NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.——If you were to accidentally stumble into the Air Force Association's Air & Space Conference, wrapping up here on Wednesday, without any sort of context whatsoever, you might think you'd landed in the midst of something between a very large family reunion and a mild-mannered evangelical tent meeting. That is, until you saw the static displays of bombs and drones and aircraft mock-ups in the exposition hall.

The father figure and pastor of the "aerospace nation," as the Air Force Association and various Air Force officials referred to the collective culture around the military aerospace community, was General Mark Welsh III, the Air Force chief of staff. On Tuesday, Welsh gave the State of the Air Force address. Today, his office issued its latest tract, the Air Force Future Operating Concept—a document outlining how the service plans to operate 20 years in the future. And while the latter is a vision of an optimistic future, Welsh's address focused largely on the gaps the Air Force faces in getting there and the challenges the Air Force faces just on delivering on its mission today.

Welsh noted that the Air Force is in its "24th year of continual combat—no air force has done that before."

But staying on a combat footing since the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 and facing ever-increasing demands for both manned and unmanned combat air patrols over Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have placed the service under increasing strain. That strain is in part because of the austerity forced upon the service by the sequestration of its funding by Congress. But some of it has been self-inflicted over the past decade and a half, as the Air Force shuffled its budget to fund the F-22 and the F-35 fighter programs. Those and other procurement programs that have stalled or floundered have cost the service (and the tax payers) billions of dollars that had no impact on improving the Air Force's capabilities. Meanwhile, Russia and China have not been standing still.

"For years we have enjoyed a capability advantage over every other air force on the planet," Welsh said. "That capability gap is closing and it's closing fast."

At the same time, Welsh added, in an allusion to Congress' push to prevent the Air Force from retiring the A-10, "the demand for air force air power is going up, the budget is not, and the flexibility we need to make the hard decisions required to modernize our force is getting harder to come by. Holding onto the things that have made us great in the past is not going to make us great in the future. I can only think of one reason for standing still, and that's if you want someone to catch you."

And as for those acknowledged self-inflicted wounds, Welsh said that if the Air Force was going to do a better job of procurement in the future, it needed some reform of the rules imposed on the service because of past mistakes. "We have got to realize that if we're held to task because of past problems, and all the parameters that are established for funding timelines and for program timelines are based on some screw-up that happened 10 or 15 years ago, we're never going to get better," he said. "We will fail in the future because we failed in the past, and that makes absolutely no common sense."

In the meantime, key parts of the Air Force—its nuclear force, its long-range strike bomber force, and the refueling planes that keep those fighters in the sky—are in need of modernization, as are some aircraft and mission areas that lack fighter-jet appeal. And as the service prepares to launch yet another major procurement program, its leadership is also pushing back on Congress and the rest of the Department of Defense because of the demands being placed on its people, and its drone operators in particular.

This one goes out to all the (F-35) haters

The Air Force is depending on the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter to fill the gaps left by the smaller F-22 force, and that program is now preparing to produce a larger volume of aircraft, but it still faces significant software issues, as well as physical ones—the chief of the F-35 program noted in a panel discussion that the final configuration of the F-35A wouldn't be set until 2019, three years after the Air Force is scheduled to sign off on the initial operating capability (IOC) for the fighter.

That means that "none of the planes that will be fielded will be in the final block's hardware and software configuration," said Lt. General Christopher C. Bogdan, Program Executive Officer for the F-35. As a result, he explained, every plane delivered to the Air Force and other customers would have to be refitted (including hardware modifications) after they were deployed.

That incomplete state is also, as Welsh noted, a reason why judgement of the aircraft now based on limited tests is improper and "uninformed." He specifically called out two common arguments, both of which have played out in the media (and in the comments of Ars readers): "You guys don't care about close air support" and "The F-16 is better than the F-35."

One of the responses to the Air Force's desire to retire the aging A-10 has frequently been that the Air Force doesn't prioritize the close air support mission. "How many times have you heard someone say, 'You guys don't care about CAS'?" Welsh asked the audience at ASC. Noting that CAS has been a primary mission of the Air Force since World War II, he listed off everything from Predator drones to B-1 and B-52 bombers that have flown CAS missions. "We've all flown CAS, because we always fly it and that's not going to change," Welsh said. "For the past seven years, that Air Force average of 20,000 CAS sorties a year... at what point do we get a little acknowledgement for that?"

Welsh played video testimonials from Air Force F-35 operational test pilots, including Major Bluto Sabin, a former A-10 pilot, who said his primary job was making sure that the F-35 was capable for the CAS role. "I developed my CAS mission mindset while flying the A-10, and it is directly transferable to the F-35," Sabin said.

In rebutting the "F-16 is better than the F-35" argument that sprang up from leaked dogfighting tests performed between an F-35A test aircraft and an F-16, Welsh said "we have to make sure we don't get distracted by silly discussions." The F-35's sensors and weapons, when fully capable, would give the pilot time to get into an advantageous position and attack enemies at a distance before they could close to attack. And the planes being tested now are "not supposed to be doing everything yet," he noted. "We won't even have full capability until 2021."

But the F-35, as capable as it is projected by the Air Force to be as a multi-role combat aircraft, as a sensor platform, and as a node in the Air Force's envisioned future combat network in the sky, cannot fill the other gaps in capability that the Air Force is facing.

Two other big programs are in the wings to help fill some of those gaps: the KC-46 tanker program, being developed by Boeing, and the as-yet-to-be-awarded Long Range Strike Bomber program. The LRSB program has been designed to minimize new development, using only "mature" technologies and focusing on how to use them better. But it will still cost at least $41.7 billion over the first ten years of the contract, and deliveries of aircraft are a long way off.

Meat and potatoes















Sean Gallagher







There are several areas of strategic investment that Welsh outlined as being important—protecting space systems, the aging nuclear missile force, and the growing network and cyber defense mission of the Air Force among them. But the demands of the nation's wars have also left critical pieces of gear to the day-to-day operations of the Air Combat Command—what Welsh referred to as "the meat and potatoes of what we've been doing"—aging and in need of upgrade or wholesale replacement.

Welsh went through many of them, citing first the Combat Rescue Helicopter program—a program seen as essential to the Air Force's "moral obligation" to be able to retrieve downed pilots and others trapped behind enemy lines. The current CRH is the HH-60 Pave Hawk—a modified version of the Army's Black Hawk helicopter with in-flight refueling, secure voice and data communications over radio and satellite, long-range inertial/GPS/Doppler radio navigation, and the HAVE QUICK encrypted air-to-ground communications system. It's been in service since the 1980s, with upgrades in the 1990s. The replacement program for the Pave Hawk kicked off in 2012, but was nearly cancelled because of budget sequestration after only one team remained in the contract bidding (Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin, which has since moved to acquire Sikorsky).

But the CRH is just the first support aircraft that is in need of an update. The E-8 JSTARS fleet, ground surveillance and battle management aircraft used heavily by military commanders during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—"our workhorse," Welsh called it. But the Air Force has not been able to keep enough of them flying to meet regional commanders' needs, Welsh said, and it needs to be replaced. The same is true, to less of a degree of urgency, for the E-3 Sentry AWACS airborne command and control aircraft. "This is not a this-year problem, but it's coming sooner than you think, Welsh said.

And age is also an issue in supporting the EC-130 "Compass Call," an electronic warfare and intelligence variant of the C-130 cargo plane. "We need the same thing it carries on a different platform, or several different platforms," Welsh said.

Given all of the "must-haves" on Welsh's list, it's hard to see how the service will get all of them through traditional procurement paths. The F-35 program was delayed by six years; the KC-46 has been pushed to the edges of its schedule by a number of delays, including a fuel contamination issue in one of the prototypes. And with the demand for remotely piloted aircraft operations stretching the limits of existing operators, the Air Force has a potential personnel problem ahead. All of that makes the outlook for the Air Force's Future Operating Concept even more tenuous.