That is the second story of a two-part series. The primary story is available here.
Call it a tale of two China strategies.
The U.S. Air Force and Navy are each preparing for a possible fight within the Pacific against China, perhaps in the subsequent couple of years, under the guidance of the identical National Defense Strategy. But this uncertain timing overlaps uncomfortably with a mountain of modernization priorities for every service.
Add to that budget caps for fiscal 2024 and financial 2025, and the 2 services have responded with very different budget strategies.
On one side, the Air Force’s proposed FY25 budget would trim its procurement account by $1.6 billion from the prior 12 months, while boosting research, development, test and evaluation spending by nearly that quantity. In the method, the service expects to scale back its fighter jet purchases by 12.
For its part, the Navy has found itself in a shooting war within the Red Sea while also attempting to increase its presence within the Pacific region to discourage China. The service has prioritized paying for current operations and personnel in its FY25 spending request. Procurement spending is flat, while research and development drops 5%.
U.S. intelligence officials say Chinese President Xi Jinping has set a goal for the nation’s military to modernize enough to perform an invasion of Taiwan — which China views as a rogue breakaway province — as early as 2027.
The Air Force says that, while it wrestles with spending caps under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, it leaned toward research and development greater than procurement to make sure future capabilities remain on the right track.
The Navy, in contrast, contends that if it must deter or fight China on this “decade of concern,” it could accomplish that with the fleet it has today, not the one it hopes to develop within the many years to come back.
Because the services determine their approaches, lawmakers are weighing in on whether the USA will probably be able to face China in time.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said at a March conference China could attempt to take Taiwan by force as early as 2027, noting that fielding capabilities on the turn of the last decade will probably be too late.
“Anybody that uses a metric or time-frame and says, ‘We’ll get these things done by 2030′ — flawed answer,” Wittman said on the McAleese & Associates event. “2027 must be the metric. That’s how we can have the chance to discourage [China].”
A pattern of differing approaches
At the very least one expert told Defense News it’s normal for the Navy and Air Force to take different approaches on modernization.
On the whole, the Navy has taken a more strategic, methodical path to accomplishing its aircraft modernization goals, holding back on buying next-generation aircraft until technology matures and costs come down, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute think tank who focuses on defense budgets.
Within the meantime, the Navy has bought aircraft already in production to fill out its inventory. For instance, over the past decade, the service repeatedly prolonged its fourth-generation F/A-18E/F Super Hornet production line to avoid a fighter jet shortfall. It introduced its fifth-generation F-35C in 2019, well after the Marine Corps’ F-35B in 2015 and the Air Force’s F-35A in 2016.
“That’s why for a couple of decade, until only in the near past, the Navy had the next aircraft procurement budget than the Air Force,” Harrison said. “The Air Force approach has been more about chasing latest technologies and glossy objects which can be dangled in front of them.”
The Air Force is now concurrently attempting to buy the F-15EX, a new edition of a legacy fighter, and the F-35A, while “getting knee-deep” into developing a sixth-generation fighter program called Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, Harrison said.
“They’re attempting to buy three different generations of fighters all at the identical time,” he said. “And it looks like they simply aren’t sure where they need to put their bets. That’s an unsustainable approach, and it looks prefer it’s catching as much as them. They only don’t have the resources to proceed buying three different lines of three different generations of fighters .”
But when China moves to reclaim Taiwan in 2027, Harrison said, the Air Force is “going to come back up short. They’re not going to have the longer term systems like NGAD in time, and so they’re not going to have the amount of fifth-gen and fourth-gen fighters that they’d likely need in those scenarios. … They’re destined to fall short on quantities with this approach.”
The Navy, for its part, acknowledges it could enter a hypothetical 2027 battle with the fleet it has today. So at the same time as its ship and aircraft fleet have shrunk in size lately amid the decommissioning of Cold War-era platforms, the service has focused on the readiness of the ships and planes it could take to war.
The Navy has launched several data-driven efforts aimed toward quickening maintenance, and it has looked to field software updates and other capabilities that will be rapidly implemented on existing platforms, relatively than built into those of the longer term.
Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven told Defense News all of the services are driven “to be able to execute the [National Defense Strategy] over the near, the medium and the long term. Each service will come to that with a rather different view on how you can execute that strategy. But we’re fundamentally all aligned to execute that strategy.”
While the Navy has sided with Wittman’s push to be ready by 2027, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on the McAleese conference his service must take an extended view.
“It’s a risk balance over time,” Kendall said. “If you happen to fixate only on 2027, you’re going to search out that in ’29 you’re in big trouble.”
‘We got pinched’
Maj. Gen. Dave Tabor, director of programs for the Air Force’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs, told Defense News the service must find a way to field enough existing capabilities and proceed developing the subsequent generation of aircraft to remain on the leading edge. To try this, he said, the service needed to strike a nice balance between R&D and procurement.
And with the Fiscal Responsibility Act’s budgetary caps pushing the Air Force to make tough decisions, R&D got here out on top.
“At the tip of the day, we got pinched by the topline,” Tabor said, and 6 F-35s and 6 F-15EXs got cut. “The result is comparatively minimal to our overall rollout, however it’s 12 jets [cut] that last 12 months we were thrilled to have.”
The implications of the FRA’s budgetary caps began to come back into focus last summer after the Air Force had drawn up its program objective memorandum, which spells out the service’s spending plans over the subsequent five years, Tabor said.
“We knew that [the FRA] was coming; we didn’t know the way it was going to manifest,” he added.
Top Air Force leaders, including then-Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, current Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin and Secretary Kendall, convened in June for a high-level meeting called Corona South. A key topic of dialogue, Tabor said, was what to placed on the chopping block to satisfy the budget caps. The matter remained unsettled as Corona South wrapped up, he added, and only became more clear after submitting this system objective memorandum at the tip of June.
In hindsight, the Air Force would have liked a clearer picture of its budgetary outlook earlier, though service leaders ended up relatively satisfied with the result, Tabor said.
“Constructing a 90% solution is a complete lot different than constructing a 100% solution and taking 10% out of it, and the latter is form of what we ended up with,” he said. “The approach was [preserving capabilities that provide] relative value to the joint fight and what did the smallest amount of injury to what we had already done.”
If a conflict with China were to erupt, he added, systems now within the works — similar to NGAD, the B-21 Raider stealth bomber and artificial intelligence-operated drones referred to as collaborative combat aircraft — would allow the Air Force to fight in ways it never had before.
NGAD and the collaborative combat aircraft ended up winners within the Air Force’s proposed R&D budget: The previous’s funding in 2025 would jump by $815 million to greater than $2.7 billion, and CCA spending would increase by $165 million to $557 million.
But Harrison and Heather Penney, a former F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow on the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said the Air Force can’t count on having newer capabilities, similar to NGAD, fielded within the early 2030s. Such a time-frame may very well be overly optimistic, they agreed, given the advanced technology that have to be refined for NGAD and the track record of some nascent aircraft programs failing to remain on schedule.
“When was the last time we ever saw a sophisticated capability show up on time and on budget?” Penney said. The B-21′s apparent success thus far is “an exception to how we’ve seen the whole lot else occur. The capabilities [intended for NGAD], by way of fully operationally capable — that’s not 2030. We’re talking 2035, 2040.”
Tabor said NGAD is “proceeding at pace” and that, even when it falls behind schedule, “we’re prepared with other capabilities to mitigate risk” for a conflict with China.
‘Something has to offer’
For the Navy, prioritizing current operations over future platforms wasn’t a selection; it was an operational imperative.
The Navy reported it has lobbed a billion dollars’ price of missiles into the skies of the Middle East since October, shooting down drones and missiles launched by the Yemen-based Houthi rebel group. The service hasn’t publicly estimated the associated fee of its operations there, which include the higher-than-usual tempo of day by day operations for ships and planes, the extension of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group’s deployment in the autumn, and what’s more likely to be a greater maintenance bill.
“Where the Department of the Navy really placed its priorities is on our fundamental mission of being forward-deployed world wide in order that if a crisis hits, we’re there on the scene,” Raven, the undersecretary, told Defense News days after releasing the FY25 budget. “Readiness and folks were the 2 top priorities that actually got here through on this budget.”
The Navy asked for $87.6 billion for operations and maintenance, up $3 billion from FY24. It also continued a recent give attention to munitions, asking for $6.6 billion to purchase weapons and expand the economic base that builds them.
However it needed to then cut procurement and R&D. The Navy asked for six ships, in comparison with the seven it previously expected to incorporate in its FY25 budget. It also asked for 75 planes, in comparison with the 94 it previously planned to buy.
This took a toll on all three of the Navy’s key modernization programs: its own Next Generation Air Dominance, which incorporates a manned and unmanned family of systems to exchange the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet; the SSN(X) next-generation attack submarine that can follow the Virginia class; and the DDG(X) next-generation destroyer that can follow the Arleigh Burke class.
The Navy’s NGAD effort took the largest financial hit: The service wants $454 million in FY25, in comparison with $1.5 billion in FY24, for the F/A-XX piloted aircraft portion of this system.
The SSN(X) program faces probably the most significant delay: The service now says it is going to begin acquisition within the early 2040s, in comparison with a previous 2035 start and a 2031 plan before that.
Raven said the Navy needed to take risk here, given the FRA budget caps.
“If we’re going to prioritize people and readiness, something has to offer, and we saw the perfect profit in taking more risk in that longer-term modernization,” he told Defense News. “But budget caps have consequences. There are hard decisions being made on this 12 months’s budget.”
Down the road, Raven added, “there could also be opportunities to learn from the Air Force because it develops its path to a few of these same sorts of technologies” — similar to their separate NGAD programs.
Though lawmakers like Wittman have expressed a preference for prioritizing readiness over future fleet size and capability, one expert warned the Navy is digging itself a hole it is going to struggle to get out of.
“Given the long lead time to design and construct capital assets similar to ships and aircraft, the U.S. Navy has entered its version of a ‘doom loop’ where funds for future ships are deferred to pay for today’s readiness — which ensures tomorrow’s readiness can even suffer, as latest ships are required to take care of readiness,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense News.
“Readiness and fleet size are inextricably linked,” Eaglen added. “It’s shortsighted to imagine they’re separate and distinct.”
The Air Force, after many years of deferred modernization, now faces a “massive gap” between its current reality and the vision Kendall crafted for transforming the service through next-generation systems, Penney said. But it will possibly’t achieve that vision without pouring its money into research and development.
“No person’s flawed here, and no person’s right,” she said.
That is the second story of a two-part series. The primary story is available here.
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.
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a give attention to U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from 4 geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.