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Secretary Rumsfeld and his key advisers had decided the Air Force
54 OF MEN AND MATERIEL
wasn t their favorite military branch, after all. That honor was
reserved for the Department of the Navy, alumni of which soon occu-
pied the deputy secretary s office, the chairmanship and vice chair-
manship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the leadership of most of the
combatant commands. The Air Force thus approached the 2005
Quadrennial Defense Review with a sense of foreboding, shorn of
civilian leaders, and its influence at a low ebb.
Quadrennial Review Neglects Air Power
The basic problem the Air Force confronted in the 2005 quadrennial
review was that policymakers and the political system had come to
take global air dominance for granted. No American soldier had been
killed by hostile military aircraft since the Korean War, and no
American pilot had been shot down by enemy aircraft since the
Vietnam War. The surprising loss of a first-generation stealth aircraft
to Serbian ground fire in the Balkan air war was regarded as an anom-
aly rather than part of some broader trend, and many policymakers
discounted Air Force reports that Indian pilots had used new tech-
nology and unconventional tactics very effectively against aging
U.S. fighters in recent air exercises.3
Air Force leaders felt strongly that both developments reflected a
more generalized erosion in U.S. air capabilities. The top-of-the-line
F-15C air-superiority fighter had been designed in the 1960s, and by
the turn of the century was so old that it flew training missions on
flight restriction because of age-related metal fatigue. One Air Force
general had the unsettling experience of losing all his cockpit instru-
mentation while flying over northern Iraq because the insulation on
wiring had rotted away, resulting in a short circuit between exposed
wires. (He later discovered he was flying the same F-15 he had first
operated as a junior officer in the 1970s.)4
From the Air Force s perspective, such stories underscored the
urgency of replacing Cold War tactical aircraft with a new generation
of stealthy fighters. The problem wasn t just that existing fighters had
grown decrepit with age, but also the fact that since they had been
designed, there had been huge advances in technology that couldn t
AGE AND INDIFFERENCE ERODE U.S. AIR POWER 55
be fully incorporated into legacy airframes. The Indian air force had
proved that new sensors and data links could be installed in old
planes, but there was no way those planes could assimilate the low-
observable features that would make them nearly invisible to radar.
That required fundamentally different airframes.
Senior policymakers participating in the quadrennial review didn t
ignore these concerns, but they were more sanguine about the dura-
bility of U.S. air dominance than Air Force representatives were. They
favored buying thousands of stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for
future use by three services, rather than continuing production of
the Air Force s F-22 Raptor replacement for the venerable F-15.
However, the F-35 was a single-engine airframe conceived mainly as
a tactical bomber rather than an air superiority plane. It lacked the
thrust, maneuverability, and fuel-efficient speed of the F-22.5
The Air Force argued strenuously that it required a minimum of
381 F-22s to equip each of ten expeditionary air wings with a
squadron of 24 Raptors (381 aircraft are needed to sustain 240
combat-coded planes due to training, maintenance, and other
backup requirements). It offered to give up 600 Joint Strike
Fighters about a third of its planned buy to secure the 200 more
Raptors needed to reach that goal. But policymakers rejected that
offer, because a cut in the Air Force buy of F-35s would increase the
average cost of F-35s for the Navy and Marine Corps. In effect, the
Air Force was compelled to terminate its highest-priority aircraft
modernization program at about half of the desired goal in order to
support the modernization efforts of other services.
This debate was widely depicted in the media as an arcane
exchange between contending bureaucracies, but for the Air Force it
was about life and death. Service leaders didn t believe they could
sustain global air dominance to midcentury without an adequate
number of F-22s. In the absence of air dominance, other facets of air
power wouldn t matter much, because the service couldn t ensure the
survival of its fleet in combat. The whole point of buying the F-22
was to sweep the sky of enemy fighters during the early days of a
future war and then work in tandem with other joint assets to sup-
press ground defenses. Once unfettered command of the air was
56 OF MEN AND MATERIEL
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