The US military is declining – branches are running out of money, personnel, and experience.

Visiting the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Poland last March, President Biden declared that they are “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” A U.S. president trumpeting the prowess of the American military is a familiar refrain but a new paper from the Mitchell Institute details an underfunded U.S. Air Force which may not be able to win against China. Entitled “Decades of Air Force Underfunding Threaten America’s Ability to Win,” the paper outlines the decline in relative spending on the Air Force, the decreasing number and increasing age of its tactical aircraft fleet and the prospects it faces if funding for modernization and new aircraft is not made available. The paper makes for stark reading. In the first paragraph, the authors, retired Air Force Lt. Gen David A. Deptula and former Air Force Col. Mark Gunzinger, plainly state that the USAF “now lacks the capacity to fight a peer conflict, deter elsewhere, and defend the homeland as required by the National Defense Strategy.” The decline in combat power and morale in the Air Force has been self-evident to those paying attention. Flying hours are one of the key barometers to overall readiness, force mentality and esprit de corps. In 1990, Air Force pilots averaged approximately 29 flight hours per month. In fiscal 2021, flying hours across all types of aircraft in the active-duty force averaged 10.1 hours per month, up from just 6.8 per month in 2019. In decades past, Air Force pilots cited their experience and training as a competitive advantage over greater numbers of technologically improving aircraft fielded by U.S. adversaries. By 2013, they could no longer boast. That year, USAF General Herbert Carlisle, commander of Pacific Air Forces, noted that training hours for U.S. pilots had dropped to the level once occupied by Soviet pilots during the Cold War. American pilots flew fewer training hours than Chinese, Indian, or some European pilots. That trend has largely remained, buffeted by other anxiety producing numbers. For the last five years the USAF has hovered around 2,000 pilots short, unable to attract, produce and retain sufficient numbers of people to fill its cockpits. The lack of people is more than matched by a lack of equipment. The Mitchell paper points out that the service now has less than half its fighter force and only one-third of the bombers it had in 1990. “Its latest proposed budget divests about 1,000 more aircraft than it buys over the next five years, which will create an even smaller, older, and less ready force in the near term,” Deptula and Gunzinger note. That force now stands at 2,176 aircraft. It compares with a fleet operated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force of China and its sister branch, the PLA Naval Air Force, of around 1,700 combat aircraft. The running commentary regarding the numbers has been that the tight margin is “not that scary” given the quantity of older, 3rd and even 2nd generation tactical aircraft in China’s fleet, let alone 4th and 5th generation equipment. The PLA’s lack of combat experience and constricted training approach ameliorate the threat goes the logic. But the numbers of aircraft and pilots are absolutely scary when one considers that China will almost certainly choose any future conflict on its own terms. If it does, it will bring the full weight of its numbers and strength (including surface-to-air missiles) to bear in its own back yard. America will inevitably fight with smaller forces 7,000 miles from its own shores. Those forces are being depleted. With respect to the Air Force, the nadir, the Mitchell paper notes, will occur at the same time that USINDOPACOM warns China will be prepared to conquer Taiwan—2027. As former USAF weapons systems officer and Chief of Fighter Programs, Legislative Affairs for the Secretary of the Air Force, Mike Benitez, noted in a recent Mitchell Institute podcast, “One of the enduring principles of all joint operations is mass... Capability is not a replacement for mass. It goes against doctrine. It goes against history. It goes against how air operations work.” Yet, the Mitchell paper argues, the Air Force has been compelled to substitute capability for mass for the last three decades. Bad Math The so-called “peace dividend” that America’s leaders sought to harvest after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 inspired three decades of reduced spending on modernizing and maintaining the strength of the U.S. military. There is a distinction between investing for modernization and capacity and spending on conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Deptula and Gunzinger raise another one - the difference between the budget numbers allocated to the Air Force and what it has actually received. They point out that in its latest budget, the Biden administration asks Congress to fund a smaller allocation for the Air Force in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 ($169.5 billion) than it requests for the Navy ($180.5 billion) and the Army ($177.5 billion). However, it doesn’t look that way to a casual observer. The USAF’s true budget the authors note is masked, as in previous years, by an arcane DOD practice that reports it is requesting $209.6 billion for the service in FY23 “The $40 billion difference is money that will ‘pass-through’ the Air Force’s budget and go to non-Air Force organizations and programs,” the paper notes. “The Air Force cannot use this pass-through funding to buy new aircraft, increase its readiness, and otherwise organize, train, and equip its forces.” For context, the paper illustrates, the $40 billion difference would buy the Air Force 400 5th generation F-35A fighters designed to fight in the high threat operational environments the U.S. would face against China or Russia. While calling for dropping the deceptive reporting practice, the Mitchell paper asserts that (not counting pass-through funding) USAF budgets have “chronically lagged” those of the Navy and Army. The Army and Navy it says received about $1.3 trillion dollars and $914 billion dollars more, respectively, than the Air Force after removing pass-through between 2002 and 2021. The paper also points to budget allocation precedent set after 9-11. Prior to the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Army, Navy and Air Force received relatively equal funding. But in the press to fight the global war on terror, congress increased funding for the Army by nearly 250% between FY01 and FY08. The Air Force’s budget “increased by a far more modest amount.” That has come at an additional cost to national security. Mark Gunzinger argues that the peer threat to the U.S. lies in a region - the Pacific - where the most important forms of force projection are airpower, space, maritime and cyber - not ground forces. He’d likely find disagreement from historians who point out that wars have only been won by holding and occupying ground. But one might counter that effective control of the domains mentioned above should be enough to prevent war in the first place. Whatever inter-service funding imbalance and friction exist the fact is that the U.S. Air Force is too small for the job it may be asked to do.