Unless it makes some significant changes, the Air Force is on a path to make itself unaffordable sometime within the next decade, the service’s top uniformed official said Tuesday.

The fix, said Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force’s chief of staff, is to change the way his service drafts its acquisition plans and draws up its budgets so that they’re more predictable, more transparent and more realistic about the amount of money Congress is likely to allocate to airpower in the future.

The changes are part a strategic framework Welsh described to attendees Tuesday during the Air Force Association’s annual conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

It includes a 30-year outlook on the weapons systems the service thinks it will need in its portfolio, and that look-ahead can’t be guided by overly-rosy budget scenarios.

The Air Force imagines a future of tight budgets, so if a new program is added, something else needs to be subtracted from the long-term plan. The Air Force also has begun plotting out its budgets over 10-year timeframes, rather than the five-year planning scenarios the Defense Department typically uses.

A third element of the framework — a “master plan” for Air Force spending — is still a work in progress, but Welsh said it’s the most important component, because it will give the service the information it needs to make tradeoff decisions between its budget priorities at any point during any given fiscal year.

“Everything has to be visible now, because we’re going to have to make tougher and tougher choices,” Welsh said. “When we build the fiscal 2017 budget, it will be the first time we have the entire strategic framework available to us, but we have to be consistent with it, and we have to be disciplined enough to stay within it. The real long-term focus for us is a game plan that’s executable for the mid 2020s, because right now, we can’t afford the things we have in our plan with the money that we’re projected to have. Something has to change, whether it’s more money, support from outside the Air Force or reprioritization from within the Air Force. … The strategic framework will help us do that, and then help us revisit this over and over again. Then what becomes important is the strategic planning process. It drives everything that we’ll do.”

Sharing long-term plans with Congress

To shepherd the Air Force through its new strategic process, officials launched a partial reorganization of its headquarters staff last year.

By the beginning of October, a new “A-5/8” organization is expected to be fully up and running. Its main task will be to step back from the chaos of the annual budget process and to build long-term, realistic plans for both the service’s budgets and its major programs.

Welsh said the end products that result from that longer view won’t be just for internal consumption inside the Air Force.

The hope, he said, is that the creation of a more stable, predictable outlook on the Air Force’s needs will build a more durable trust relationship between the Pentagon and Congress — something he said is essential if the Air Force wants its priorities to survive the annual gauntlet of the authorization and appropriation process on Capitol Hill.

“Nobody should be surprised about what happens in the Air Force from now on,” Welsh said. “Next time we tell somebody we’re going to shut down the A-10s and that we’re going to move the maintenance crews over to the F-35s, we should have been saying that for 10 years in a row. Nobody should act surprised by that. It’s been a plan for a long time. We just haven’t presented it in a way that makes it really clear, over and over and over again. We’ve got to do better at that.”

While Congress hasn’t yet taken final action on DoD’s budget for 2015, it has rejected several Air Force proposals to reprioritize funding during many preliminary gates in the legislative process, turning down proposed base closures, compensation tweaks and the retirement of entire fleets of aircraft, including the A-10.

Optimism for 2015 budget request

Deborah Lee James, the Air Force Secretary, predicted Congress will eventually approve about 75 percent of the Air Force’s budget. The other 25 percent of the equation on which lawmakers make changes will inevitably cause some painful choices, she said.

“If Congress says, for example, ‘Do not retire certain aircraft in fiscal year ’15,’ they must pay for that somehow. They’re dealing with the same budget figures we’re dealing with, and my fear is that they’ll carve that out of our readiness accounts in order to rearrange other funding priorities,” James told reporters Tuesday. “Our readiness has already atrophied over the last several years. We have to get those levels up.”

Welsh also said the Air Force can’t afford another setback following the widespread pause in pilot training and other readiness activities it was forced to undergo last year when sequestration first took hold, and the military’s budget was suddenly reduced.

“We feel we have to defend readiness in order to do our principal job. If that’s the case, and we’re not allowed to either divest force structure or recapitalize or reshape our force structure, then the money’s coming out of modernization,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the only other option.”

That’s also a path the Air Force doesn’t want to traverse. While the service says it won’t back off on funding for its highest-priority acquisition programs — the F-35, a new refueling tanker and a new long-range strike bomber — it has several other lower-tier modernization priorities that it would like to keep intact.

Present, future need equal focus

It also has a lot of work to do in order to keep its current fleet of planes in an airworthy condition until new systems come online.

“Our airplanes are falling apart,” Welsh said. “I don’t care if it’s B-1 oil flanges that are breaking and starting fires or if it’s F-16 canopy ceiling longerons that are cracking. There are just too many things that are happening, because our fleets are just too old. We have to recapitalize.”

Welsh said the Air Force’s current plans to build new aircraft and repair its existing fleet are in keeping with its new ethos to plan for the budget climate it lives in, and not the one it would like to see.

“We’re trying really hard to face reality here and not ask for candy that we know isn’t coming,” he said. “We’re not asking for more money. We’re just asking for permission to recapitalize within our budget line. The problem here is that there’s a natural tension between ongoing operations and future capability. We completely understand that. Our view is that we can manage the ongoing operations, but if we don’t get to this recapitalization, we will eventually have no capability in some of our mission areas 10 years from now. We can’t mortgage the future for the present. That’s not the right answer.”

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