Washington must take another look at its plans to “rebalance” the Air Force in the coming decades, two air power advocates warned Monday, or it could regret a missed opportunity to expand American global power.
“At some point in this town, and in the administration, and in the Defense Department … we need to start talking about strategy,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula.
He, along with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Mark Gunzinger, now a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, argue in a new report that the Air Force must increase the number of bombers it plans to buy and make other changes while it has the “strategic opportunity” to do so following the end of major combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At an event at the Air Force Association outside Washington, Deptula was dismissive when describing the Air Force’s plan to buy 80 to 100 new long-range stealth bombers, which it hopes begin entering the fleet in the 2020s.
“Has anyone ever heard of a strategy associated with that number?” he asked. “I see a lot of smiles and snickers in the audience. … That’s because it’s a budget-driven number.”
Today, the U.S. is on course to shrink from a force of about 184 heavy bombers in 1993 to a force potentially as small as 85, Deptula and Gunzinger warn — not enough to get the job done. Moreover, Deptula pointed out, the total size of the fleet can be deceptive. Of the 20 B-2 Spirit bombers in the arsenal, he said, only four to six are ready for tasking on any given day. Others are undergoing depot maintenance, down for repairs or otherwise unavailable.
So Deptula and Gunzinger argue the Air Force needs to plan on buying 154 LRS-Bs, or 174 if the B-2s retire — still smaller than the most recent peak in the post-Cold War force, they argue, but enough of a force to truly make good on President Barack Obama’s desire to “pivot” to the Western Pacific.
Air Force officials might be privately enthusiastic about such an idea, but there’s little chance they could publicly adopt it. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh and Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James have been enduring round after round of opposition from members of Congress about their proposals to retire aircraft, including the A-10 Warthog attack jets and U-2 Dragon Lady spy planes.
Deptula acknowledged buying more bombers would be costly, but said it made sense when calculated by cost per effect. He showed a slide that compared the number of aircraft needed to attack a target in the first Gulf War — 75 fighters, attack aircraft, and tankers — with two B-2s.
Deptula and Gunzinger also argued for broader reform inside the Defense Department.
“We think that DoD and the United States has an opportunity to do something different as they try to build the future joint force,” Gunzinger said.
The Pentagon must flatten and combine its bureaucracy in a way that makes sense for the information age, they argued, rather than persisting with what Deptula called a “Clausewitz”-era structure of separate commands and staffs. It should also begin to think of the joint force as a “combat cloud,” they said, the next step down the path toward overcoming the anti-access and area denial obstacles expected from China or other advanced adversaries.
A “cloud,” as the men described it, would give American commanders the ability to attack from many different directions but involve no one single major target — like an air base or an aircraft carrier — which would cost a conflict if lost. New bases in Southeast Asia and Australia, as well as potential new long-range strike weapons and unmanned aircraft, would enable the U.S. to spread out its forces into this cloud and complicate the defenders’ job in a potential conflict.
Flat or shrinking defense budgets are a major problem, however, as Deptula acknowledged, as is what he called “institutional inertia” on the part of the military departments.
“Right now the services are acting like turtles,” he said. “They’re pulling into their shells to protect what they have.”