As the Pentagon begins a major reshaping of the nation’s defense budget, the Air Force chief sees an opportunity to secure additional funding—highlighting its role in the new defense secretary’s priority missions.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to shift 8% of funds to priorities such as missile defense and nuclear modernization could open up new funds to service—since the air and space domains are central to Golden Dome, and the service owns two-thirds of the nuclear triad and three-fourths of nuclear command and control, Air Force Chief Gen. David Allvin said during Defense One’s State of Defense series.
“I don’t think it’s an expectation that every service will pay for it equally out of their own budgets, which is why this is the right conversation to have. We look across the Department of Defense and say the things that the Department of Defense needs to do to support this leadership team’s priorities, maybe they come in different ratios from different services,” Allvin said.
Allvin also stressed that a larger Air Force means more options for the president, without the need for “massive land forces.”
Though an Air Force plus-up is not guaranteed, Hegseth voiced his support for the service this week while speaking to a gathering of senior Air Force department leaders, saying the Air Force will be a “huge part” of how the military “gets funded.”
“I fully believe that we are relevant and very relevant with these new priorities—so we’ll see where the chips fall,” Allvin told Defense One.
Amid the budget shakeup, members of Elon Musk’s government efficiency team have been meeting with Defense Department officials to find ways to eliminate wasteful military spending. Allvin said he hasn’t met with the DOGE team, and declined to give specifics on places to trim spending in the Air Force, but said he supports a “holistic” review of the Defense Department.
“I think looking at it holistically to understand which things the Department of Defense feels is more or less wasteful or more or less useful, and then we fall in line as a service to make sure we’re well aligned,” he said.
One cost-cutting measure the Air Force has long asked for is closing excess infrastructure through the Base Realignment and Closure process, or BRAC. Congress has been hesitant to greenlight base closures in recent decades, Allvin is hopeful that the new budget push will open up conversations “maybe in a way that they haven’t in the past.”
“If we’re trying to get more out of the Air Force that we have, we have excess infrastructure. We need to come to grips with that and figure out how to address it so we don’t have excess infrastructure that’s not providing combat capability,” Allvin said.
Modernization plans
The service is also making its case to continue the major overhaul announced last year to prepare for a fight against China. Most of the effort has been halted until the service’s new secretary and undersecretary are in place and can review it.
A key part of this initiative, called Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition, is the creation of Integrated Capabilities Command, a three-star command to plan the service’s modernization.
While the overall effort is paused, work is continuing on the “provisional” Integrated Capabilities Command, which has started identifying “mission threads” across the service’s commands to better understand the service’s needs as a whole, Allvin said.
“They have a subset of the overall work that we envision for Integrated Capabilities Command, and they are doing that. And that subset is, rather than having all of the major commands, [Air Combat Command], [Air Mobility Command], Global Strike, etc, having them just put together their platforms and their modernization, we’re drawing mission threads across. What does it take to do a certain mission?” Allvin said.
Once the service’s new secretary and undersecretary are in place and examine the plans, Allvin said he’s confident the administration will see how the effort “aligns perfectly” with new direction from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“When I look at Secretary Hegseth’s priorities—rebuild the military, get rid of the bureaucracy—if you have multiple parts of your Air Force doing the same thing, that’s bureaucracy, and when we extract that part out of it to have this Integrated Capability Command that lets them focus on warfighting, now we can sort of revive the warrior ethos and reestablish deterrence by having clear responsibilities for each of the major commands,” Allvin said.
The provisional ICC, which is currently being led by Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum, stood up last year and is slated to reach full operational capability this year, pending the go-ahead from the new service leaders.
Eventually, the command will work on several key modernization programs, such as Next Generation Air Dominance, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Next Generation Air Refueling System.
The fate of these programs ultimately rests with the incoming service leaders, but Allvin’s opinion on developing a sixth-generation fighter jet and advancing the CCA initiative is clear.
“I’m convinced from the analysis that NGAD is necessary. That’s my opinion, and I have an opinion, and I will offer that to the senior leadership, but I can see the difference that it makes,” Allvin said, pointing to a recent internal study launched to review the next-gen fighter program after it was paused last year.
“But it’s not all on its own. That’s part of the analysis we looked at. It’s great, but it also needs the supporting structure around it. It needs to have defendable bases, needs to have sufficient refueling to where it can stay on station longer. It needs to have the CCA with it…They’re part of one system. Put those all together, and I think we’ve got a capability to make sure we’re dominant for a long time to come,” Allvin said.
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