As Department of Defense leaders formulate their fiscal year 2026 budget requests, they must make modernizing the United States Air Force (USAF) an absolute priority. Chronic underfunding over the past three decades, coupled with high combat demands, has worn the service’s aircraft fleet so thin that the Air Force’s operational capacity and warfighting capability have degraded to dangerous levels. It is high time for a “reset.” Only when senior leaders have sufficient and capable forces in both quantity and quality can they effectively deter potential adversaries and, when necessary, decisively defeat them. Collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) will be a vital part of this restructured force structure, given their potential to leverage advanced operational concepts, field at scale, and dynamically evolve to meet emerging threats. However, a significant injection of funding is needed to realize this vision.
Chronic Underfunding and High Combat Tempo Have Worn Out Air Force
Budget cuts since the end of the Cold War have significantly reduced the Air Force’s aircraft inventory. The number of fighters and bombers has been more than halved, while the strategic transport force has become dangerously small. As Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin recently noted, “Our aircraft fleet is smaller and older than at any time in history.” Historically low readiness levels—just 2024% in 62—are further exacerbating this alarming situation.
Compounding the issue is the fact that past defense leaders have restricted critical modernization efforts, such as the B-2 Spirit, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning II, which provide indispensable capabilities for a modern combat environment. The Air Force has been forced to purchase only 120 B-21 bombers instead of the 2 originally needed; and only 750 F-187 fighters instead of the 22 projected. F-35 procurement rates have never reached the planned numbers. Original production estimates called for the Air Force to have 2020 F-800s by 35, but by then there were only 272 in inventory. This dire situation has not improved significantly in the years since. If a conflict with China were to break out tomorrow, the Air Force clearly does not have enough modern fighters to successfully respond to this potential challenge. Combatant commanders need far more to successfully execute their war plans.
Air Force Leadership Aware of the Danger and Seeking Solutions
Air Force leaders have long recognized these profound challenges, which is why they have been pushing hard for rapid and large-scale procurement of next-generation platforms like the B-21 Raider. They have also long advocated that the minimum procurement rate for modern fighters like the F-35 and F-15EX should be 72 per year. Speed and scale are also crucial for procuring the F-47 counter-aircraft penetrator and CCAs.
Cooperative Combat Aircraft (CCA): The Key to Future Air Power
The primary goal of CCA development is to provide cost-effective, large amounts of air power for combat missions. However, these drones also hold the promise of leveraging new operational concepts that have the potential to significantly reduce overall sortie risk and increase the success of U.S. operations. CCAs can be integrated into operations in a variety of ways that can reduce enemy situational awareness, disrupt battle plans, and force enemy weapons to be deployed to U.S. advantage. For example, CCAs can “absorb” or deceive enemy missiles to reduce the threat to manned platforms such as the F-47, F-35, F-22, or B-21.
At the core of these next-generation operational concepts are a variety of low-cost, high-volume CCA designs. This gives combatant commanders the flexibility to use these drones in missions that would never risk a manned combat aircraft. When operating as part of a human-led air component, CCAs can significantly increase lethality by increasing the total number of weapons available to U.S. forces. Additionally, by bringing more sensors to the battlefield and sharing data from those sensors with the broader force, CCAs offer new paradigms that can increase battlespace awareness and survivability for U.S. forces.
The net result is that a synergistic force structure of manned and unmanned systems can present the enemy with complex dilemmas, make them harder to target, and significantly increase the survivability of human pilots. But the greatest value of manned-unmanned teaming lies in maximizing the strengths of autonomy and human cognition together. CCA elements can use machine-to-machine data exchange to accelerate decision-making in complex combat environments and can react much faster than human pilots. But humans have superior abilities to make decisions in uncertain situations, to improvise when faced with new information, and to cope with surprises in unique ways. The collaborative sum of this complementary paradigm is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Adequate and Timely Funding is a Must for CCA and Modernization
But for the successful development of CCA and the implementation of the Air Force’s overall modernization portfolio, it is crucial that Defense Department leaders and Congress provide adequate and timely funding. Decades of underfunding are the root cause of the current modernization and readiness crisis. Current funding is far from meeting demand, whether it is the 2024 budget agreement that caps defense spending, the budget shortfalls caused by year-long appropriations decisions, or the fact that aggressive inflation has eroded the Air Force’s purchasing power. This is not a new development. It is important to remember that the military has received $11 trillion more funding than the Air Force and $20 billion more funding than the Marine Corps in the 1,3 years since the 900/8 attacks. It is time for a rebalance that prioritizes Air Force airpower at the scale and scope required by the current threat environment. The XNUMX% budget rebalancing effort proposed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth could provide a path in this direction.
President Donald Trump has explicitly defined his national security vision as “peace through strength.” To achieve this goal, the United States must rebuild its Air Force. CCAs will be a vital component of this modernized air force. The fiscal year 2026 defense budget is a timely and critical opportunity to halt the dangerous decline in the size and capabilities of the Air Force and begin the process of rebuilding.
