Air Force Lt. Gen. Mark Kelly said Wednesday that the Air Force’s $26.9 billion research and development budget represents a willingness to risk operational capacity in favor of regaining a technological advantage over adversaries.
“We’ll end up having to take some more risks in the next couple of years,” said Kelly, deputy chief of staff for operations at Air Force headquarters, speaking at the Air Force Association in Arlington, Virginia.
“We can’t go forward in the next four years relying on what made us great in the last 40 years,” he told the standing room only group of officers, diplomats, media, and industry professionals on Wednesday.
Kelly described an Air Force that has seen continuous deployments for the past 17 years, a period when the service has been honed to fight violent extremists rather than peer adversaries.
The new budget is in line with the 2018 National Defense Strategy and means the Air Force will sustain some assets with high mileage. A $770 million increase, for example, over fiscal year 2020, in operations and maintenance will not be enough to maintain the entire fleet.
“Every day it’s a shell game of how many tankers we have to move, and losing a few is not going to make that any easier,” Kelly said when asked about the challenges a budget reorganization poses.
Kelly gave examples of 1960’s-era KC-135 tankers and problems bringing online replacement KC-46 refueling aircraft. He also cited stresses to B-1 bombers and their high repair costs.
“This is hard, hard work, and frankly, the cost to repair some of the highest mileage aircraft exceeds their life expectancy,” he said.
Kelly described a careful balance between capability, a technological edge, and capacity, to include assets and personnel.
“We have to lead in the capability realm, we can lean on our partners and allies for some of the capacity,” he said. “We’ll take some risk, but it’ll probably be a bigger risk if we halt the technology growth.”
The U.S. has lost the high technological advantage, high-end training and readiness that it had when it went to war in 1990, Kelly said.
“We’re ready for a peer fight, it will just be taxing,” Kelly said when asked by the Washington Examiner about the Air Force’s current warfighting ability. “At the end of the day, if a peer fight kicks up, we’re going to have no time and all the money. The challenge is getting from where we’re at now to that day, which will be tough.”
The Air Force’s planned fiscal year 2021 procurement is a far cry from what’s needed to reconstitute the Air Force’s fleet, said Heritage Foundation senior researcher John Venable, a 25-year Air Force veteran who was on hand to hear Kelly speak.
“This is baffling,” said Venable, who noted that the Air Force plans to decommission more than 100 aircraft in the next five years. “The Air Force is too small.”
An overemphasis on research and development may leave the Air Force vulnerable if a conflict with China were to emerge, he said.
“Where they have invested and where we have fallen behind is capacity,” he said. “No technological advantage will help if we have already cut the force structure too deeply.”
