Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed Pentagon officials to cut their planned budgets by 8 percent and redirect those funds to new priorities. But the Air Force doesn’t have much to draw funding from, a service official warned.
“Let’s be frank, the Air Force has gotten smaller. The Air Force has gotten older. As you look at where the Air Force has gone, we’ve protected the core [missions], which is homeland defense, strategic deterrence, and power projection. So there’s not many places where we can go now for these things. So an 8 percent cut to the Air Force, it’s going to be painful. It’s going to look really, really bad,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director of Force Design, Integration and Wargaming at Air Force Futures.
Still, Kunkel said there’s “hope” because the shift is a reprioritization of resources, not an overall cut to the Pentagon’s budget, and the Air Force is well-positioned under the shakeup because it’s vital to any future conflict.
“The Air Force provides policymakers [with] significant options. We always have. We always will. When you look at the future fight, the role of the Air Force is increasing. It’s not decreasing. It’s increasing. And for this future fight, we’re going to be a big part of that,” Kunkel said Wednesday at an event hosted by the Hudson Institute.
Hegseth specifically exempted certain programs from this funding shift—including the development of a next-gen missile defense shield for the U.S., dubbed Golden Dome, and the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which will build robotic wingmen to fly and fight alongside fighter jets.
Notably, the Pentagon’s most expensive program, the F-35 fighter jet, was not included in the exemptions, raising questions about whether the Air Force will scale back its fighter buy in the upcoming budget request to accommodate the shift in funding.
Though CCAs were envisioned to work alongside manned fighters, a cut to the F-35 buy wouldn’t impact the CCA program because the service is now looking at larger numbers of drones per fighter, and is exploring ways to “expand the aperture” so these drones don’t rely entirely on manned fighters, Kunkel said.
“We need to think about how we integrate CCAs with other platforms, and that’s something I think we need to look at, so the CCA just doesn’t become a solution that’s dependent on fighters. It’s a solution that has all kinds of options,” Kunkel told Defense One on the sidelines of the event.
Kunkel also said the Air Force’s new force design, planned to be a flexible framework to adapt to varying funding levels and changing threats, is in lockstep with the new administration’s priorities.
“Our investments and our force design is completely in line with where the administration is going and with Secretary Hegseth’s priorities. His priorities of rebuilding the military, we’re right there, restoring a warrior ethos, we’re right there, reestablishing the strategic deterrence, we are right there in the middle of that,” Kunkel said.
