Not only are they too small, by one-third, to fight a near-simultaneous war with Russia and China in 2030, the U.S. Air Force’s four newest frontline combat aircraft today—the B-2,
,
and
—will be limited to stand-off distance from future highly contested airspace.
In 2030, a new crop of Russian and Chinese very-long-range air-to-air missiles will keep
’s newly delivered KC-46 tankers at least 500-1,000 nm away from defended airspace, flanked by a protective shield of aging
. Meanwhile,
F-35As will still slip through an enemy’s long-range fighter screens but will now stay safely outside an enemy’s borders, lobbing Stand-in Attack Weapons (SiAW)—the Air Force’s future version of the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER)—at targets from hundreds of miles away.
The long-range penetration mission—a mainstay of U.S. offensive strategy since World War II—will now rely on a new family of frontline aircraft designed to avoid detection by low-frequency tracking radars. Led by
B-21s, a still undefined next-generation fighter and a mysterious new penetrating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (P-ISR) aircraft, this sixth-generation strike package penetrates deep inside enemy airspace from multiple directions and lingers there as long as possible.
As the successors of the Northrop Grumman B-2 and Lockheed Martin’s F-22 and F-35A, these aircraft find the most elusive or dangerous targets then nullify them using electronic or kinetic effects or by sending the target information to distant F-35s with SiAWs or Boeing B-52s loaded with long-range weapons, including hypersonic missiles.
That sobering scenario, presented in an April 11 report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), describes not a distant vision of aerial warfare but a near-term wake-up call for the airpower community and Congress, according to the authors. The National Defense Strategy (NDS) released by the Pentagon in 2018 calls for the military to be prepared to win a war with China and Russia within a decade, but today’s Air Force is woefully short of the aircraft and capabilities needed for the task, the CSBA concludes in the congressionally mandated report.
“We have a force that is not well-suited to these kinds of conflicts because we haven’t invested in the force in the last 25 years the way we should have,” CSBA Senior Fellow and report co-author Mark Gunzinger tells Aviation Week. “Now we’re playing catch-up. We really, really are.”
Indeed, the CSBA report echoes the eight-month-old, unclassified summary of the Air Force’s own analysis, “The Air Force We Need.” In late 2017, Congress commissioned the reports by the CSBA and the Air Force—along with another unreleased, classified analysis by Mitre Corp. The objective was to gather insight for shaping resource decisions in the absence of a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The latter was replaced in 2018 by the
’s less detailed NDS.
Of the three assessments, the CSBA offers the only independent and unclassified analysis of a force structure for the Air Force and one that is unconstrained by the Trump administration’s budget and policy agenda.
“What the QDRs gave [Congress] was, ‘Here is our strategy, and here is the force that we can afford to best support the strategy.’ But that is not what Congress wanted. They said, ‘We come up with what the nation can afford. We want to know what’s needed,'” says Gunzinger, one of the report’s five co-authors and a contributor to five QDRs.
According to both reports, the Air Force needs more and different aircraft. The service’s “Air Force We Need” analysis concluded that the requirements laid out by the NDS, which include fighting rogue states and lightly armed insurgents, call for a total of 386 squadrons, including units devoted to nonaviation missions such as cyberwarfare and space. The CSBA analyzed requirements only for aviation units and came up with similar overall results. Today, the Air Force operates a total of 169 squadrons flying bombers, fighters, tankers, command-and-control (C2) and ISR missions. Whereas the Air Force calls for adding 50 squadrons to raise that to 219, the CSBA analysis proposes raising the inventory by 54 squadrons.
The two reports agree roughly on the size of the force but disagree on the fleet mix. The CSBA report calls for 24 bomber squadrons in 2030, a 71% increase over the 14 squadrons recommended by the Air Force. But the Air Force report proposes 89 squadrons made up of ISR and C2 aircraft, versus 76 called for by the CSBA. The numbers of fighters and tankers are roughly equal between both reports, with the CSBA suggesting three more fighter units and four more tanker units than the Air Force’s vision for 2030.
The classification of the Air Force’s report makes the mix of aircraft types within those top-line fleet numbers unknown. But that is also what makes the CSBA version of the report so interesting. Unconstrained by the obstacle of secrecy, the CSBA project was free to speculate on the specific types of aircraft the Air Force will need after 2030. Moreover, two of the report’s authors—Gunzinger and Carl Rehberg—performed such analyses within the Pentagon until retiring from government employment within the last decade.
As an aircraft that entered the development stage 3.5 years ago, the B-21 presents a special case. Though nearly all schedule and performance details are classified, the authors make intriguing projections about the bomber’s current and potential production capacity over the next decade. Based on limited information provided by the Defense Department’s selected acquisition reports, the CSBA report estimates that Northrop Grumman will deliver 38 B-21s by 2030. But even that pace is not fast enough. The CSBA authors recommend accelerating the production ramp-up to complete 55 B-21 deliveries by 2030, starting with the first in 2024.
The Air Force needs B-21s because they form the heart of the CSBA’s projected stand-in strike package. The next-generation fighter and existing F-35As and F-22s are useful, but alone they lack the range and payload for the task.
“What if your tanker has to stand off 500 mi.? What if close-in air bases are under threat?” Gunzinger asks. “You don’t want to do that with something that requires a lot of refueling and carrying that [smaller] payload.”
Although larger than a fighter, the B-21 is considered survivable against the next generation of airborne and ground-based threats, in CSBA’s analysis. The Air Force has not released the size of the B-21, but Rehberg—a former B-1B pilot—considers it smaller than a B-52 or B-2, which helps its stealth signature.
“It’s also the outer mold line, and it’s the material you use that’s determinate,” Gunzinger says. “You design something with a couple tails that stick up, and your exhaust is hanging out in the breeze—OK, that’s going to be pretty easy to find.”
The same analysis also consigned the F-35A to a standoff role in the CSBA’s 2030 study. “I think you need a new outer mold line for a highly contested environment,” Gunzinger says. “You need something that’s all-aspect, broadband [and stealthy].”
But the F-35A still has much to offer for a next-generation fighter, which the CSBA identifies as a dual-mission Penetrating Counter Air/Penetrating Electronic Attack (PCA/P-EA) aircraft. The report calls on the Air Force to accelerate the first delivery to 2026, even though the Next-Generation Air Dominance acquisition program has not yet opened for bids. The faster time line would require the Air Force to leverage mature technology as much as possible, Gunzinger says. One possibility is to combine the F-35’s existing avionics and mission system with a new airframe optimized for broadband stealth. That suggests a tailless, supersonic aircraft.
“That would drive you to a different kind of [outer mold line] and a different kind of concept for operating that,” Gunzinger says. “You’ll not necessarily be pulling high-Gs and so forth. It’d be more of a [beyond-visual-range] type platform.”
The authors provide less detail on the projected requirement for a P-ISR aircraft, due to the sensitivity of the mission area and their backgrounds in recent government service.
“It could be manned or unmanned, and there’s probably nothing more I can say about it, and neither can Carl because we were in that world not too long ago,” Gunzinger says. “Everything that penetrates ought to be able to contribute to operations in the [electromagnetic spectrum] to include communications, sensing, jamming and creating other effects.”
