What if money were no object? What kind of Air Force would you buy?
That is basically the premise behind the push by the Air Force to grow by nearly 25 percent over the next 12 years, under an initiative it calls “The Air Force We Need.”
At an Air Force Association conference last week, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson laid out the case for a 386-squadron Air Force, up from the current 312.
The number, she said, came from an exhaustive six-month review of what is required to meet the demands of the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy championed by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, which calls for a more lethal U.S. military to counter Russia and China in what has been dubbed “a new era of great power competition.”
“We know now from analysis what everyone in this room knows from experience,” Wilson said. “The Air Force is too small for what the nation expects of us.”
Wilson said that thanks to the military buildup under President Trump, the Air Force has largely been able to turn the corner on its well-documented readiness problems, and is now focused on fighting and winning future conflicts.
While during the post-World War II era, the United States never ceded “a scrap of technical know-how to our adversaries,” Wilson argues it has now fallen behind.
This month, Russia conducted the largest exercise on Russian soil in four decades, involving more than 300,000 troops and 1,000 aircraft.
China has formed and militarized islands in the South China Sea, putting all of Southeast Asia within reach of its long-range bombers, and recently declared its first aircraft carrier “combat ready” and dispatched it for sea trials.
“The United States used to be an order of magnitude ahead of any peer competitor in terms of military technology. That’s no longer the case today,” said retired Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, the architect of the coalition air campaign during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “Essentially in terms of capability, the Russians and the Chinese, in the vast majority of instances, are already peer competitors.”
Wilson’s ambitious plan is to add 74 combat squadrons, the core fighting unit of the Air Force, which would qualify as the largest expansion since the Cold War.
The biggest growth percentage-wise would be for bomber squadrons, which would go from nine to 14, a 55 percent increase.
In February, the Air Force announced plans to send its supersonic B-1 and stealthy B-2 bombers into early retirement, once enough of its new B-21 long-range strike bombers came on line.
The B-21 Raider, to be built by Northrop Grumman, is now in the design stage.
Adding five bomber squadrons could mean buying more of the new bomber, or possibly extending the service life of the service’s 20 B-2s.
Under the plan, the number of fighter squadrons would go from 55 to 62, and would likely require the purchase of additional Lockheed Martin F-35s, since there is no other stealthy alternative.
Presumably at least one squadron, maybe more, could be filled with whichever plane the Air Force picks to fill its light attack mission, which calls for a cheaper, less-sophisticated aircraft to operate in non-contested airspace.
Two turbo-prop planes are in the running. The A-29 Super Tucano built by a joint venture between Sierra Nevada Corp. and Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer is slugging it out against the Beechcraft AT-6B Wolverine, built by Textron Aviation.
The smaller planes might also have a role in the 22 new command, control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance squadrons, although some of those aircraft will likely be drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper or its successors.
The Air Force has 25 drone squadrons solely dedicated to reconnaissance and strikes, and would add two more under the proposal.
And the need to fuel all those planes in flight would require 14 additional tanker squadrons, which could increase the buy of Boeing’s KC-46 Pegasus, which is essentially a flying gas station.
Despite all the analysis and modeling, the Air Force has no estimate for what this historic expansion would cost, or even how many more military and civilian personnel would have to be recruited and trained.
One estimate is that creating 74 operational squadrons would require hiring 40,000 more people over the next decade, at a cost of $5 billion annually.
Todd Harrison, a budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, estimates operations and maintenance alone would total $13 billion a year, and he says without knowing the mix of additional aircraft there’s no way to put a price tag on the acquisition costs.
But Deptula, who is now dean of the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Power Studies, says the virtue of the Air Force plan was it didn’t start with the premise of what would fit into the service’s budget, but rather began with the question: What will it take to fulfill the strategy?
“So this is the first time in recent memory that a service secretary has come out and said, ‘Look we did this evaluation on the basis of what are the actual requirements for our forces based on threats and our national security policy,’ ” Deptula said.
The Air Force admits that for its vision to become a reality the service will require a long-term commitment, a stable budget, and most crucially the support of Congress.
Michael O’Hanlon, a veteran military analyst at the Brookings Institution, says while he’s impressed by the rigor of the Air Force study, the new set of goals should not be viewed as a binding budget plan or definitive requirement.
“Better to think of it, rather, as one contribution to an ongoing debate — that is, as the ‘vision’ that it professes to be, no more and no less.
