The Problem

After decades in decline, President Trump is now inheriting an Air Force older, smaller, and less ready than it has ever been in its history—and planned to get even smaller over the next five years if action is not immediately taken to reverse this course. Additionally, President Trump’s initiative in standing up the U.S. Space Force has been stifled by insufficient funding, inadequate numbers of personnel, and resistance to consolidating Department of Defense (DOD) space agencies. President Trump must prioritize fixing the Department of the Air Force ahead of many of his other executive initiatives or the consequences will be disastrous for the Nation’s defense.

This task will fall primarily to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Dr. Troy Meink, the President’s Secretary of the Air Force nominee. If confirmed—and there is little reason to think he will not—Dr. Meink will inherit responsibility for the two military services most important to achieving the president’s vision of peace through strength—the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force. However, this is not just about the Department of the Air Force; it is about the status of the entire U.S. military.

Every national security option at the President’s command is made possible by airpower and spacepower—no matter whether the actual fight takes place on land, at sea, in the air, or in space. No joint force operation can be conducted without some element of the Department of the Air Force—a claim no other military department can assert. This makes our Air and Space Forces America’s indispensable military branches fundamental to any U.S. joint force operation.

The Trump administration’s DOD leadership, along with congressional priority, is needed to rebuild and restore the Air Force to global preeminence. The same will be required to fully resource the Space Force to achieve space superiority—to catch up with the myriad requirements and expectations piled on to America’s smallest military service and ensure overall U.S. military success.

The Navy also has force structure challenges, but not to the degree facing the Air Force, which risks a death spiral without a rapid infusion of money. Today’s Air Force has almost 60 percent fewer active-duty fighter squadrons than during Desert Storm in 1991, and its bomber force is less than half the size. Only 28 percent of Air Force fighters and 14 percent of its bombers are stealthy, which means most Air Force combat aircraft are not survivable against China’s and Russia’s most advanced threats unless significant resources are applied to suppress enemy air defenses.

Recipe for a National Security Disaster

The youngest B-52 bomber—making up most of the U.S. bomber force—is 63 years old; air refueling tankers are about the same age; the Air Force’s “advanced” trainer—the T-38—first flew in 1959. The average age of its fighter force is near 30. Ten of its aircraft types first flew over 50 years ago. Those 10 aircraft types account for over 2600 Air Force aircraft, roughly two-thirds of the entire force. The Air Force is literally a geriatric force today. In comparison, the Navy has only one ship on active duty over 50 years old—and it is a non-combatant.

Under the Biden administration’s plans, the Air Force is on track to lose nearly 1,000 planes over the next five years, while acquiring a fraction of that number in new aircraft. In Fiscal Year 2025 alone, the Air Force plans to divest 250 aircraft while buying just 91. Continuing to remove more aircraft than it buys will collapse the Air Force, and currently, there is no plan to stop that from happening.

However, the situation is worse than only declining force structure. At any given time, up to 514 of the Air Force’s flyable aircraft are grounded due to a chronic lack of spare parts. As the Air Force gets older, readiness gets worse. Added to the critical situation of a declining force structure and insufficient spares, is the Air Force’s chronic 2000 pilot shortfall.

The oldest and smallest aircraft inventory in its history, combined with lack of spare parts, and an enduring pilot shortage with falling pilot experience levels is a precarious condition that is a recipe for a national security disaster.

The challenges facing the Air Force are masked by nearly $45 billion in non-Air Force spending over which the Secretary of the Air Force has no control—that is about 24 percent of the Air Force budget. This “pass-through” budget practice is the single biggest threat to the modernization of the Air Force because it creates the false impression that the Air Force is getting significantly more funding than the Army and the Navy. It does not. For example, in the FY 2025 DOD budget briefing on chart two, it shows the Department of the Air Force receiving the most total (budget) obligational authority (TOA) of the DOD departments/agencies. If the pass-through and Space Force are removed, the Air Force actually receives less TOA behind the Navy and Defense-wide agencies and about the same as the Army. For 30 years in a row the Air Force received less funding than the Army and Navy when pass-through is appropriately allocated to what it is—spending for defense-wide agencies. As a result, the Air Force has significantly atrophied.

Secretary Hegseth should immediately change this deceptive practice and, in the name of government transparency, begin reporting the Air Force’s true budget authority.

The Air Force has a constructive modernization plan. The F-35, the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) penetrating combat aircraft, B-21 bomber, T-7 trainer, newly developed uninhabited Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), the EA-37B electronic warfare jet, the E-7A AWACS replacement, the KC-46 refueling tanker, and the Sentinel intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile are, together, the right set of capabilities to rebuild the Air Force. President Trump’s new missile shield over the U.S. will require the Air Force to significantly expand its fleet of air superiority fighters to defend against advanced cruise missile and other next-generation aerial threats. The problem is that today the Air Force lacks the resources to fully fund all these modernization programs at the pace they need to occur.

Some see a future bright with unoccupied aircraft and wonder why we cannot get to that future faster. Yet, as promising as artificial intelligence and autonomy are, these capabilities are still developing. They have not advanced to where they can replace crewed combat aircraft. Indeed, for the foreseeable future, success will be based not on choosing between crewed and unoccupied aircraft, but rather on integrating the two to work effectively together based on the reality of actual capabilities.

Israel recently executed a decisive strike flying U.S.-made F-35s into the heart of Iran, some 1,000 miles away, without a loss. Those F-35s penetrated highly defended Iranian airspace, destroyed advanced Russian built surface-to-air missile systems, and demonstrated impressive airpower capability against a well-armed foe. Drones could not have done what those F-35s did and will not be able to do so any time soon. Experts working to advance artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies on aircraft estimate that vision may not be possible until well into the future.

Challenges Facing the Space Force

The Space Force faces its own compounding pressures: First, overwhelming demand for more space-based capabilities from all the combatant commands and service components. Second, massive vulnerability as China and Russia have turned a once peaceful and uncontested domain into a no-man’s zone of rising threats. Third, China and Russia are increasingly leveraging space themselves to hold America and its allies at risk. Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman uses an apt analogy here: Building the U.S. Space Force into a modern warfighting service is akin to transforming the peacetime, commercial-based Merchant Marine into the U.S. Navy with its associated warfighting prowess and capabilities. This means not only protecting friendly satellites but denying adversaries the benefits of space effects and the ability to target U.S. and allied forces from space.

Without control of space, the U.S. cannot win. The new Trump administration must get the Space Force the resources and authorities to gain and maintain control of space. Biden administration policies restricted the Space Force from fielding capabilities necessary to achieve domain superiority in the same way other branches of the military achieve superiority in the air, on land, and at sea. This must change if the Space Force, and indeed our nation’s military, is to succeed.

The Space Force is now too small to meet its mission. It is funded with a scant 3.5 percent of the DOD budget and must support every military service component and every combatant commander with just over 9,000 military members. Other services have individual bases with a greater population.

A key rationale for establishing the Space Force was to consolidate all of DOD space missions and assets into a single military branch to maximize unity of effort, effectiveness, and efficiency. But that never happened. President Trump needs to correct this lack of action by the Biden administration and command all DOD space agencies (including the National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial Agency, Missile Defense Agency, etc.) to move under the Space Force. These agencies each play a critical role in space. Their fundamental purpose should not change, but the unity of vision and efficiency of operations gained by consolidating them in the Space Force will enhance U.S. national security and coordination across our defense and intelligence establishments. The Space Force can and should be entrusted to lead, guide, protect, and ensure they flourish in accomplishing their roles. Continuing business as usual with stove-piped organizations and multiple organizational leaders is doomed to generate waste through inefficiency and mission gaps through lost coordination.

The Space Force has a good plan but is having to rearchitect nearly all their capabilities given a rapidly evolving threat environment. One of the biggest challenges facing the Space Force is its scale. Despite the overwhelming demand for more space functions, the service is constrained by its size and must be nurtured to grow as rapidly as possible while not so fast that it will collapse under the strain.

Establish a National Nuclear Deterrence Fund

With respect to conventional and nuclear modernization, we cannot choose either/or as the President—and the Nation—needs both. The nuclear triad, two-thirds of which resides in the Air Force, is a proven deterrent that got the nation through the Cold War. Now, as the world evolves to include three major nuclear powers and a host of smaller ones, the deterrence borne of a survivable nuclear triad has never been more essential. However, given the need to rebuild the conventional force structures of both the Navy and Air Force, it is imperative to establish a national nuclear deterrence fund separate from the Air Force and the Navy service accounts. This will ensure that spending on the Nation’s nuclear deterrent forces does not kill funding from these two services’ conventional forces.

To ensure we are getting the most out of every defense dollar, President Trump should encourage Secretary Hegseth to direct defense-wide use of cost-per-effect analyses and enforce clear roles-and-missions discipline among the armed services. Doing so will challenge the Army to justify developing long-range hypersonic strike missiles costing $50-$60 million apiece when the Air Force and Navy can perform that mission effectively at a fraction of the cost. Likewise, the Army does not need to develop its own surveillance aircraft or its own space constellation of satellites when these capabilities are already resident in the Department of the Air Force. Other services are acting to recreate their own “Space Force” within their own confines—this is duplicative and flies in the face of why President Trump created the service. Mission grabs are not appropriate for a military strapped for resources and are ripe for cost-per-effect analysis by the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

A Crisis That Needs Correction

Today, the Department of the Air Force is in a crisis, and the nation has ignored it for too long. To see what happens when a nation lacks a dominant air arm, one need only look at the Russia/Ukraine war. Without dominant air forces, both sides are left to grind out a ground war in a race to see which side runs out of forces and weapons first. That is not the American way of war.

Victory in conflict is never a guarantee. What might come from losing a war with China? Are we willing to give up Guam or retrench from foreign basing if defeated? Both results would have far-reaching negative impacts on the U.S.’s standing in the world and long-term economic strength. Yet these may be the consequences of the continued decline in the capacity of the U.S. Air Force, and insufficient resourcing of the U.S. Space Force.

The typical American citizen believes that our military forces are dominant and unbeatable—that is no longer the case. If President Trump is to manifest his theme of peace through strength, then he must reverse the nosedive that the Air Force is in, and provide the Space Force the money, people, and organizational authorities necessary to fight and win in space. There is no more time left for delay. The fixes must start now, or we may very well lose the next war.