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US Air Force budget delays letting China close air superiority gap, top official says: ‘We are out of time’
- New weapons programmes to counter China in the air and space held up by political obstruction, stopgap measures, Senate subpanel told
- ‘The threat keeps changing. It keeps getting worse,’ US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall says
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Washington is “out of time” as China quickly catches up to American military capacity while a full-year annual budget faces delays in Congress, according to a top US Air Force official.
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Addressing the US Senate’s defence appropriations subpanel on Tuesday, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said China had built larger and more capable forces that could challenge the US military.
He said his service had faced delays to new weapons programmes aimed at countering China in air and space warfare, such as anti-satellite technologies and hypersonic weapons, because a few politicians had obstructed passage of the federal budgets, resulting in repeated stopgap measures in recent years.
“Time is my greatest concern,” Kendall said. “We are in a race for military technological superiority with a capable pacing challenge [in China]. Our cushion is gone. We are out of time.”
According to Kendall, the US$217.5 billion fiscal 2025 budget request for the US Air Force was constrained by an agreement reached last year under the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that capped the US Defence Department budget for 2025 at US$849.5 billion, about 1 per cent less than the Pentagon’s spending 2024 spending plan.
The act was a bipartisan agreement introduced in May last year to suspend the debt ceiling through to January 1, 2025. The law imposed limits on discretionary spending, including defence programmes, in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling before the government ran out of funding to pay federal obligations.
The budget caps had forced the air force to make “difficult choices” to delay the acquisition of major weapons – including the F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter jet and the F-15EX Eagle II fighter jet – for the next generation of combat aircraft, according to General David Allvin, the US Air Force chief of staff.
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