The Air Force, Confronting Pilot Shortages and Ancient Planes, Needs Upgrading

United States Air Force B-52s have been busy in the war against Iran, as they were in Vietnam, and when they were crucial Cold War components of the nation’s nuclear triad of air, land and sea-based deterrence. Wars are mostly fought by young people, but today, and increasingly, geriatric machines participate in the wild blue yonder.Of the 76 extant B-52s, the youngest was built in 1962, before the Beatles’ first album and the Cuban missile crisis. According to Joseph Trevithick of the War Zone, a defense news and analysis website, current planning envisions these heavy bombers in service until 2050, when the youngest will be 88 and will have outlasted today’s B-1s and B-2s. The B-52s have undergone many upgrades and are now in a modernization program: new engines and avionics. Yet as Mr. Trevithick writes, “At some point, the airframes will simply age out.”A retired Air Force lieutenant general, David Deptula, now dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, writes in Forbes that “the bulk of our Air Force” — 10 aircraft types, more than 2,600 aircraft, two-thirds of the entire force — “consists of geriatric fighter, bomber and trainer aircraft that were designed and built before the internet was invented,” having had their first flights more than 50 years ago.The former defense secretary, Robert Gates, one of our wisest national security thinkers, was imprecise when in 2024 he lamented that “our Air Force has stagnated in size.” The situation is worse than that. Since Operation Desert Storm (1991), the number of fighter squadrons has declined to 56 from 134, the number of fighter pilot flight hours per month has declined to under 10 from 22.3, and the average age of fighter planes has increased to 30.3 years from 9.7 years. What the Air Force calls its “advanced” trainer first flew in 1959 — the Eisenhower administration.The Iran war has highlighted the weakness of the nation’s defense industrial base and the precarious condition of its munitions stocks. The American Enterprise Institute’s Mackenzie Eaglen, writing in the Dispatch, reports that American forces expended more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles in a few weeks. Because average annual production has been 90 to 100, she says, “absent acceleration, replenishing this key armament … would take roughly 10 years.”Our adversaries at Beijing and Moscow know this, and know that the production of sophisticated weapons cannot easily be surged. Readers of the 2024 report by the United States Commission on the National Defense Strategy know that today’s threats are the most serious “since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” General Deptula notes that the Air Force is older, smaller and less ready to deter or win a major war than at any time since it became an independent service in 1947.The pilot shortage is now chronic. Today the game is more than 2,000 short of requirements. The Mitchell Institute’s Heather R. Penney writes that the Air Force “has been unsuccessful in meaningfully improving its pilot retention rates for over twenty years.” To those who say unmanned systems are radically reducing the importance of pilots, she says: “Algorithms and software, no matter how sophisticated, cannot replace the creativity, initiative, and judgment to decide and act through the fog and friction of war that only human cognition at the forward edge of the battlespace can provide.”The war to defang Iran has been a reminder that there are things, such as regime change, that airpower alone cannot accomplish. But consider what airpower has done to implement the American political objective of reducing that regime’s capacity for projecting threats against other nations.The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War notes that American and Israeli operations achieved air dominance over Iran in 72 hours, partly because of Israeli attacks on Iran’s air defense radars in April and October 2024. And the Iranian missile force is much more than missiles and launchers. It is crews, communications and computer networks, production and logistical facilities. Airpower has struck one of the few ball bearing plants (crucial for ballistic missile guidance systems), at least 69 facilities associated with the production of missiles, warheads and explosives, and at least 11 research and development facilities. Rebuilding its production chain will take many years. All this without “boots on the ground.”Most developed democracies contentedly assume perpetual peace, and are ever more casualty-averse. That this social-political fact converges with myriad military facts (the force structures of China and Russia) adds urgency onto making American airpower again adequate for its many missions.The Washington Post

The Air Force, Confronting Pilot Shortages and Ancient Planes, Needs Upgrading

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