F-35As: Ready Half the Time
By John A. Tirpak
The F-35A mission capable (MC) rate for fiscal 2023 was 51.9 percent, with the Air Force blaming spare parts availability for the decline from the previous year’s figure of 56 percent.
Mission capable rates measure the percentage of time an aircraft is able to perform at least one of its core missions.
The new figures match those published in an April audit of F-35 sustainment costs from the Government Accountability Office. In that report, the GAO said the F-35A’s mission capable rate peaked in 2020 at 71.4 percent, then declined to 68.8 percent in 2021, 56 percent in 2022, and 51.9 percent in 2023, as the Air Force brought on more jets at the rate of about 40 per year. The GAO quoted the Air Force’s “minimum performance target” MC rate for the F-35A at 80 percent, and its “objective performance target” as 90 percent.
In the audit, the GAO noted that “none of the variants of the aircraft (i.e., the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C) are meeting availability goals,” but allowed that the services “have made progress in meeting their affordability targets (i.e., the amount of money they project they can afford to spend per aircraft per year for operating the aircraft). … This is due in part to the reduction in planned flight hours, and because the Air Force increased the amount of money it projects it can afford to spend” on its F-35As.
The GAO report states the Air Force now expects to pay $6.6 million annually per tail to operate and sustain the F-35A, a roughly 34 percent increase over the figure it cited in June 2023 of $4.1 million per airplane. The service also told the watchdog agency it would continue to operate the F-35 about 12 years longer than originally planned but fly each aircraft less often. The service expects to fly each F-35A about 187 hours per year, versus the original plan of 230 hours per year.
While the Air Force has in previous years stated an MC goal rate of between 75 and 80 percent for most its aircraft types, it has abandoned that practice, a service spokesperson said.
“The Air Force does not have an overall [MC] goal or standard,” she said.
Mission capable rate “‘goals’ are specific to the wing/unit flying the aircraft, derived from either syllabus sortie requirements [training] or home-station training and real-world operation requirements [ops bases],” she added.
The service has said the way it measures mission capable rates has changed in recent years, with more focus on readiness of aircraft either already deployed or about to deploy and less on stateside aircraft. The spokesperson reiterated that stance, claiming MC rates “do not equate to Air Force readiness rates.”
“They are just one component assessed at the unit level to help determine how ready a squadron is to meet the threat,” the spokesperson said. Instead, the service measures readiness “by how well the Air Force can carry out its missions, which requires more than mission-capable aircraft. It also requires trained and ready aircrew, maintainers and other Airmen, as well as enough spare parts and resources.”
The Air Force declined to offer explanations for significant declines in mission capable rates for various fleets, such as the C-5 Galaxy, B-1 Lancer, and other platforms where huge resource investments in maintainability and reliability have not paid off in aircraft availability. Overall, MC rates for most Air Force fleets—44 of 64 types—declined in fiscal 2023 over 2022.
No More Ops & Maintenance Groups
By Greg Hadley
The Air Force is eliminating group-level Operations and Maintenance commands, streamlining the makeup of squadrons and wings, Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said June 14, revealing the latest twist in the drive to more effectively project combat power.
Dozens of such commands, usually led by colonels, exist today across the Air Force. But as Allvin oversees the “re-optimization” of Air Force combat power for great power competition, leaders’ group-level commands don’t have a place in a structure where wings could deploy as a unit, then disperse squadrons or smaller units in a “hub-and-spoke” agile combat employment scheme.
“We’re talking about having a doctrine of mission command that means empowering at the lowest competent level, giving left and right limits—commander’s intent—and letting them leverage their initiative,” Allvin said. “Those squadrons need to be able to exercise that. And sometimes, if there’s another level of command between the squadron commander and the wing command, the group command might be helping them out too much.
“If you’re a group commander, what do you want to be when you grow up? A wing commander. How do you do that? Well, you make sure your squadrons are all the best. So maybe you might be helping them out and succeeding and not letting them fail forward in training.”
The colonels who previously commanded groups will instead move to wing staffs, where they will focus on “the operational warfighting and joint warfighting functions,” Allvin said. The aim is to help them become better joint leaders, something Allvin believes is necessary for the Air Force to take a leading role in the future of warfare.
“I think it’s our responsibility not only to be good participants in the joint force, but I also think the Air Force should start having maybe perhaps a greater leadership role,” he said.
The change is not a small one, Allvin acknowledged, and will require the service to revamp some of its processes. Officers’ career paths may have to change, and professional military education will have to shift to emphasize the operational level for wing commanders and their staff.
Doing so, though, will help align the Air Force better with the other services, Allvin predicted. It will also make sense for the service’s new combat wings, the “unit of action” leaders first unveiled in February as part of their “Re-Optimization for Great Power Competition.”
At the AFA Warfare Symposium, officials said they will break down all of the Air Force’s operational wings into three categories:
Deployable Combat Wings (DCW): Complete units that can deploy together, with their own native command and control, mission, and support elements.
In-Place Combat Wings (ICW): Complete units with
command, mission, and support elements that fight from their home station.
Combat Generation Wings (CGW): Units that provide force elements to Deployable Combat Wings, whether those elements entail command and control, mission, or service support elements.
The goal, leaders explained at the time, is to move away from the current system where Airmen are pulled from dozens of different units to fill out one expeditionary wing, only meeting and working together once they arrive in theater. Eventually, entire wings will train and deploy as one unit. The service is taking a phased approach to get there, first introducing Expeditionary Air Base teams pulled from a smaller group of bases, and now planning to move to Air Task Forces, which will pull forces from only two or three bases.
The locations of the first six Air Task Forces were announced in May and are scheduled to start deploying in late 2025 and early 2026. The timeline for implementing combat wings is “pretty dynamic right now,” Allvin told reporters, but the goal is to have enough in place ready to go when the Air Task Forces start to wrap up—sometime around the fall of 2026.
Like the Air Task Forces, some of the first combat wings will deploy to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. But make no mistake, Allvin said, they are not designed for the typical CENTCOM structure of large central bases from which all airpower is generated.
“We’re optimizing for the pacing challenge. So this construct is best suited for going over and doing deterrence exercises or actually having to go over and employ Agile Combat Employment against the pacing challenge of China,” Allvin said June 13 at an AFA Warfighters in Action event.
A central tenet of Agile Combat Employment is dispersing smaller teams to operate from remote or austere airfields—and Allvin told reporters that it makes sense for the combat wing’s staff to act as the hub while squadrons go to the spokes.
“If we’re going to actually expect these wings to go and be able to do these maneuver functions in the hub-and-spoke locations, then we need them to have a different set of specialties,” Allvin said. That drove the decision to fold group commanders into the wing staffs.
Deployable Combat Wings will be the principal “units of action” presented to combatant commands, but not every wing will be designated as such. Some will be Combat Generation Wings, which might lack the command and control functions of a combat wing, but provide plug-and-play combat capability to those wings that can deploy as a unit. Allvin said USAF leaders are still determining how much combat airpower each Deployable Combat Wing will need.
Still other wings will deploy in place. These could include any wing that can operate globally from its home station, including bomber and cyber units, among others.
“We don’t want to have a Deployable Combat Wing that’s got two airplanes in it just because we’ve got to spread them around,” Allvin said. “So finding the right number of platforms around which you can do the command element and then the sustainment element is going to be key, but it starts off with, what are the requirements? And then what are we resourced to do?”
Service leaders plan to make a decision on how many Deployable Combat Wings they’ll start with by this fall, Allvin told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Air Force Aims for 24 Deployable Combat Wings
By Greg Hadley
The Air Force plans to field 24 Deployable Combat Wings to meet its rotational demands and provide a cushion for times of crisis, Lt. Gen. Adrian L. Spain, deputy chief of staff for operations, said June 18.
Combat Wings replace squadrons as the “units of action” that the Air Force presents to combatant commanders when forces are needed. Deployable Combat Wings will include command, sustainment, and mission layers, and can either pick up and deploy as an entire unit, or add or exchange mission elements depending on a combatant command’s needs at the time.
Getting to 24 DCWs won’t happen overnight. Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said June 14 that his staff is still developing the road map that will enable combat wings to be the operable deployable elements by late 2026.
“I think the number that we’re shooting for right now is 24,” Spain said. “We think 16 Active-duty and eight from the Reserve Components.”
How many the Air Force can field may not equate to need, however.
“The number that we can generate and the number that we need is absolutely what we’re talking about,” Spain said. “How many do we think we can actually generate with current resources? And how many do we need, not only to meet the current rotational requirements that we know we’re going to have or we’re likely to continue to have … but to give us some margin for combat credible and capable units of action beyond just the rotational part?”
Two dozen Deployable Combat Wings would allow the Air Force to maintain six wings each in the four phases of the Air Force force generation cycle: Prepare, Ready, Available to Commit, and Reset. Regular rotations would draw from the Available to Commit group, but in times of war, forces could be committed while in the Ready, or “certified” phase, as well.
“You have a bench in the certified phase that you might want to take some risk on depending on what’s going on in the world and forward deploy them,” Spain said. “That would be in the worst case: an existential fight that’s coming up and we’re willing to take that risk. You wouldn’t do that for day-to-day operations. But you do have [a Ready capability] and they’re three-quarters of the way through that cycle and largely prepared to go.”
Rotational demand and availability would not be spread equally among the Active and Reserve Components, however. Drawn from both the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, the eight Reserve Component DCWs will have different deploy-to-dwell ratios, meaning more time home between deployments, and they may not be quite as fully equipped to deploy on their own.
No Deployable Combat Wing will deploy with “more than about four mission force elements,” Spain said. Typically, those elements have been equated with squadrons, and Spain said the reality is that in most cases a dozen aircraft would make up a force element for fighters.
Equipping those fully will be key to making units fully combat ready.
“Historically, in order to get to the deployable element, we kind of raided the follow-on force’s kit, in order to make sure the first 12 got out the door sufficiently,” Spain said. The Air Force would prefer not to have to do that, however, and this year’s unfunded priorities list included $612 million to bolster nine new elements, in the hope that Congress will buy out that deficit.
The exact makeup of the Deployable Combat Wings’ force elements may vary, but Spain said the wings will be designed to be modular enough that the command and support elements can take on other kinds of capabilities than whatever is their native force element.
“Where we are going to need to train the command echelon is to be able to receive forces of any type, because it’s probably going to be rare that the mission element that you have at your base is exactly what the crisis demands,” Spain said. “But I may need a command echelon and sustainment echelon … so they may go and the force elements may go either to a different place or not deployed at all, because I need F-16s versus F-22s at this time.”