Past trends and future plans

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2004 by Duncan J. McNabb, Christopher J. Bowie

WHEN CONDUCTING AIR Force strategic planning, we pay particular attention to key historical trends. The powerful forces driving these trends may prove difficult to change or deflect, so analyzing the direction in which these vectors are moving may offer a window into the Air Force's future. This short analysis examines historical tendencies in Air Force resource allocation to mission/capability, areas, the implications they hold for future investment and policy decisions, and policies the Air Force might pursue to increase future US joint-force capabilities more efficiently and effectively.

In an unprecedented parsing of Air Force spending patterns from 1962 to 2009 (the end of our current detailed-planning horizon), the Air Force's Strategic Planning Directorate categorized nearly 900 individual programs into broader, more telling mission and functional areas. (1) The result is a single, simple chart (fig. 1) that depicts the net result of thousands of decisions made at the highest levels of the Air Force and government over a tumultuous half century. This stack of bands tells the epic story of dramatic, strategic shifts: the end of the New Look and the beginning of flexible response, the Vietnam conflict, the Reagan buildup in the 1980s, the demise of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the first Gulf Win, the Serbian conflict of 1999, the terrorist attacks in 2001, and the recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. We believe that the chart provides revealing insights into the changing nature of Air Force resource-allocation patterns over this turbulent period and the difficult strategic-investment decisions that lie ahead.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

To create this relational, historical look, we organized the data into three broad capability areas:

1. Foundations (activities underpinning the overall organization but not attributable to a specific capability or system, such as headquarters, training, health care, general research and development, security, base-operating support, and environmental and quality-of-life programs)

2. Joint-support enablers (capabilities used by all the services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, such as airlift; refueling; and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance [[C.sup.4]ISR])

3. Joint combat forces (such as fighters, bombers, special operations, ballistic missiles, and munitions)

To highlight broad trends, we aggregated by decade and displayed the results as a function of percentage of the total Air Force budget.

Looking at the broad capability, areas--foundations, joint-support enablers, and joint combat forces--we found several interesting features. For example, spending on foundations has declined from about 36 percent of the total budget in the 1960s to about 30 percent in the current decade. So the constant drives for efficiency that characterize Air Force operations have had substantial payoff. The two remaining categories--joint-support enablers and joint combat forces--provide a striking illustration of the Air Force's growing investment in joint-support forces, such as airlift, refueling, and air-breathing/space-based [C.sup.4]ISR. These accounts grew from 33 percent to 45 percent of the Air Force budget.

The growth in these mission areas has come at the expense of the "foundations" and what we traditionally think of when we consider airpower: combat forces. Current, conventional combat forces are far more lethal, thanks to advanced aircraft, precision weapons, and modern [C.sup.4]ISR, but spending on these forces has declined from 31 percent of the total Air Force budget in the 1960s to about 25 percent in this decade. At the same time, our combat-force capability has increased by several orders of magnitude.

The layperson (or even an informed observer) who contemplates the future of the Air Force tends to look at force levels of combat aircraft, such as the number of fighter wings or the inventory of such aircraft. In reality, this capability area represents only a small percentage of the Air Force budget. Taken to its logical extreme, for example, cutting all combat aircraft, munitions, and ballistic missiles in the Air Force would reduce its total budget by about only one-fourth--and would undermine US joint-combat capabilities. (For example, inability to control the air would greatly increase risks to any future joint operation.)

Looking out several decades, we see that these trends hint at the issues likely to challenge future decision makers. We will continue to strive to increase peacetime operating efficiency in the foundations, but the data indicates that the "low-hanging fruit" has already been plucked. Gaining additional increases in efficiency will undoubtedly become more difficult.

On average, Air Force resource allocation to the joint-support area has grown by 0.26 percent per year. (2) If this trend continues, in another 20 years spending on this area would consume more than half of the Air Force budget--a likely prospect, given future modernization needs in joint support. Specifically, airlift is critical to the rapid deployment and supply of US forces around the world; the ongoing C-17 and C-130J programs show little indication of a decline in spending for some time to come. Similarly, tankers are essential to deployment and combat operations of all the services. The aging condition of the KC-135 fleet means that the currently planned KC-767 lease or buy is likely only a first step in tanker-force recapitalization that will require sustained spending in this area.