Air Force budgets don’t have the money to pay for any U.S. pilots to fly in the last six weeks of the fiscal year, a top general warned Congress.
“So, the last month and a half, the entire Air Force would have to stop flying,” Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Wednesday. “But because we can’t do that, it would start affecting units almost immediately, forcing their grounding, and that turns around our readiness program.”
That message is designed to jolt lawmakers ahead of a contentious fight over government spending, which is set to run out at the end of April. If Congress can’t agree on new spending plans, they will have to avert a government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution that extends current spending levels. That might appeal to Democrats insofar as it would help stymy President Trump’s spending priorities, but it would put the military in a jam.
“It would be devastating for us,” Lieutenant Gen. Arnold Bunch said during the same hearing on Air Force modernization. “If we take a continuing resolution throughout the year, we will be $2.8 billion short that we will have to find a way to fund within 5 months.”
The funding gap for flight hours flows from a strategic move the Air Force has made to prepare fighter pilots for the prospect of conflict with a major power such as Russia or China.
“We are actually flying more this year trying to improve our readiness status,” Harris told Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, to explain why they need more money than last year. “We’re flying more this year flying at a rate greater than last year, trying to reverse our readiness trends and have more airmen prepared to fight the high-end conflict, not just today’s fight.”
Without that training, pilots can’t take advantage of the capabilities provided by the Air Force’s most advanced fighters, according to military brass.
“A multi-mission aircraft, an F-16 CJ, that is trying to fight its way in, take down a SAM system, defend itself against an air threat, work through an electronic warfare environment, and then egress and get a strike package into hit a target … those are the training areas that we are having a hard time getting to because of the pace and schedule [of deployments],” Air Force Gen. “Hawk” Carlisle told reporters in February.
