NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Air Force must focus its limited maintenance resources on aircraft that are capable of surviving in a contested environment, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday.
In a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Meink highlighted the service’s lackluster aircraft readiness as one of its major challenges.
“We have some of the best aircraft,” Meink said, citing the F-22 and F-35 fighters and the B-2 bomber as examples.
The scope of the readiness challenge “surprised me a bit,” Meink said.
“I knew there was a readiness challenge,” Meink said. “I didn’t appreciate how significant that readiness challenge was.”
The Air Force’s aircraft readiness rates have steadily trended down for several years, and last year hit a recent low. The fiscal 2024 fleet-wide mission-capable rate — which measures how many aircraft are able to carry out their missions on an average day — hit 62%, meaning nearly four in every 10 aircraft were unable to perform their job at any given time.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin raised alarms about the decline at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in March. During that speech, Allvin displayed a chart showing another statistic, aircraft availability, which had declined from 73% in 1994 to 54% in 2024.
One major factor driving declining readiness rates, experts agree, is that the Air Force’s planes are decades old — and getting older all the time. Allvin’s chart in March showed that over the past three decades, the average aircraft age in the fleet almost doubled from 17 to nearly 32 years old.
Meink said Monday that the Air Force has “some of the best aircraft” of any military, and praised the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the B-2 Spirit bomber.
But he pointed to Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, where F-22s are stationed, as an example of the problems the Air Force is facing.
The F-22 is “a phenomenal platform,” Meink said. “But when I go out to Langley and there’s a number of aircraft, nonoperational, sitting around the ramp that aren’t even being worked on because we simply don’t have the parts to do that — that’s a problem, right? We have to fix that.”
In an afternoon roundtable with reporters, Meink said maintenance and sustainment have been a major cost driver for the Air Force over the last roughly 15 years. Lawmakers, the administration and top Pentagon leadership are working to help increase the Air Force’s maintenance budget, he said.
But with the Air Force’s resources stretched thin, Meink said, it must be efficient and focus maintainers on its top priorities — systems that will be able to survive in a future war’s highly contested airspace.
“If a system is not capable of operating in a contested environment, then we need to be second-guessing and/or thinking about how much money we’re dumping into readiness on those platforms,” Meink said.
And as the Air Force retires older, outdated aircraft, Meink said, it will be able to shift skilled maintainers and other resources to planes that will be needed in a future conflict. Meink pointed to Ukraine’s success in using modified quadcopters worth a few thousand dollars to destroy multimillion-dollar Russian drones as an example of the new air warfare environment the U.S. will have to operate in.
Meink said the Air Force also must hold its contractors accountable for the reliability of their systems.
“When we’re getting a part that’s supposed to last 400 hours, and it lasts 100 hours, that’s unacceptable,” Meink said. “We need to work with the government and contractors to make the right investments to improve the serviceability and reliability of our weapon systems and the parts we’re putting in those weapon systems.”
William Bailey, who is performing the duties of the assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the increasing modularity of new aircraft and other in-the-works systems will allow them to be more easily maintained and replaced.
Bailey also said the acquisition community plans to conduct a deep dive into the service’s supply chains to identify where “pinch points” are holding up the delivery of vital spare parts.
The Air Force must use also advanced data analytic techniques to better understand the state of its weapon systems, Meink said.
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.