The U.S. Air Force has invested years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in keeping
Boeing’s
F-15C fleet flying well into the 2040s. But Lt. Gen. Scott Rice, director of the Air National Guard (ANG), recently shocked the aerospace community when he revealed the service is now thinking seriously about sunsetting the iconic Eagle two decades early.
Faced with tight budgets, the Air Force is desperately looking for ways to cut costs in order to invest in new capabilities. To keep the 1970s-era Eagle flying beyond the late 2020s, the service would likely need to spend $30-40 million per aircraft—an investment that may not be worth the price, officials say.
THE STRATEGIC IMPACT OF RETIRING THE EAGLE
F-15C/D retirement will come down to a trade-off between short-term capacity and long-term capability
Russia and China are fielding fourth-gen fighters in large numbers
Air Force must determine how much risk it wants to assume before F-35A and Penetrating Counterair fighter, fully come online
Proposal signals big changes may be coming for the service’s combat air force
The Air Force probably cannot afford to repair the F-15 fleet while simultaneously bringing online new fifth- and sixth-generation aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), B-21 stealth bomber and new Penetrating Counterair (PCA) fighter, the head of Air Combat Command, Gen. Mike Holmes, tells Aviation Week. But at a time when Russia and China are pumping out large numbers of highly capable fourth-generation fighters, can the Air Force really afford to retire over 200 Eagles?
The U.S. military relies on the F-15C, primarily operated by the ANG, to maintain air superiority at home and abroad. With its eight
Raytheon AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles and wide-aperture radar, the F-15 excels at the counterair mission—intercepting and shooting down enemy fighters. The Eagle and stealthy
F-22 Raptor are the only two fighters in the Air Force inventory specifically designed for the air-to-air role.
Retiring the F-15C/D fleet not only creates a potential capability gap, but a capacity one as well. The truncated F-22 fleet cannot fulfill the Air Force’s global air superiority mission alone, particularly when at any given time many Raptors are down for maintenance getting their delicate stealth skin retouched. The service currently operates about 230 F-15Cs and Ds around the world, primarily based in the U.S. for the homeland defense mission but also at Kadena Air Base, Japan, and
RAF Lakenheath, England.
The Air Force is considering retiring its fleet of F-15C/Ds in the 2020s. Credit: U.S. Air Force
Divesting the F-15s without an immediate replacement would leave the Air Force with just 125 or so combat-coded air superiority fighters, says Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group.
“From an airpower perspective, this is a disaster waiting to happen,” he says. “When you look at a peer adversary, China or Russia, they have an awful lot of fourth-generation planes.”
The Air Force’s proposal is to plug the resulting gap with
Lockheed Martin F-16s upgraded with active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radars. However, experts argue that the single-engine F-16 cannot match the F-15’s air-to-air capability. Even with the AESA upgrade, the F-16’s radar dish is much smaller, yielding a narrower targeting range, says the Heritage Foundation’s John Venable. Meanwhile, the F-16 carries fewer missiles—six at most—and it flies slower and is less maneuverable than the F-15.
The F-35A will be able to mitigate the shortfall to some extent. Although the JSF is designed primarily for the air-to-ground mission, operators say it is more capable of performing counterair missions than originally expected. There have been reports of F-35As achieving impressive 20:1 and even 24:1 kill ratios against simulated enemy aircraft during recent exercises such as Red Flag.
F-16 Fighting Falcons upgraded with a new AESA radar could replace F-15C/Ds in Air National Guard squadrons. Credit: Sgt. Kenneth Norman/U.S. Air Force
“The F-35 is a lot better at air-to-air combat than most people understand,” says U.S.
Marine Corps Lt. Col. David Berke, the first operational F-35B pilot and the only Marine to have flown the F-22. “I would be extremely confident taking the F-35 against any current or future adversary I might face. Force on force, F-35 against T-50s and J-20s, I’m in.”
However, the reality is that the F-35A is not yet operationally mature and will not be fielded in large numbers for many years.
“The best platform available to us in numbers right now is the F-15C,” says Venable.
But the Air Force argues that the fourth-generation F-15Cs will not be survivable in the current and future battlefield environment. With near-peer adversaries fielding sophisticated radars and advanced surface-to-air missiles that threaten fourth-generation aircraft, the U.S. military must move toward a fifth- and sixth-generation fighter fleet, top generals say.
“Most of these were designed in the late ’60s and ’70s and are not appropriate for the threat that we have,” says Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris, deputy chief of staff for strategic plans, programs and requirements. “When it comes to fighting in some of these contested airspaces, fourth-generation does not have much of a role five or 10 years from now, even with some of these upgrades.”
The Air Force likely will not restart production of its only other dedicated air superiority fighter, the F-22, but may choose an upgraded Raptor for the future PCA program. Credit: 1st Lt. Mahalia R. Frost/U.S. Air Force
Although the F-15C carries twice as many air-to-air weapons as an F-35, “it doesn’t survive to shoot them,” Harris says. “They would take three times the number of missiles to their graves.” Holmes wants to begin buying more modern fighter aircraft, at least 100 per year. This includes ramping up production of the F-35 and moving more quickly to develop a sixth-generation air superiority aircraft under the PCA program.
It is very unlikely that the Air Force will restart production of the 1990s-era F-22, a strategy that has been floated by President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Air Force, Heather Wilson, among others. However, it is possible that PCA could be a 21st-century F-22, upgraded with many of the advanced capabilities being fielded on the F-35.
Any sixth-generation aircraft would need fusion and full-spectrum dominance—the ability to operate in electro-optical, infrared, laser and radio frequencies, says Berke.
“We don’t get to decide what spectrum we fight in,” Berke says. “The F-35 lives operationally in all four of those spectrums simultaneously.”
Rebecca Grant, president of IRIS Independent Research, argues that as the F-35A becomes more operationally available, the time may be right for the Air Force to begin thinking about retiring the F-15C/D.
“You may take a little bit of a bath in capability, or they may allay that with the F-22, but with growing numbers of operational F-35s that risk is far different from what it was 10 years ago,” Grant says. “The F-15s are old—they are fierce and fabulous, but they are old.”