This close to the March 4 submission of the fiscal 2015 budget request, getting specifics from service officials can be like pulling teeth. But a number of statements, both in public appearances and during interviews, provide a sense of direction for the Air Force’s plans.
The message: Expect to see big cuts to personnel and platforms.
The overall theme of the budget is the question of capability today or capability tomorrow. It’s a tricky path for the service, which has cut readiness in order to keep modernization programs — most notably the KC-46A tanker, F-35 joint strike fighter and new long-range strike bomber — moving forward.
“A basic strategic tradeoff is whether we maintain more of our current capabilities and continue to upgrade them to marginally improve their capability, or do we use those resources to modernize the force and develop and field the next generation of capabilities?” said Mark Gunzinger, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who served in a number of Pentagon roles. “I see a trend, which I think the [Strategic Choices and Management Review] highlighted, toward sustaining a smaller force in the near term in order to resource needed modernization programs.”
The Air Force has already begun to shrink the force by about 22,000 airmen this year, and in a Jan. 29 speech, Secretary Deborah Lee James indicated the trend will continue.
“I feel quite certain we will become a smaller Air Force, but it will be an Air Force that will remain highly capable and on the cutting edge of technology so we can always step up to the plate and meet the country’s needs,” James said.
The Air Force took a conservative approach to its budget, beginning with a worst-case scenario and building up. While the congressional budget deal has bought the Pentagon extra funds over sequestration levels, the service intends to use that money to address readiness challenges rather than add new platforms.
The choice to take funds from readiness and needed upgrades in favor of recapitalization is a direct result of politics that have prevented politically sensitive cuts, according to one top Air Force general.
“That was a juxtaposition forced on us because we were not allowed to make other decisions that would allow us to modernize, recapitalize and resize the force all within the budget we were given. We were told, ‘You cannot reduce any force structure, you cannot get rid of any people,’ ” Gen. Michael Hostage, head of Air Combat Command, said in a Jan. 27 interview. “I knew I had to keep recapitalizing. I had to replenish the force.”
The Air Force is fielding the smallest and oldest combat air force it has ever fielded, Gunzinger said.
“That is really startling,” he said. “We need to get on to modernization. We just have to.”
But modernization leads to what James referred to as “hard choices” in the 2015 budget. That includes vertical cuts, or the removal of whole platforms, from the Air Force inventory/.../