Air Force readiness “continues to spiral downward,” the Heritage Foundation said. The latest comprehensive assessment of the U.S. militaryrates the U.S. Air Force’s capabilities as “very weak,” the lowest grade on the conservative think tank’s five-point scale.
Meanwhile, the Space Force was upgraded more than a year ago, moving from “weak” to the midpoint “marginal.”
The Air Force’s low score is due to delays in mission performance and crew training, as well as questionable “deployability,” according to Heritage’s assessment based on 2023 data released Jan. 24. . In particular, the United States Air Force’s ability to withstand bombing raids was criticized. Competition with other companies in the same industry.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has expressed similar concerns in recent months. Last September, Kendall launched a sweeping review to “reoptimize” the Air Force, but he had already begun publicly questioning its readiness as early as last August.
“If you were asked to go to war with a superpower tomorrow, Russia or China, would you really be ready to do it?” Kendall said on a Facebook livestream in August. “I think the answer is not as much as we think, but by a wide margin.”
Air Force leaders will detail findings and plans from the “reoptimization” study at the AFA Warfare Symposium Feb. 12-14. Officials have begun rolling out force forecasting concepts, including how they aim to implement the Air Force Generation Model (AFFORGEN) and plans to create an “air force” last fall. These plans are still in progress and hints will be presented at the conference.
Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. James C. Slife described the operational effect of this shift as reversing a long-standing trend of prioritizing efficiency and instead prioritizing mission efficiency. AFFORGEN is intended to “define joint force capabilities, risk, and readiness,” Slife told Air & Space Forces Magazine, while future deployable forces will package capabilities and train together. Units are able to operate as a team because the moment they are called into action.
Both issues were raised in a report by the Heritage Foundation, whose Air Force branch was led by retired colonel and 25-year Air Force veteran Senior Researcher John Venable.
AFFORGEN has established a two-year cycle for deployable units, with four six-month phases that include “reset” and training time. But Venable argued that the Air Force is not investing enough flight hours to properly train aircrews for the close-quarters combat they will face.
“The last time fighter pilots averaged 150 hours of flight time per year and more than two sorties per week was in 2015,” Venable wrote. The historical standard for the Air Force was 200 hours per year, three sorties per week.
The service’s flight hour budget has not increased proportionately to the rest of its budget, and the total number of flight hours has actually declined in recent years. If Airmen are not given adequate opportunities to prepare and train, Venable wrote, Aforgen is “nothing less than an attempt to change the conversation around readiness at perhaps the lowest level in Air Force history.”
Aircraft material readiness is also declining, Venable asserted, with particularly low mission capability rates for F-22s and B-1s, further limiting the amount of time aircrews can fly to develop critical skills. It was pointed out that
The Air Force needs three active-duty squadrons to send two squadrons to the front lines, Venable wrote. That is why “until the end of the Cold War, the Air Force was organized using three squadron wings to handle the associated load.”
But that structure collapsed as the Air Force consolidated forces into fewer squadrons per wing and deployments changed to force packages of aircraft and personnel.
“We have deployed wings on Desert Storm,” Slife said at the AFA Air, Space and Cyber conference in September. “We will no longer deploy wings…we will deploy a custom-built collection of UTCs that have never trained together before arriving where the action takes place. It is an efficient operational method. It primarily operates in relatively uncontested environments where there is a large fixed operational base that is not susceptible to attack. That is not the world we live in anymore.”
Even now, Venable argued, the Air Force is struggling to meet its personnel requirements and is having to pull pilots and personnel from across the force. In the event of a new crisis with a near-peer competitor, the Air Force must spring into action and maintain a fast-paced operation.
Venable claims that this nearly wiped out the Air Force. “The Air Force does not have a fighter squadron with the level of readiness, capability and confidence necessary to take on our competitors, and readiness continues to decline,” Venable asserted. .
space force rising
Heritage magazine was less critical of the Space Force, raising its score from “weak” to “marginal”, a mid-range grade on a scale of 1 to 5.
Mr. Venable cited improvements across the board in USSF capabilities, capabilities, and readiness. “Capacity and capacity trend lines are improving rapidly, which could bode well for his service in 2024 and beyond,” he said.
The Space Force can meet global and strategic-level requirements for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). For communication. and for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). But more remains to be done to meet tactical and operational requirements, Venable said.
Such requirements are the focus of initiatives such as the Space Development Agency’s Proliferation Fighter Space Architecture. The architecture deploys hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit to provide missile warning and tracking, serving as the backbone of integrated all-domain command and control. However, full participation is still several years away.
