Thread by @Aviation_Intel

The risk the USAF is taking on in hopes of realizing its grand future airpower vision is stunning. Never seen anything like this. So much has to go right, extremely complex concepts involved, and it is being seen as a cannot fail endeavor, but as we all know, reality has a vote🧵

This is coming from the guy that has begged & made the detailed case for migrating to unmanned dominated airpower for years, laying out these concepts before they publicly existed. But now it is late in the game, & the force structure being sacrificed for this long before...

these capabilities materialize is really concerning. If they are serious they see a war with China on the horizon in the next five years, they are planning to execute this with hundreds less airframes. And yes survivability matters, but just saying an F-16 is not survivable...

is totally misleading, especially when they are not cutting the very upgrades that would make it more survivable. And if we have to cut all this now to develop these new systems, then how do we know we can even afford all this new stuff once it is ready for production?

It all sounds great on powerpoint, but the enemy isn't going to go by your future airpower timeline. Nor is development going to go like you think it will. Attrition, being able to be in multiple places at once, and all the bread and butter work that isn't day 1 of warfare...

is really going to suffer in the near term.

I think it's great we have people in top positions that see we need to really correct now and go big in key areas to remain competitive, but this is just as much a damning reminder of poor past leadership that didn't move sooner.

And now we need to sacrifice fast on existing end strength in order to gain these new capabilities sometime in the future.

I think everyone is still digesting all this. I certainly am. But it's clear that we are borrowing very heavily from what we have today...

in order to pay for what we hope will be available sometime in the future.

Kendall has been the visionary here. CQ seems like a true believer in needing major change now. You can tell this is late in the game. I appreciate both of them a lot actually. Not easy to push for this big of change. But there...

are massive risk issues here especially if we are to believe a fight with China is coming so soon. You can't have it all, but we are spending so much on all of this as it is. R&D is great but you actually need hardware on hand to fight a conflict.