AUGUST 2024
The Department Of
Defense’s Collaborative
Combat Aircraft Program
Good News, Bad News, and Unanswered Questions
By Gregory C. Allen and Isaac Goldston
Introduction: Big Problems with the Air Force Fighter Fleet
On September 22, 2021, General Mark D. Kelly, then commander of U.S. Air Combat Command, gave
a speech with a grim recurring message: “Extensive analysis unambiguously shows that the current
[U.S. Air Force] ghter eet will not succeed” in plausible scenarios for a conict with China in the
Taiwan Strait.
Some of the extensive analysis that Kelly referred to was conducted by the Mitchell Institute for
Aerospace Studies, which has since made its analysis public. The Mitchell Institute found that by 2022
the Air Force eet was less than half the size it was in 1990, and roughly 80 percent of Air Force ghters
had already exceeded their designed service lives. In the Air Force eet, the average ghter—not the
design model, the actual aircraft—is about 30 years old. According to the Mitchell Institute report,
these aging aircraft are increasingly neither mission capable nor safe to y, “because of their advanced
age and systems and structures that are failing at increased rates.” Purchases of new aircraft are not
keeping up with the pace of the problem. The eet has been getting older and smaller each year.
As General Kelly correctly pointed out, this is not a recipe for success in an era marked by renewed
large-scale wars. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, backed by China, Iran, and North Korea, shows that the
world is far from safe.
The Air Force needs more aircraft, but it also needs those aircraft to be cheaper to buy, y, and repair.
In 1985, Norman Augustine made his famous observation that each new generation of U.S. ghter
aircraft costs vastly more than the one before. Since the time of the Wright brothers, the unit cost of
