The Air Force has created a long-term plan to deal with budgets lowered by sequestration called Air Force 2023, an “honest look” at what the service could look like in 10 years if sequestration remains law and what changes it might have to make, according to the service’s top officer.
“Let’s get realistic about what we could look like in 2023 and take a real, honest look in the mirror about what we are going to have to do to get there,” Welsh said yesterday at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington.
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| Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh. Photo: Air Force. |
Welsh said Air Force 2023 plans for the best Air Force the United States can have with fewer dollars and the steps it will have to take to get there. Welsh said the service has also made incremental adjustments in case it has more money.
Welsh said if full sequestration remains in effect, the Air Force will have to cut about 50 percent of its modernization programs just to be able to afford some level of readiness. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) Senior Fellow Todd Harrison said yesterday it isn’t certain what the Air Force’s budget will be in 10 years because that is not how sequestration works. Harrison said there is one overall cap for defense, but it doesn’t specify how it is divided among the services and that it is conceivable, or perhaps likely, the Air Force’s budget will be different years from now.
Harrison said assuming the Air Force has the same share of the budget in fiscal year 2021, the final year of sequestration, as it does today (26 percent), its budget would be roughly $148 billion. That’s about $130 billion in today’s dollars, Harrison said, about equal to the FY ’13 level of funding (excluding war funding).
Welsh said as part of Air Force 2023, the service will continue recapitalizing its fighter fleet with the F-35 and its aerial refueling fleet with the KC-46. The Air Force will also continue to upgrade its fighter jet radars, Welsh said, to compete against future threats. Welsh said the bulk of the Air Force’s sequestration bill is going to come out of readiness, force structure and modernization.
But everything else is on the table.
“If it’s nice to have. It’s on the books,” Welsh said.
Welsh said, outside of its Air Force 2023 planning, the service should revisit acquisition figures for every program, including the F-35 and KC-46. Citing the Air Force’s planned buy of 1,763 F-35A conventional variants, Welsh said those types of figures should be reevaluated to make sure they are the right answer for the United States.
“The number on the books, right now, (is) based on analysis that was done a couple years ago,” Welsh said. “I don’t know if it will end up being more or less than that…but we should revisit for every program.”
Welsh also said the Air Force’s new next-generation Long Range Strike Bomber, one of the service’s highest priorities, will use practical technology to help keep unit costs affordable and get the aircraft deployed in a reasonable fashion.
The Air Force plans to buy around 80 to 100 new bombers at a price tag of around $550 million each. Whether the service actually buys that many is yet to be seen as the service originally envisioned a fleet of 132 B-2s in the 1980s, but ended up with only 20 as the program was beset with cost and scheduling problems (Defense Daily; Feb. 10, 2012).
“What we don’t want to do is try to reach into some level of technology that is impractical, that’s where prices start to get out of control,” Welsh said.
Welsh said when the service branches reach too far and try to impose hard-to-achieve technical requirements on next-generation platforms, like the short-takeoff and vertical landing capability on the F-35B variant, costs go up and progress slips to the right.
That won’t happen with the new bomber, Welsh said.
“If somebody offers you something, if it sounds (good)…you just keep adding to the requirement base for a platform without proven technology,” Welsh said about adding tough requirements to programs. “We are not going to go there.”
Welsh said it is important for the United States to have a bomber fleet in case it ever has to conduct a large scale campaign.