AURORA, Colo.–The U.S. Air Force will likely fare “extremely well” in a GOP budget reconciliation bill, a service official suggested on Tuesday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium here.
Last week, the House narrowly passed a budget resolution
that sets a blueprint for passing Trump administration priorities via the reconciliation process, to include spending an additional $100 billion on defense over four years, while Senate Republicans said that they want $150 billion more over those four years (Defense Daily, Feb. 26).
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for an 8 percent annual cut in DoD funding over the next five years for a possible reallocation to higher defense needs.
“The reconciliation is gonna be just part of what gives us opportunities to start new programs,” Maj. Gen. Joseph “Solo” Kunkel, the Air Force director of force design, integration, and wargaming, said here during a Tuesday panel discussion on future air superiority. “I think the Air Force is gonna do extremely well in those [reconciliation] discussions. I think you’ll see the Air Force on top.”
“I think that also goes into this 8 percent budget cut,” he said. “We’re not doing the 8 percent budget cut because we’re gonna cut the military. We’re doing an 8 percent budget cut because we realize there’s gotta be a shift in TOA [total obligation authority] between organizations, between [military] services so I think we’re also gonna do well when you take a look at the 8 percent budget cut and how it’s reallocated among the services. The Air Force provides easy policy options for decision makers. We always will. More Air Force makes sense, now more than ever.”
Budget reconciliation would allow the Senate, when the bill gets there, to pass billions of dollars in Trump administration priorities without requiring the 60-vote threshold needed to break the filibuster, while the House will require a near-unified GOP caucus to support the measure facing likely unanimous Democratic opposition.
During Tuesday’s panel discussion on future air superiority, Air Force Gen. Kenneth “Cruiser” Wilsbach, the head of Air Combat Command, said that manned fighters, such as the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-22 and F-35, will continue to play a significant part.
While General Atomics and Anduril are soon to deliver their Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) prototypes to Creech AFB, Nev., for flights under the direction of the Air Force CCA Experimental Operations Unit at Nellis AFB, Nev.’s 53rd Wing, “in 2025, we don’t have the artificial intelligence [AI] that we can plug pilots out of aircraft and plug AI in them to the degree that the AI can replace a human brain,” Wilsbach said.
“Someday we will have that, I trust, but right now, we don’t so it does require this manned and unmanned teaming, as we go forward,” he said. “In the future, maybe not. It would be great not to put humans at risk in the battlespace, but for right now, the human brain is the best intelligence that we have.”
Top Trump adviser Elon Musk has suggested a near-term end to manned fighter aircraft, such as the F-35 and the Air Force’s manned Next Generation Air Dominance fighter–now on hold, and their replacement by AI-enabled drones (Defense Daily, Dec. 19, 2024).
“The American way of war is always advancing, always putting the knife on the throat of the enemy, always having options,” Kunkel said on Tuesday. “In the history of war, fights always collapse, and eventually you end up fixing bayonets. I think the same is gonna be true with this future fight. You’re gonna wanna be in a position where there is someone that can continue to take the fight to the enemy when the autonomy breaks down, when the links break down. I think you want someone there that can continue to put the knife on the enemy’s throat. I don’t see us fully stepping away from manned aircraft ever.”