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US Air Force F-15 fighter jets in 2020.
Photo:
sameer al-doumy/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The Pentagon is pulling F-15 fighter jets from Okinawa after decades on the Japanese island, and the news has received too little attention. American air power is spread thin across the world, and the U.S. is in a precarious position even as it needs to put more hardware in the Pacific to deter China.
“Starting in November, the Department of Defense will commence a phased withdrawal of F-15 C/D aircraft forward-deployed to Kadena Air Base over the next two years,” the Air Force said on Oct. 28 after the news had leaked. The Air Force F-15Cs and Ds are 38 years old on average, and no doubt they’re costly to maintain and keep airborne. Lt. Gen.
David Deptula,
a retired F-15 pilot, tells us these are the last active duty F-15C/D pilots in the Air Force, another limiting factor.
Yet the F-15s are departing strategic real estate in the Western Pacific’s first island chain with no permanent replacement. The U.S. will “temporarily” deploy “newer and more advanced aircraft” on rotation, the Air Force says. The announcement promises a steady presence but says the Pentagon has “not made a decision on the long-term solution.”
This reality has been a long time in the making, the “inevitable result,” as Gen. Deptula says, of political complacency and “slashed investment in successor aircraft.” The Air Force initially planned to buy 750 F-22s, but former Defense Secretary
Bob Gates
shut down the production line at 187 jets. The services aren’t buying enough F-35s to pick up the load.
The result: The Air Force will have “less than 45% of its original planned” fifth-generation fighter force “in the critical 2027-2030 timeframe when China may be ready to attack Taiwan,” the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studiessaid in a recent report.
Only about half of the F-22 fleet is mission capable, and these jets are working overtime all over the world. The Pentagon has dispatched F-22s to Poland to deter Vladimir Putin from extending his war in Ukraine to NATO. It also sent a squadron of F-22s to the Middle East this year to help the United Arab Emirates fend off the Houthi rebels.
Air Force Gen.
Mark Kelly
Some defenders of the F-15 pullout say the fighters are too old to help in any conflict with China, or would be obliterated early on, as if this is comforting. A rotational force is also a big downgrade. One virtue of a permanent presence is that American troops learn the neighborhood and are prepared to fight on night one of a conflict. That pays a double dividend of deterrence, persuading adversaries the U.S. is serious about enforcing order.
The Biden Administration has shown no interest in growing the Air Force, even as it calls China a “pacing” threat. The F-15 departure “sends the wrong signal,” as GOP lawmakers wrote in a Tuesday letter to the Pentagon, and it will fall to Congress to pick up the pace on aircraft buys and find long-range fires or other assets that can be moved into the Pacific.
None of this will be easy or cheap, but the vanishing F-15s are one more sign of America’s eroding military power.
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Appeared in the November 3, 2022, print edition as ‘The Pacific’s Missing Fighter Jets.’
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