【英文】美国军力评估报告：美国空军（37页）

英文研究报告 2021年11月10日 06:02 管理员

Unlike some of the other services, the Air Force did not grow larger during the post-9/11 buildup. Instead, it grew smaller as acquisitions of new aircraft failed to ofset programmed retirements of older aircraft. Following the sequestration debacle in 2012, the Air Force began to trade size for quality.3 Presidential defense budgets from 2012 through 2017 during the Obama Administration proved merely aspirational, and as the service sustained the war on terrorism, it struggled also to sustain the type of readiness required to employ in a major regional contingency (MRC) against a near-peer threat. The Air Force was forced to make strategic trades in capability, capacity, and readiness to meet the operational demands of the war on terrorism and develop the force it needed for the future. The collective efects left the Air Force of 2016 with just 55 total force fifighter squadrons, and the readiness levels within those organizations were very low. Just four of the Air Force’s 32 active-duty fifighter squadrons were ready for conflflict with a near-peer competitor, and just 14 others were considered ready even for low-threat combat operations.4 Recognizing the threat from a rising China and resurgent Russia, the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) directed the services to prepare for a large-scale, high-intensity conventional conflflict with a peer adversary.

Later that same year, the Air Force released “The Air Force We Need” (TAFWN), a study of the capacity it would need to fifight and help the U.S. win such a war. Based on thousands of war-game simulations, the study found that the service needed to grow by 25 percent, from 312 to 386 squadrons, to execute that strategy. That growth included one additional airlift squadron and seven additional fifighter, fifive additional bomber, and 14 additional tanker squadrons.That equates to an additional 182 fifighter, 50 bomber, 210 air refueling, and 15 airlift platforms.7 During the same period, the service’s most senior leaders conveyed the need for more time in the air for its aircrews,8 and these collective demands required a bigger budget. In a series of speeches in 2018, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Air Force Chief of Staf General David Goldfein highlighted the shortfall and the need for more funding to increase the service’s capacity with next generation platforms: in other words, to buy all-new-design aircraft rather than continuing to purchase aircraft that have been in production since the 1980s and 1990s).9 To meet that requirement, the Trump Administration increased DAF funding by 31 percent from 2017 to 2021.