Air Force Confirms It Plans To Slash F-35 Buy In 2023—But Can’t Explain Why

The Air Force on Monday unveiled its proposed budget for the 2023 fiscal year beginning October 1, revealing a 10% increase over last year’s request that Secretary Frank Kendall says is sufficient to maintain and modernize the force.

Organized around three pillars that Kendall calls integrated deterrence, campaigning and enduring advantage, the proposed budget increases funding significantly for virtually every major modernization program.

Every program that is, except the one effort that Chief of Staff C.Q. Brown has called the “cornerstone” of Air Force modernization—the F-35 fighter.

That program takes a big hit, falling from an expected request for 48 aircraft to 33.

The service says it still intends to seek a total of 1,763 F-35s over the long run to replace its Cold War fighters, but at a rate of 33 per year, that would take half a century.

Kendall says the service will increase its annual buy of F-35s in the future, but he also says the outlook for obtaining adequate funding will grow “harder” in later years.

I asked Secretary Kendall in an embargoed budget preview last week why F-35 was being cut while so many other programs were seeing big increases, and his explanation was less than clear.

I left the meeting with a feeling that cutting F-35 was not the Secretary’s idea; it certainly isn’t what the Air Force has been signaling was the plan going forward.

Kendall acknowledges the proposed cut will face resistance from Congress, so he better come up with a more convincing rationale than I heard last week if he doesn’t want to see other efforts decremented to return F-35 to it previous production profile.

Since Congress is sure to react, here are five questions the Air Force will need to answer as budget hearings commence.

I should note that several companies with an interest in F-35, including airframe prime contractor Lockheed Martin, contribute to my think tank.

Why slash your most important military aircraft program during a war? F-35 is the only next-generation combat aircraft the U.S. currently has in high-rate production. The Air Force has consistently stated that F-35 is pivotal to the preservation of air dominance in Europe and Asia.

Cutting the program while Russian bombers are daily attacking targets in Ukraine makes no sense. One of President Biden’s first steps when the threat of Russian invasion arose was to redeploy F-35s eastward to protect NATO air space.

F-35 is far superior to any tactical aircraft Russia has, but the Air Force has barely begun to build up its presence in Europe and many more fighters will be needed to assure the superiority of NATO air power.

Why cut the one aircraft that every overseas partner seems to want? Over the last year, several Western democracies have signed on to buy F-35, including Finland, Germany and Switzerland. Canada has signaled today that it too will buy F-35 for its own air force.

That effectively makes F-35 the Free World’s fighter: with the single exception of France, every major U.S. ally in Asia and Europe is now planning to buy F-35s, and it is already operational in countries such as Australia, Britain, Israel, Italy and Japan.

Many more countries would buy it if they could. So, what message does it send to overseas partners that the lead U.S. service is trimming its own order to a number well below economic production rates?

Why trim a program that is over-delivering on price and performance? The Air Force variant of F-35 costs less to build than the list price of any commercial jetliner currently on the market, and yet performs four to ten times better than legacy fighters in core missions such as air-to-air combat, air-to-ground strikes, suppression of enemy air defenses, electronic warfare and intelligence gathering.

In addition to being more survivable and versatile than any other fighter in the world, F-35 is designed for seamless interoperability with other friendly air forces using secure data links and shared reconnaissance.

Although still in its infancy as an operational aircraft, F-35 is already the most reliable and maintainable tactical aircraft in the Air Force fleet. It is less likely to break and takes less time to fix when it does break than older fighters.

Why buy more outdated combat aircraft while buying fewer new ones? The Air Force plans to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars in its 2023 budget upgrading 60-year-old B-52 bombers and buying new F-15 fighters based on an airframe that commenced design in 1969.

The service says it has sound reasons for these and other outlays on aged airframes, but it can’t explain why they deserve a higher priority than maintaining production of its most lethal and survivable new combat aircraft.

The service in effect has made its newest fighter a bill-payer for some of its oldest planes. Congress will want an explanation of how this approach to balancing the budget contributes to preserving U.S. global air dominance.

Why damage a domestic manufacturing base that is already struggling? Aerospace is one of the few manufacturing sectors in the U.S. that still enjoys a positive balance of trade, and F-35 is by far the biggest government program on which the sector depends.

It is also one of the few industrial sectors where organized labor continues to play a critical role. But according to a letter recently sent to President Biden by F-35 suppliers, a reduction in F-35 quantities will have “an immediate negative and dramatic impact on our businesses and thousands of represented workers who are counting on F-35 for their jobs and livelihood.”

This is no exaggeration: Lockheed figures F-35 accounts for nearly 300,000 jobs at 1,650 suppliers scattered across 47 states. It is also the best bet that America has to continue its leadership of the global market for military aircraft through mid-century. And that is before we even get to the domestic political fallout from such an ill-timed move on the eve of mid-term elections.