The Department of the Air Force is finalizing its fiscal 2026 Program Objective Memorandum (POM) in which the department “had to make some very tough decisions,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on June 20.
In the coming months, DoD is to review the military services’ POMs and revise them before the release of federal agencies’ budget requests next year.
“We have a big problem with resources, and if we are forced to live with the level that it looks like we might have right now, I think we’re gonna have a hard time,” Kendall told the Professional Services Council’s federal acquisition conference in Arlington, Va., on June 20.
“My biggest problem is not innovation,” Kendall said. “It’s not the speed of contracting. It’s money. The resources are my biggest concern. The reorganization we’re doing is not going to cost very much, but without the resources to sustain the current force and get to the next generation of capability, we’re gonna be on the wrong side of the curve in terms of being competitors, and that’s just a fact of life.”
The Department of the Air Force’s $217.5 billion budget ask for fiscal 2025 is a $2.4 billion, 1.1 percent increase over the fiscal 2024 request, the department has said.
In February, the Air Force announced 24 initiatives under a reorganization–Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition–that is to help achieve the service’s priority research and development/acquisition efforts, such as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) (Defense Daily, Feb. 16).
Department of the Air Force leaders have said that big bills in fiscal 2026 include the manned Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter to replace the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-22 and the resolution of a 37 percent Nunn-McCurdy cost breach for the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Sentinel future ICBM.
While the Air Force has said that it will choose a manned NGAD contractor this year, the House Armed Services Committee’s fiscal 2025 defense authorization bill cites an unspecified “program delay” in cutting the service’s $3.3 billion request for the NGAD “family,” which includes CCA, by $300 million (Defense Daily, June 18).