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Fighter gap? Or credibility gap? The Air Force swooped into a Senate hearing in April to drop a budget bomb: The service faces a shortage of 800 jet fighters beginning about a decade from now unless Congress starts buying it more planes now.

Instead of the 2,250 planes the service says it needs, the numbers will begin start to dwindle as today’s aging planes begin to retire. Aircraft shortages will begin to appear in 2017. Over the next seven years, the Air Force fleet could shrink to as few as 1,450 fighters, Lt. Gen. Daniel Darnell told the Senate Armed Services air-land subcommittee. “We would anticipate a shortage of over 800 aircraft in 2024,” said the deputy chief of staff for air, space and information operations, plans and requirements.

The solution, Darnell told lawmakers, is for Congress to let the Air Force buy twice as many F-22s as the Defense Department says it needs — 381 instead of 183 — and to more than double the planned rate of production of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, from 48 a year to 110. This April surprise was a follow-up to a February stunner. Two weeks after the Defense Department sent Congress the largest defense budget since World War II, the Air Force announced that its $144 billion share was too small. Senior Air Force officials sent Congress a $18.7 billion list of so-called “unfunded priorities,” including $1.1 billion for more F-22s and $761 million for F-35s. The service has said it will need an extra $20 billion a year for the next five years.

In April, Darnell told the air-land subcommittee: “America faces a dangerous and uncertain future. Our enemies do not sit idly by. Adversaries, both declared and potential, continue to develop and field new and better means to threaten our nation, our interests and worldwide stability.”

But not everyone is convinced that the future is so scary it warrants spending an extra $100 billion on the Air Force. At times, Defense Secretary Robert Gates sounds like one of the skeptics. In a speech at a Heritage Foundation seminar in May in Colorado Springs, Colo. — home of the Air Force Academy — Gates said, “For much of the past year I’ve been trying to concentrate the minds and energies of the defense establishment on the current needs and current conflicts.”

Gates, who is struggling to manage the two wars that are costing nearly $200 billion a year, said, “I have noticed too much of a tendency towards what might be called ‘next-war-itis’ – the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict.” With “limited resources, where we have to make choices and set priorities, it makes sense to lean toward the most likely and lethal scenarios for our military,” he said. “It is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms — ship to ship, fighter to fighter, tank to tank — for some time to come,” he said. The U.S. is more likely to confront insurgents, guerrillas and terrorists, he said. “Overall, the kinds of capabilities we will most likely need in the years ahead will often resemble the kinds of capabilities we need today.”

“To remain viable,” he said, major weapons programs “will have to show some utility and relevance to the kind of irregular campaigns that are most likely to engage America’s military in the coming decades.”

Gates didn’t single out the Air Force in his Colorado remarks — indeed, the only program he named was the Army’s Future Combat Systems, saying it would need to demonstrate its value for irregular warfare challenges as well as for full-spectrum warfare. But in February, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gates zeroed in, offering this tart assessment of the Air Force’s most prized plane: “The reality is we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater.” At $140 million a piece — $360 million when development costs are included — the F-22 consumes a lot of money for no tangible results.

The Air Force says it bases its requirement for 2,250 fighters on the number needed “to achieve the objectives identified in the National Defense Strategy with an acceptable level of risk.” The current strategy was published in March 2005 and a new one is due in 2009. Depending on how it’s written, the strategy could eliminate the looming fighter gap.

DEFINING THE GAP

But there are different opinions on what the gap is. “The gap depends on how you define the requirement,” said P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force colonel and former special assistant to President Clinton for national security affairs. If the requirement for fighters is based on the threat, “then it’s highly doubtful there’s a fighter gap,” Crowley said. “I just don’t think we’re going to face anything like a peer competitor — certainly not one that’s going to fight a war that plays to our strengths.” That includes China, which often is cited by the U.S. military as a potential near-peer adversary. China is more likely to wage economic war — if it wages war at all, Crowley said. It’s not that the Air Force doesn’t need some F-22s — it does, Crowley said. “The real issue is: Can the Air Force justify more than 183 F-22s? Probably not.”

If, as Gates suggested, the United States’ most likely threats will be guerrillas, insurgents and terrorists, then any gaps lie in having sufficient weapons best suited for countering an asymmetric enemy. Gates’ favored weapon is clear: “It would appear that UAVs are an emerging model,” he said.

There are other solutions to the fighter gap. “You could SLEP the existing aircraft,” said David Berteau, who served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for production and logistics from 1990 to 1993. SLEP is short for service life extension plan, a thorough overhaul that restores military hardware to nearly new working condition. By SLEPing current fighters, the Air Force could keep them flying instead of retiring, thereby avoiding the fighter gap. How much would it cost and what, if any, additional risk would it mean for the Air Force? Those are key questions the Air Force does not appear eager to answer, Berteau said. Another gap filler? “Don’t do it all yourself.” Count on allies for help, Berteau said. The Air Force’s fighter requirement is based on the assumption that the U.S. will have to go it alone.

The Air Force also might consider managing fighters the way it manages bombers, said Barry Watts, a former chief of the Pentagon Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. Because there are relatively few bombers — about 180 — they are treated as pooled assets and allocated to operations as needed, Watts said. Fighters, on the other hand, are permanently assigned to the service’s 10 Air Expeditionary Forces and go to war when their AEF does. Thus, the Air Force argues that it needs enough F-22s to fill 10 squadrons. “Wait a minute,” Watts said. That means the Air Force is basing its F-22 requirements on its force structure. “I understand the force structure calculations, but there are alternatives.”

If F-22s were managed the way bombers are, would there still be a gap? The debate about gap or no gap is far from settled, and “it’s a debate we need to have,” Crowley said. “The fighter gap is the first salvo in a post-Iraq redefinition of the future of warfare.”

With its dire warnings of enemies “declared and potential,” and its $18.7 billion wish list, the Air Force is pushing aggressively for a bigger share of the defense budget. But it’s not the only service hungry for more. The Army and Marine Corps are expanding, adding 92,000 troops over the next five years, and those extra troops aren’t cheap. The extra Army personnel alone are expected to cost about $70 billion over five years. The Army also faces costs of about $13 billion a year to replace wawr-damaged equipment damaged and could potentially spend more than $200 billion on Future Combat Systems.

The Navy, meanwhile, is struggling with a dysfunctional shipbuilding program and a fighter gap of its own that could grow to about 70 planes.

In his 2009 defense budget request, instead of ending the F-22 program, Gates left a door open. Production was to halt after 183 planes, and $497 million was to be included in the budget to pay for shutting down the production line. But when the budget was delivered to Congress, the shut-down money had been reallocated for making repairs to F-15 fighters. That leaves the F-22’s fate up to the next administration and to Congress.

WILLIAM MATTHEWS is a staff reporter at Defense News.