‘Let’s be frank’: Hegseth’s budget shakeup will be ‘painful’ but there’s ‘hope,’ Air Force official says

U.S. Air Force and Massachusetts Air National Guard pilot Capt. Martin “Heklr” Clark, climbs into the cockpit of an F-15C Eagle aircraft prior to flight, April 20, 2016, as part of the Frisian Flag 2016 exercise, Leeuwarden Air Base, Netherlands. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by 1st Lt. Bonnie Harper/Released)

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s direction for the military services to collectively free up roughly $50 billion for fiscal 2026 will be “painful,” a top Air Force official said today, though he predicted the process will benefit the service in the long run.

“Let’s be frank,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, a chief architect of the service’s new force design concept, said in a conversation hosted by the Hudson Institute. “The Air Force has gotten smaller. The Air Force has gotten older. And as you look at where the Air Force has gone, we’ve protected core [missions], which is homeland defense, strategic deterrence and power projection. So there’s not many places where we can go for these things.”

Those limited opportunities for paring back, Kunkel reasoned, means “it’s going to look really, really bad” once Hegseth’s budget drill gets underway.

Nevertheless, the general found reason for “hope.” The process is not anticipated to change the service’s overall topline and is instead shifting dollars toward the Trump administration’s new priorities — including in the out-years under the Pentagon’s five year budget planning cycle. 

“When you look at it from that perspective, the Air Force is going to do really well in the future,” Kunkel said, adding that the service’s newly minted force design will provide options for leadership to invest in. “When you look at the secretary’s priorities and you look at our force design, you’re like, ‘There’s a match, there’s a match, there’s a match.'”

Warfighting ‘Looks Much Better’ With NGAD

A leading hot-button issue for the service is a futuristic stealth fighter known as Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD), whose fate has still not been formally decided by the Trump administration after being paused last year. Without providing too much detail, Kunkel stated that “the fight looks much better when NGAD is in it” as opposed to having to operate without it.

“NGAD remains an important part of our force design, and it fundamentally changes the character of the fight in a really, really good way for the joint force,” he said, such as by ensuring “less operational risk” as the service pursues air superiority. If the fighter is not fielded, “that fight is just gonna look a little bit different, and we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives.”

Kunkel additionally observed that for the NGAD concept to be viable, the platform will need support from survivable bases it can launch from and tankers that can gas it up. Concerning base defense, elsewhere in the conversation Kunkel echoed comments from other officials that the Air Force may need to have its own indigenous base defense capabilities instead of traditional reliance on the Army to provide them. And on tanking, the general said that a next-gen tanker also currently in limbo “might be part of the solution,” but there are other operational approaches that can achieve a similar outcome without it. 

Asked about reforms to the requirements process, including the at-times-cumbersome Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, Kunkel said a key lesson from the war in Ukraine has been the value of rapidly iterating systems that are then quickly delivered to the field. That necessity, in turn, will likely require a different way of doing business. 

OP ED: The Pentagon’s joint requirements process must go

“We’ve got to make changes in our processes, which is going to require some changes to the law to get ourselves to be more adaptable,” Kunkel said. He declined to comment on specifics.