The Air Force is 60% smaller than it was 35 years ago, yet the threats today on America are at its greatest.
Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula recently attended a virtual meeting with National Security Commission Chairman James Grenier Jr., National Security Division Director Sean Counihan and National Security Division Deputy Director Ariel De Jesus Jr., where he answered questions on Air Force readiness, Space Force challenges and how The American Legion can be a voice on Capitol Hill to support the two service branches.
Deptula, who has flown more than 3,000 hours (400 in combat) and is the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Power Studies and a senior scholar at the U.S. Air Force Academy's Institute for Future Conflict, said the Air Force is 60% smaller than it was during Desert Storm in 1991. “Yet the threats today are the greatest United States have ever faced in their entire history.”
What is your assessment overall of the state of readiness for the Air Force?
The Air Force in terms of its pilot force is flying less training sorties on a monthly basis than ever before in its 79-year history. That’s a result of the fact that we have the oldest Air Force that we've ever had in our history. It's a result of the fact that we have the smallest Air Force we've ever had in our history. And both of those have an impact on aircraft availability. Because the aircraft are old, it means that parts are difficult to come by. On any given day, there are over 700 airplanes in the Air Force inventory that aren't flying because of lack of spare parts. And they don't have the spare parts because they're so old they don't make those parts anymore. If it’s the smallest, we don't have as many airplanes available so that means fewer airplanes for an equivalent number of pilots to fly. That's also what results in less flying than we have had before, or reduced levels of readiness.
Do you think the president wanting a $1.5 trillion defense budget will go to the Air and the Space Force to help them modernize?
Yes, I think that the $1.5 trillion dollar budget, objective, will go a long way to reversing the force structure nosedive that the Air Force is in and adequately fund the Space Force. Because both these services, for different reasons, have been underfunded. There are no more efficiencies that can be squeezed out of the force. You can't do any more with less. It's down to the situation where you either give us more resources, or your Air Force will continue to decline and get smaller and smaller and smaller.
What challenges does Space Force face?
There are three principal challenges. Number one, they're underfunded. The Space Force is only 3% of the Department of Defense budget. It cannot do its missions to deter and defeat threats in space without more resources. It is simply a matter of scale. Our adversaries understand the advantages that we have had in the past in space, and they're working extraordinarily hard to take those advantages away. Less than a decade ago, we treated space as a secure domain. It's no longer a secure domain; it’s a contested domain. Both the Chinese and the Russians have demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities that can attack our satellites. So Space Force needs to build the capacity and the capabilities to protect all our satellites. That requires money and a lot more than 3% of the Department of Defense budget.
Second, with respect to personnel, the Space Force is undersized. There are only 10,000 military personnel in the space force. I think it should be doubled within the next five years. The example I like to use to drive this home is the entire service, the United States Space Force, is only 20% the size of one Army base, Fort Bragg. Let that sink in for a minute. Less than 20% the size of Fort Bragg. Now, if you get rid of 20% of Fort Bragg, it might affect the town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, but, you know, I dare say that the rest of the Army could probably make up for that deficiency. But what happens to the entire U.S. military if you got rid of the entire Space Force? It can't function. There’s no joint operation that can be conducted in the United States military without some element of the Space Force and the Air Force. And you can't say that about any other service. That's why both these services are indispensable to joint force operations.
Then the third piece that I say where the Space Force greatest challenges is organizational consolidation. One of the reasons that President Trump at the time stood up the Space Force is to consolidate those (more than 60 national security space) departments and agencies under the leadership of one service. That has not happened. Out of those 60 departments and agencies, only one has been integrated into the Space Force. So we continue to have this fractured structure. Doesn’t it make sense to have the agency that's responsible for building our national security, satellites and architecture to be in the same organization that's responsible for protecting them?
Some would argue the most pressing threats are here on Earth with Iran, Russia and China. What should the strategic approach to the Space Force be, given the grave existing threats the U.S. is now engaged with?
The threats to our systems in space have grown by the Russians, by the Chinese, from direct ascent to very sophisticated co-orbital threats. That includes kinetic attacks, cyber jamming, spoofing, and they even have other satellites up there that can physically capture one of our satellites and take it out of orbit or disable it. I go back to the fact that right now the Space Force is not optimized to meet these threats. So there are a whole set of expanded current missions as well as new missions that are necessary in response to the Chinese and Russian growing capabilities in space. That includes current missions that need to grow or acquisition, launch services, satellite operations, training, expanded combatant command support, and space superiority sensing. Not just what's going on here on Earth, but what's going on in space.
And then there are new missions that need to be incorporated into the Space Force. That's tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking, dynamic space operations, data analysis, and then defending space operations. Part of the vulnerability of space isn't in space; it's the ground stations that all that information flows to. And the distribution of those networks. The other big one is infrastructure. Just numbers and capabilities, and facilities on Space Force bases. So those are all some of the areas that need to grow if we're going to be able to deal with the threats that continue to be built by the Chinese and the Russians.
What is the message you would like us to convey on Capitol Hill to help the Air Force and Space Force get the resources they need?
Number one, you need to stop and then reverse the decline in Air Force readiness and force structure. The Air Force today is the oldest, the smallest, and the least ready in its entire history. If you don't stop and then reverse that decline, your Air Force is going to go away. Number two, resource the Space Force to meet the demands of the national security strategy. The Space Force isn’t just protecting the U.S. military, it’s protecting the American citizen way of life. If GPS goes away, you're not going to be able to buy gas, you're not going to be able to extract money from your ATM machine, you're not going to be able to deposit money in your bank account. You're not even going to know what's in your bank account. My number three ask is, let's create transparency in the Department of War's budget. Across all the services, get rid of pass-through; identify the monies to where they're going. You don't have to be specific. But move that $51.5 billion pass-through out of the Air Force budget to where it belongs in defense wide spending.
- Security