The Air Force’s proposed budget for fiscal 2025 would cut procurement of two major fighter programs — the F-35A and F-15EX Eagle II — and boost research and development funding for future capabilities.
The service plans to purchase 42 Lockheed Martin-made F-35As for $5.9 billion and 18 Boeing F-15EXs for $1.8 billion next yr. That might be a discount from the 48 and 24 fighters, respectively, the service originally expected to purchase.
The Air Force plans to stop buying F-15EXs all together after 2025 concludes, which is able to cap all the line of Eagle IIs at 98 — six fewer than the 104 the service had been planning to purchase. The Air Force’s expected total purchase of 1,763 F-35As stays unchanged.
The Air Force also desires to cut 250 aircraft in 2025, including 56 A-10 Warthogs, 65 older F-15 C and D Eagle fighters, 26 F-15E Strike Eagles with less-capable engines, 11 F-16 Fighting Falcons, and 32 Block 20 F-22A Raptors the service said can be prohibitively expensive to ready for combat. The service expects those retirements, if approved, would save greater than $2 billion in fiscal 2025.
The Department of the Air Force’s fiscal 2025 proposed budget requests a complete of $217.5 billion, a rise of $2.4 billion, or 1.1%, over its request from this yr. Kristyn Jones, who’s performing the duties of undersecretary of the Air Force, noted to reporters that the rise doesn’t sustain with inflation.
The service asked for $188.1 billion, a $3 billion or 1.6% increase over its 2024 request. The Space Force’s requested $29.4 billion budget can be a 2% drop from the 2024 request.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters in a March 8 briefing the service “needed to make some hard decisions” to suit throughout the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act caps the federal government’s spending increases as a part of a deal Congress struck last yr to avoid a default on the nation’s debt. For the Defense Department, that limits its 2025 budget to $850 million, lower than the $860 million the administration originally anticipated.
Kendall described the resulting budget as “acceptable,” and “essentially consistent” with the fiscal 2024 budget. But although he said it moves the department forward on key programs and strikes a balance between near-, mid- and long-term programs, he said he’d “wish to have the ability to maneuver faster.”
And more “tough decisions” are ahead in fiscal 2026′s budget, he warned, including the primary real effects of the LGM-35A Sentinel program’s severe cost overruns. The Air Force’s next intercontinental ballistic missile, slated to exchange its aging Minuteman III nuclear missiles, has seen its costs ballon a minimum of 37% and triggered a value overrun process called a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.
“Life gets rather a lot harder as you get past [20]25,” Kendall said.
The Air Force tried to strike a balance between mid-term procurement of more air frames and capabilities which have already been developed, and research and development of future advanced capabilities the service hopes pays off in the long run.
“My priority is to get to a next generation of capabilities as quick as we are able to, due to what China’s doing when it comes to their modernization,” Kendall said. He added later, “China is advancing in a short time, and so they’re not stopping. So we actually need, as a priority, to get to a next-generational capability. And you may’t even start to purchase that until you’ve done the research and development.”
That resulted in a “tradeoff” in favor of R&D over procurement, Kendall said, to present future administrations options of latest capabilities it may decide to buy as threats change.
The Air Force’s proposed procurement budget in 2025 is $29 billion, which can be down $1.6 billion from its 2024 proposal. And its proposed research, development, test and evaluation budget would rise from $36.2 billion within the 2024 proposal to $37.7 billion in 2025.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., warned on the March 7 McAleese Defense Conference in Washington that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to make a move on Taiwan by 2027. Wittman said military strategies that rely on fielding capabilities by about 2030 will come too late, and the U.S. military must field shorter-term capabilities to have the ability to dissuade China from attempting to take Taiwan by force.
“Anybody that uses a metric and says, ‘We’ll get these items done by 2030′ — unsuitable answer,” Wittman said. “2027 must be the metric. That’s how we can have the chance to discourage” China.
In a gaggle with reporters at McAleese, Kendall said the Air Force has to take an extended view, and might want to counter China not only in 2027, but for years to return.
“It’s a risk balance over time,” Kendall said. “In the event you fixate only on 2027, you’re going to seek out that in ‘29, you’re in big trouble. And ‘29 goes to return.”
Squeezing costs
A wide range of rising costs are squeezing the Air Force’s budget, Jones said, and led to the procurement cuts. The department expects to spend about $1 billion more in 2025 to maintain the variety of flying hours and weapon system sustainment on par with 2024 levels, and personnel costs corresponding to military pay and advantages are also going up, she said.
R&D funding for Sentinel would remain flat from the 2024 request at $3.7 billion. And the service desires to spend $700 million on six construction projects for Sentinel in 2025, in addition to one other $70 million for planning and design, a serious increase from the $140 million it requested for Sentinel construction in 2024.
Jones said a number of the changes included within the “reoptimization for nice power competition” reorganization the Air Force unveiled last month will help set the Sentinel program back on course. Those changes would come with putting a three-star general in command of the Nuclear Weapons System Center, and having a two-star general function a program executive officer for ICBMs. Jones said the Air Force remains to be studying this system’s requirements and searching for alternative strategies that might get monetary savings.
Overall funding for the B-21 Raider stealth bomber will remain fairly regular, although some funds will shift from R&D to procurement because the bomber continues in its low-rate initial production phase. R&D funding for the bomber’s engineering, manufacturing and development phase would dip from $3 billion in 2024 to $2.7 billion in 2025, while procurement funding would increase from $2.3 billion to $2.7 billion.
The Next-Generation Air Dominance program, the service’s future fighter system, would receive an extra $815 million to develop and test its air vehicle, mission systems and capabilities, bringing spending on that program to greater than $2.8 billion.
The Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, program would receive $559 million in R&D funding to proceed development, prototyping and integration of its air vehicle, which can be a $166 million boost over 2024 levels.
CCAs are drones outfitted with autonomous software that might fly alongside crewed NGAD and F-35 fighters into battle and perform missions corresponding to strikes, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare operations. The service now has contracts with five vendors on this program — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril — and plans to winnow the sphere to 2 or three within the months to return.
The CCA program would also receive one other $116 million to check its autonomous capabilities and for experimentation programs corresponding to Project Venom and the experimental operations unit. And the service said its proposed 2025 funding for CCAs would allow it to lock down the aircraft’s design, construct production-representative test aircraft for this system’s first increment, begin testing and refine the concept for its second increment.
The Air Force also plans to purchase 15 KC-46A Pegasus tankers for $3.1 billion and 7 T-7A Red Hawk trainers for $233 million. And it might retire 16 KC-135 Stratotankers because it brings on latest KC-46s.
The service plans to retire 22 T-1A Texan II training aircraft to unlock more resources that may be invested in newer pilot training technologies.
And the budget would supply $13.7 million for the Air Force’s tanker recapitalization effort to function a bridge between the present wave of KC-46s and the service’s planned Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System, or NGAS. That selection will likely be between more Boeing KC-46s and a tanker from Airbus. The service expects to complete its acquisition strategy for that tanker this summer, after which release a request for proposal in 2025. The Air Force plans to start out requesting procurement funding for that tanker in 2027.
The Air Force began conducting an evaluation of alternatives study for NGAS in January, Maj. Gen. Michael Greiner, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for budget, told reporters. The service desires to spend about $7 million on preparing for NGAS, including conducting modeling and simulation studies, so it may field a sophisticated tanker by the mid-2030s.
The service also wants to spice up its purchases of AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, or LRASMs, and Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Prolonged Range missiles, or AARGM-ERs. The LRASM and AARGM-ER purchases would increase considerably — from 27 in 2024 to 115 in 2025, and from 14 in 2024 to 128 in 2025, respectively.
Kendall said the Air Force is hoping to proceed its strategy of multi-year procurement purchases for AMRAAM, LRASM, and the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Prolonged Range missile.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.