Our Incredible, Shrinking Air Force
By Chris Gordon and John Tirpak
The Air Force fleet will drop below 5,000 aircraft for the first time in its history and continue to shrink, even as leaders work to modernize the force. In 2025, service plans call for divesting 250 aircraft and buying just 91, and Lt. Gen. Richard G. Moore Jr., deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, says more cuts are to come.
“I see that continuing,” Moore said, because the Fiscal Responsibility Act caps spending increases at no more 1 percent, regardless of inflation. “This is the result of a reduced top line and also reduced buying power, and so we have to buy fewer [aircraft]. We had to balance. Balance is something that’s a requirement.”
Ahead lies a force with a fleet size closer to 4,000 aircraft, he admitted. “What’s happening is, in order to maintain legacy force structure and try and modernize, we’re hollowing out the force,” Moore said.
Moore argued that the Air Force needs to jettison aircraft that aren’t combat capable, noting that divesting 32 older F-22s contributes to that plan. But Congress has balked at that plan in prior years, and Moore admitted the service would prefer not having to propose such a tradeoff in the first place.
“In the choice of what we absolutely need to maintain and what hard choice could we make that might not be as hard as others, this is the one,” Moore said of retiring the older F-22s. That’s because those jets are not combat-rated and can’t be affordably upgraded. “We remind ourselves regularly that when times get tough, we have to make hard choices. This was one that was hard,” he said.
F-35 Issues
Meanwhile, Congress is also growing exasperated with Lockheed Martin’s inability to complete the F-35’s Tech Refresh 3 (TR-3) update. The Air Force has declined to take delivery of dozens of completed fighters since last fall pending the successful completion of testing and delivery of required functionality. But in May, the House Armed Services Committee weighed in, proposing to slash the 2025 budget for F-35 purchases by 10 to 20 aircraft.
The House Armed Services Committee “chairman’s mark” of the 2025 National Defense Authorization bill, essentially the first draft of the legislation, proposes a $1 billion cut to the procurement program while investing some $850 million to increase testing capacity by buying a second Cooperative Avionics Test Bed aircraft, developing an F-35 “digital twin,” and setting up a second Mission Software Integration Laboratory.
“We are trying to get the attention” of the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin, a HASC staff member told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “We are tired of talking about [F-35 delays] and hearing excuses. … Once and for all, let’s get this thing straightened out.”
The Pentagon’s 2025 budget requests asked for 42 Air Force F-35As, 13 Marine Corps F-35Bs, and 13 Navy F-35Cs. The draft signed by HASC Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), would cut 10 jets, six for the Air Force and two each for the Navy and Marines. But it would cut another 10 aircraft if the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Program Office fail to deliver on a series of corrective actions the committee is demanding.
Either way, they signal little sign that Congress might add to the 42 F-35s the Air Force wanted, as lawmakers have in past years, meaning the pace of deliveries will continue to lag Air Force requirements. The service has stated in the past a need to acquire at least 72 fighters annually to rejuvenate the force, but its budget requests have rarely matched that requirement. The 2025 request includes just 60 new fighters, with 18 F-15EXs in addition to 42 F-35s.
F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Michael J. Schmidt testified this spring that TR-3 testing has been slowed by insufficient test assets, a problem that has contributed to a backup on F-35 deliveries as completed planes are parked after coming off the production line. About 75 jets are parked now and awaiting delivery.
Anticipated Block 4 upgrades—primarily software enhancements dependent on TR-3—are being “reimagined,” Schmidt said, deferring many of those capabilities into the 2030s.
TR-3 testing, already a year behind, is ongoing, with the best-case scenario being a truncated TR-3 approval coming in the third quarter of this year. The F-35’s international partners have agreed to the truncated version, but the U.S. has not bought in so far. Schmidt has said the fully completed TR-3 won’t arrive before 2025.
Lockheed Martin Chairman Jim Taiclet told financial reporters in April that the truncated version would allow pilots to practice using systems that won’t be fully operational until the all-up TR-3 comes long. He called it a “combat-capable training” version of the software. He also said Lockheed will deliver only 75 to 110 F-35s this year, well short of the 156 planned.
Moore said that in the near-term, the bulk of aircraft retirements are A-10 close air support aircraft that the Air Force does not consider survivable against modern anti-air threats. Also due to exit the fleet in the coming years are aging F-15C/D Eagles, some of which are barely airworthy.
“I don’t know if we’re as troubled by the retirement of A-10s as we would be by other retirements that would have to happen later in the [future years defense plan],” Moore said. “But I do see … divestitures outpacing procurements for the rest of this budget horizon.”
Weapons School: Still Evolving After 75 Years
By David Roza
The Air Force opened its Aircraft Gunnery School at what was then Las Vegas Air Force Base, Nev., in 1949, with the intention of leveraging the expertise of World War II fighter pilots to pass on their hard-won combat lessons to new crews.
Over the next three-quarters of a century it became the Air Force Weapons School, among the service’s premier institutions, a place where Airmen and Guardians alike become experts in their weapons systems and how best to employ them. Weapons School graduates spread across the Air and Space Forces today include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Space Operations, and the commanders of Pacific Air Forces and U.S. Air Forces Europe/Africa.
The Weapons School’s heritage and evolution were on display May 17 as the school celebrated its legacy. The base renamed the 57th Wing and 99th Air Base Wing headquarters complex for Gen. John P. Jumper, 17th Air Force Chief of Staff and the Weapons School flight commander from 1974 to 1977. Jumper, Air Combat Command head Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown—a former Weapons School commandant—converged on the base for the ceremonies.
The timing couldn’t be better, Weapons School Commandant Col. Charles Fallon said, noting that the Air Force today faces potential adversaries in China and Russia with technological sophistication and vast international ambitions. Just as past generations of weapons instructors had to adapt to emerging threats with limited resources, so too must today’s cadre rise to the occasion. “We can do that too,” Fallon said. “We can be those people.
Today’s School
Today, the Weapons School educates some 150 Airmen and Guardians every six months from its complex at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., having expanded well beyond fighters, to include bombers, helicopter search and rescue, cyber warfare, space operations, and more, with geographically separated squadrons hosting platform-specific classes across the country.
Through it all, one constant remained, said Fallon told Air & Space Forces Magazine: a commitment to keep being better.
“When you look at where we began, with very few platforms post-WWII, to where we are now, it looks like wild change,” he said. “But the one thing that hasn’t changed, from its inception until now and into the future, is that we are always going to adapt and improve. That is at the heart of what we do.”
Now, as the Air Force and Space Force prepare to fight a near-peer adversary such as China or Russia, the Weapons School is adapting to include a greater emphasis on synthetic training, multidomain integration, and human performance, ensuring that weapons officers keep pace with rapidly developing capabilities, technologies, and evolving military threats.
“Not only are we looking to make really fantastic weapons officers, we think part of that is just making better humans,” Fallon said. “If you can make a better human, then that better human will be a better weapons officer, a better tactician. They’ll be able to answer their nation’s call to lead Airmen.”
Synthesized Success
For most of its history, the Weapons School emphasized live flight training as the way to prepare students for real-world operations. Indeed, weapons officers helped stand up the first Aggressor Squadrons: dedicated pilots who imitate hostile “Red Air” tactics to better prepare U.S. and coalition crews for combat. But in recent years, synthetic training has allowed Weapons School courses to simulate large-scale, high-tech battles that may not be possible on a real-world training range.
“When I first went through the school, it was ‘pound on your chest, we’re going to fly, we’ve got to do it live,’” said Fallon, who began his career flying F-16s and is now an F-35 pilot. “Now there has been such great advances in the synthetic environment that you can create an ultrarealistic and, in some cases, more realistic threat representation in-scenario than you could in the actual real-world environment.”
Traditional simulators taught crew members how to safely operate an aircraft, but manufacturer’s threat simulations were not so realistic, Fallon explained. Today’s synthetic environments, however, can network live and virtual simulations together, enabling realistic threat scenarios and making possible some situations that simply can’t be practiced in the real world.
Fallon likened it to video games, which often fall into one of two categories: arcade or simulator. In an arcade racing game, for example, players hold a button to make the race car go forward, while in a simulator racing game, players must shift gears and adjust for weather conditions, tire traction, and a range of other realistic factors.
“All of our simulators up until now have kind of been that arcade mode,” Fallon said. “Now we’re getting into the real simulation mode where the synthetic environment is almost imperceptible from the real world.”
While not a replacement for live training, synthetic environments help emulate threats or stand-off weapons that may be too long-range for the restricted airspace above a training range, or assets that may be too expensive to bring in more than once a year. But it also helps with the day-to-day skills Airmen and Guardians need to stay proficient.
“I can go in the sim for eight hours and those individuals can receive hundreds of reps and sets that would have taken an entire year of training live,” Fallon said.
Multidomain Masters
The push for synthetic environments occurs as warfare becomes more multidomain: the first Bamboo Eagle exercise held earlier this year featured air, sea, cyber, and space operators working together in an eight-day simulation of an Indo-Pacific conflict. That melding between domains is also happening at the Weapons School, where Fallon sees students from different platforms working together earlier in the six-month curriculum.
“That integration continues to push left in the timeline, and you honestly can’t start that early enough,” he said.
That was not always the case at the Weapons School, which for its first 43 years focused exclusively on fighters. That changed in 1992, with the activation of B-52 and B-1 bomber divisions; followed by HH-60 rescue helicopters, EC-130 electronic warfare planes, and RC-135 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance jets in 1995; and a space division in 1996.
Today, the Weapons School features 21 Weapons Squadrons, focused on platforms ranging from intercontinental ballistic missiles to CV-22 tilt-rotor transports. The F-35 embodies that fusion: a multirole fighter jet with cutting-edge sensors and electromagnetic warfare systems. Almost 70 percent of the F-35 Weapons School syllabus involves some sort of integration with another platform, Fallon said.
“That’s a wild change from other platforms in the past, and we would assume every platform that onboards from here on out is going to be very typical of that,” the colonel said.
The mind-melding culminates in the three-week Weapons School Integration (WSINT), the capstone element where students work together to plan and execute “every aspect of air, space, and cyber combat operations,” according to the Air Force.
The growing emphasis on integration also reflects that the Weapons School, never known for being easy, may become even more demanding of students, who are already expected to be Ph.D.-level experts in their own platforms upon graduating.
“It was a real shock for someone who’d aced everything to date to consider failing a formal course,” wrote retired Lt. Col. Dan Hampton about his experience at Weapons School in his 2012 memoir “Viper Pilot.” Besides a heavy flying schedule, he and his fellow students also had to juggle hundreds of hours of academics covering aircraft weapons, systems, and tactics, write a graduate-level paper, and then present it to their instructors.
“I used to fall asleep standing up in the shower at the end of the day,” Hampton wrote. “It sucked. I loved it.”
Still, part of the expectation at the Weapons School is to raise the standards, “so that every single class is more difficult than the class prior to it,” Fallon said.
“As our understanding of the pacing challenge continues to evolve, we continue to add on,” he said. “All the things that we have asked our graduates to do for the past 75 years, that’s just the norm. And then anything new is a growth on top of that. The old stuff doesn’t go away, there’s nothing that comes off the plate.”
The Weapons School plate has more on it now than ever before, but new advances in human performance could help students consume more and digest it faster to keep pace.
Human Performance
The Weapons School is often “the nexus of the latest and greatest technology and what things you can do with that technology,” Fallon said. “But for right now, it’s people that operate all of our technology, and so that’s where we really need to lean in and invest.”
Recent efforts include taking lessons from science and academia on how people cognitively behave and receive information. For the past year and a half or so, the school hired a contractor to perform cognitive brain mapping on students and instructors, examining their brain waves, stress levels, and abilities to learn and adapt. The data so far hints that future syllabuses could benefit from having time off or “very targeted recovery, rather than just, ‘Hey, you’re gonna fly every single day for five days,’” Fallon said. “And then at the end of the week, we wonder why someone’s not getting better.”
Several hundred students and instructors are also tracking their sleep and daily routines through wearable technology, which helps them better understand how to perform at their best.
“We can’t continue to burn people out into the red and then wonder why they’re not getting it,” Fallon said. “We need to allow them to get into what we call a flow state, so that they can actually perform at their peak. Then we need to proactively work that into the syllabus, which is something that’s never been attempted here before.”
Beyond making sure students perform at their best in Weapons School, Fallon also wants graduates to keep improving long after they put on the school’s iconic patch.
“The real problem is once you put that patch on your shoulder, training in the Air Force literally stops,” Fallon said. “There are no more upgrades that I can put you in, there is no formal course I can send you to to get you more training in your platform.”
The default assumption, he explained, is that the patch-wearer is at the top of their game and the best of the best.
“My question is just, can you make them better?” the colonel asked.
Synthetic training could play a role by remembering an individual’s weak areas from past experiences, then targeting those whenever they hop in a simulator. The technology is not there yet, the colonel said, but once it is, it could ensure weapons officers retain their edge.
Inflection Point
The Air Force Weapons School has a 75-year tradition of excellence, one that Fallon is reminded of every time he walks through the front door and is greeted by a statue of Brig. Gen. James “Robbie” Risner, the Korean War ace who was shot down during the Vietnam War and helped keep up the spirits of his fellow prisoners of war at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”
“That is definitely a visceral thing that physically hits you in the face every single morning when you walk in, and it really means something,” Fallon said.
Though Risner was not a weapons officer, every year a graduate receives the Risner Award for embodying the Weapons School’s values: humble, approachable and credible, and for doing something “of great credit for the community and represents the patch the best,” Fallon explained.