An Air Force two-star general warned Wednesday that potential 8% cuts to the service’s budget would be “painful.”
But Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, the service’s director for force design, integration and wargaming, expressed hope that the Air Force could still receive additional funding for its top priorities, citing its alignment with the Trump administration’s focus on lethality and deterrence and the potential for redirected funding from cost-cutting measures outside the service.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered services to review their budgets and find 8% of planned fiscal 2026 spending that could be redirected from noncrucial programs toward efforts that make the military more effective. The Air Force has said one avenue it plans to pursue to meet these goals is accelerating its retirement of older and outdated aircraft.
Kunkel said Wednesday that with the Air Force now smaller and older than at any other time in its nearly 80-year history, “there’s not many places that we can go for” such cuts.
“An 8% cut to the Air Force, it’s gonna be painful,” Kunkel said at a discussion hosted in Washington by the think tank the Hudson Institute. “It’s gonna look really, really bad.”
But Kunkel noted that Hegseth plans to redirect funds within the department and that the military’s budget wouldn’t be cut overall.
The Air Force’s top priorities are protecting the homeland, projecting power abroad and strategic deterrence, Kunkel said. The Air Force will look at all its efforts as part of the “8% drill,” he said, and anything that doesn’t contribute to at least one of those priorities will be reconsidered.
The Air Force, with its ability to rapidly employ force across the globe, will become even more important in a future conflict, Kunkel said. However, to win such a war, he said, the service can’t continue to operate under the same design, just with updated fighters and bombers.
The service will need to fine-tune its capabilities to counter the nation’s threats and protect its ground-based systems needed to launch aircraft or other weapons, Kunkel said.
The Air Force’s effort to create a sixth-generation fighter and accompanying systems, known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, is now on hold as the service reconsiders how to tame its high costs.
Kunkel said that when the Air Force studied how a war would play out with and without NGAD in its fleet, “the fight looks much better when NGAD’s in it.”
But NGAD and its accompanying “family of systems,” such as drone wingmen, known as collaborative combat aircraft, wouldn’t be able to survive alone, he said. The Air Force will need to invest in survivable bases and refueling tankers that can resist enemy attacks, so the service can generate combat sorties and then keep aircraft gassed up, even under fire.
If the government decides not to pursue NGAD, Kunkel said, the Air Force will continue to be part of the fight — but the operational risk will be higher and the military may not be able to achieve all the combat goals it sets out to.
“It’s a package deal,” Kunkel said. “NGAD remains an important part of our force design, and it fundamentally changes the character of the fight in a really good way for the joint force.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
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