated to the Air Force and Space Force? Those are unknowns right now,” Kendall said. “We’re trying to position the next administration to be able to address all those questions, make a sound decision, and then move it forward consistent with the constraints they have.”
Back in March, Kendall and other leaders warned that the department’s 2025 budget request would be “unsatisfying” to many as they were limited by budget caps. By June, Kendall was warning that the lack of resources was his biggest concern for the 2026 budget. And in November, he said that absent an increase in funding, the Air Force would not be able to afford three of its signature modernization efforts all at once: the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, the Next-Generation Aerial-refueling System tanker, and Collaborative Combat Aircraft drones.
The Space Force is in no less dire straits—after explosive growth in its first few years of existence, the service saw its first ever cuts proposed in the 2025 budget. Some of that, Kendall said Dec. 19, was driven by the ebb and flow of developing new systems while devoting less resources to old ones.
But Congress has proposed even bigger cuts to USSF on top of what the Pentagon requested.
“What the Hill has done, as they work on [the ’25 budget] is, to fund their priorities, they have taken a lot of cuts out of the [research and development] accounts,” Kendall said. “Space Force is 65 percent, roughly, R&D. The Air Force is about 25 percent. So when they’ve gone and taken a few percent out of every R&D program, the Space Force suffers more from that.”
Kendall made “space order of battle” the first of his seven Operational Imperatives, and much of the service’s R&D funding is to develop new proliferated constellations of satellites, as well as new missions shifting to space like targeting and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. On top of that, Space Force leaders have said the service needs to invest in counter-space capabilities—weapons that can hold adversaries’ space capabilities at risk should they be used to target U.S. forces.
“The new administration will have to take a look at this,” Kendall said. “We’re leaving behind a draft budget for them to start with, which I think is in pretty good shape. And then they’ll have to figure out how much are they going to put in the defense and how are we going to allocate it? There’s no question in my mind that one of our highest priorities should be increasing Space Force funding and accelerating the fielding of some of those capabilities.”
But while Kendall is confident that “there’s almost a consensus within the DOD that we’re going to need to ramp up funding for space,” he also used one of his final public appearances as secretary to argue the Air Force shouldn’t be the bill-payer.
“The Air Force can’t pay for the Space Force. So within the Department of the Air Force, I can’t solve the Space Force problem by moving tens of millions of dollars over into the Space Force,” Kendall said. “The rest of the joint force and DOD as a whole—people appreciate that and understand it. I have made some moves there in the margins, but not dramatic ones. That needs to be considered in the context of the overall DOD budget.”
Indeed, the Air Force faces a funding crunch of its own. As the service in charge of two legs of the nuclear triad, its budget includes the new B-21 bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. Sentinel in particular is over-budget and behind schedule, with a price tag now projected at around $140 billion.
No matter the cost, Kendall said funding for nuclear modernization is a “given.” But as those programs grow, they threaten to siphon money away from all the other Air Force priorities.
“We have to have a secure, reliable, and effective nuclear deterrent,” Kendall said. “We also have to have an effective conventional force for our most pacing challenges. We have to do both.”
While some advocates have called for a dedicated separate fund for Sentinel and the nuclear enterprise, Kendall said he is “neutral” on the idea. At the end of the day, he argued, it all comes down to the size of the budget.
“There are only two ways to do all that we need to do: you add money to the DOD budget and you put to the relevant services, or you take it away from somebody else within the DOD budget,” he said. “Those are the only choices, and we’re going to have to figure out which one of those to do.”
Funds for nuclear modernization will be there, he added, but any cuts elsewhere raise existential concerns.
“There are choices to be made about investments in conventional capability. But if we don’t act and fund the Space Force and the Air Force, it’s only a matter of time until China achieves superiority,” he warned.