The US Air Force lacks imagination, and that’s a dangerous thing

A US Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon assigned to the 480th Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany (left), flies alongside a German air force Eurofighter Typhoon assigned to the 74th Tactical Air Wing over Germany, Feb. 16, 2023. (US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Allison Payne)

Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin has called his service to action, warning it faces a “time of consequence” when “the decisions we make, the actions we take” will determine if the Air Force is ready for the future fight. Deciding today what weapons, concepts and capabilities Airmen will need 10 or 20 years from now is no easy task, especially with war’s character changing rapidly.

Despite what some would say, the fundamental problem is not the size of the service’s budget, but a culture that is reluctant to embrace the risks that come with innovation. This leaves the service vulnerable to technological and doctrinal surprise — something we’ve seen before, from the shock of Pearl Harbor to the aerial attacks on September 11.

To meet the moment, the Air Force will need to hedge against a failure of imagination. And that means knowingly opening the service up to risk in several areas — especially around programs being allowed to fail and dollars sometimes being burned on new ideas.

The Air Force, like any organization that has enjoyed enormous success, prefers to hold fast to what worked in the past, pursuing a procurement strategy that revolves around a small number of advanced, expensive platforms with long development cycles. But adding new technology to try to sustain this old way of fighting is unimaginative. The Air Force’s reluctance to embrace the near-term risks that come with innovation creates strategic risks. With Russia adapting to the battlefield in Ukraine, Iran pursuing a cost-imbalance strategy, and China pursuing the same or similar technologies as the United States, adversaries need only employ a little imagination to take the Air Force by surprise.

The Air Force’s caution is understandable: If you are building something designed to last for many decades, you better get it right. Consider the venerable B-52 bomber, a platform still flying after more than 60 years, or the F-16, which remains a workhorse as it approaches its sixth decade in service. This hardware-centered mindset emphasizes perfecting a platform design before it ever reaches full production, much less the warfighter — a process that works well when change is slow and incremental — like moving from 4th to 5th generation fighters.

In an age of rapid technological leaps, however, this process rewards the status quo and stifles real innovation. New capabilities or operational concepts are too easily rejected as unproven, and unprovable, ways of fighting. The Air Force — like the other services — is too often more concerned with near-term risks to budget and procurement programs than long-term strategic and operational upsides.

If the United States and China ever got into a shooting war, Chinese military planners would expect the US Air Force to follow a familiar script, seeking to generate overwhelming precision effects from a smaller number of traditional fighters and bombers, supported by reconnaissance aircraft and aerial refueling tankers. After studying US military operations extensively for the last thirty years, China has honed its anti-access/area-denial playbook to counter it.

Predictability is a vulnerability. And the solution lies in spreading risk.

Instead of building a small number of super-expensive platforms made by a few large defense firms, the US Air Force should diversify its approach, developing a wider variety of systems in smaller numbers, with the flexibility to scale up when needed, add technology as available, and discontinue procurement of certain platforms when technology negates their benefits or capabilities.

The service should also adjust and refine requirements for different mission needs and different adversary strategies. The Air Force currently upgrades platforms in blocks, periodically and incrementally adding new technology and capabilities while keeping the basic platform the same. While this approach is supposed to reduce training and sustainment costs, it prevents revolutionary change while driving up costs of sustaining an aging force.

To implement this hedge strategy, the US Air Force needs to rethink its approach to procurement before it’s too late.

First and foremost, adopt a shorter and less bureaucratic requirements process. The Federal Acquisition Regulation, which sets the policies and procedures governing acquisition with a focus on protecting taxpayer dollars, applies whether procurement is of a multi-million-dollar system built to last decades, or an expendable platform expected to become quickly obsolete. The upshot is that the marginal costs per unit of compliance is very high for low number, low-cost platforms, effectively discouraging innovation. The Air Force should therefore work with Congress to expand rapid and flexible acquisition authorities for lower-cost platforms, which would allow the Air Force to pursue a wider range of systems, and, after testing and evaluating them, decide whether to field them or change course.

Second, the Air Force should work with Congress to allow more budget flexibility for emerging concepts and capabilities. The current process attempts to predict the future several years in advance, including what companies will be producing, what adversaries will do, and what capabilities will be available. Services have to program and plan their budgets for the Program Objective Memorandum more than two years before funds would become available, assuming the budget is approved and passed. This means a new company with an emerging capability has to wait over three years after developing it and convincing the Air Force of its value before potentially profiting. This is an eternity for new entrants, but something larger and more established companies can price into their contracts.

Third, the Air Force should promote a development and procurement culture for most capabilities which encourages risk-taking over risk avoidance, signaling the value it places on innovation through promotions and budget priorities. Incentives today reward caution and punish creativity. The object is to preserve what has won fights in the past. But no one wins when high-priced legacy systems with dubious long-term advantages continue to win out over new capabilities that deliver the same or better effects at lower cost.

Finally, the defense industry itself needs to change. Washington should cultivate an environment where many companies contribute to the development of airpower — not just a handful of defense giants who have an inside track because they know the rules of the game and lobby to keep those rules in place. A broader, more innovative defense market will better prepare the Air Force to create, rather than react to, the next wave of aerial surprises.

A more agile, less predictable US Air Force, particularly one built around massive numbers of mobile, dispersed and lower-cost sensing, decoy, and weaponized drones (of varying capability), would simultaneously complicate both Russian and Chinese military planning.

These platforms would seem similar but do different things, making it hard for the People’s Liberation Army to know which blips on the radar screen are the ones that can sink ships, which are the ones that are sensing the ships, and which are the ones — like decoys — just there for the confusion. Such surprise threatens to disrupt Chinese military plans and unbalance the PLA, giving the United States the initiative. Such diversity would also complicate Moscow’s calculus in rebuilding its military and give the United States and its NATO allies more options for deterring or defending against Russian aggression.

The US Air Force has gotten comfortable with its predictability. That has to change if it is to succeed in future conflicts.

Col. Maximilian K. Bremer, US Air Force, is the director of the Advanced Programs Division at Air Mobility Command.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University.

This commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the US Defense Department, or the US Air Force.