The Shrinking U.S. Air Force

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An F/A-18C Hornet refuels with a British Royal Air Force L-1011 aircraft in southern Afghanistan after conducting operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Sept. 27, 2008. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and Carrier Air Wing 14 are providing support to coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan. U.S. Navy photo by Cmdr. Erik Etz

The Amazing Shrinking Air Force -- War Is Boring

To pay for rising costs for F-22s, F-35s, KC-45 tankers and other new planes, the Air Force will cut around 300 fighters from its 2,000-strong force. But that won’t do anything to fix the programs themselves: costs will continue to rise and numbers of new planes will continue to shrink amid an overall force structure on a steady decline to irrelevance.

What’s going on here? Bad strategy. Overly-complex designs. Inadequate cost controls. Sloppy, corrupt management. It’s the same old sad tale. In a new book, America’s Defense Meltdown, Robert Dilger and F-16 designer Pierre Sprey propose a radical new procurement strategy to not only stop the force decline, but reverse it, buying some 9,000 new planes in just 20 years within existing budgets. Buy the book, when it’s out. In the meantime, here’s a teaser.

The authors propose to rebuild the Air Force focused on just two combat missions, close air support and air superiority, thus abandoning strategic bombing, which many believe is a flawed concept. This new Air Force needs two new combat planes in large numbers, Dilger and Sprey contend:

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My Comment: The article does not take into account the development of unmanned vehicles, nor projected numbers that will be deployed. But I would not be surprised that these vehicles will be the future work horses in most of the world's conflicts.