The U.S. Air Force now fields just 1,098 fighter aircraft, nearly 50 planes below the congressionally mandated floor, and a new research report warns the shortfall will only deepen before it improves.
A Congressional Research Service report flagged the gap and laid out a series of hard questions for lawmakers: whether to accept the Air Force's plan to change how it counts its planes, whether the defense industrial base can build fighters fast enough, and whether the service can train enough pilots and mechanics to fly and fix them. The report, cataloged as CRS product R49338, found that the fleet averages 27.4 years old and has been "heavily used," Military Times reported.
Congress set the 1,145-fighter minimum by statute. The Air Force is not meeting it, and the CRS projects the inventory will keep shrinking until 2030 before any growth begins. That timeline means the gap between what the law demands and what the service actually operates could widen for four more years.
A $950 million sustainment bill keeps climbing
Money is a central problem. Annual sustainment costs, the price of keeping aging jets flyable, have jumped roughly $950 million since fiscal year 2019. On top of that, the Air Force faces an annual shortfall of approximately $400 million in weapon system sustainment funding. Every dollar spent nursing old airframes is a dollar unavailable for new ones.
The Department of the Air Force submitted a report to lawmakers in 2025 acknowledging the strain. That report identified sustainment, personnel, and training as core obstacles and proposed a path forward: divest older fighters such as the F-22 and A-10, ramp up F-35 and F-15EX production, and invest in next-generation manned fighters and uncrewed combat aircraft.
If Congress approves the larger procurement numbers the Air Force wants, the fleet could grow to 1,558 aircraft by fiscal year 2035, well above the current statutory floor. But that projection depends on production lines delivering on schedule and on Congress writing the checks, neither of which is guaranteed in a defense budget environment already strained by billions in cost overruns on programs like Air Force One.
Changing the yardstick won't change the shortage
One of the more contentious proposals in the 2025 Air Force report involves how the service counts its fighters. The Air Force wants to swap from a metric called Primary Mission Aircraft Inventory, which tallies only planes assigned to primary missions, to Combat-Coded Total Aircraft Inventory, or CC TAI. The new metric would fold in backup aircraft and attrition reserves, planes that sit in hangars waiting to replace combat losses or fill maintenance gaps.
The CRS report raised this switch as a question Congress should examine carefully. Changing the counting method could make the fleet look larger on paper without adding a single jet to the flight line. Lawmakers who set the 1,145-plane floor based on one metric now face a proposal to measure compliance against a different, more generous one.
The CRS put the stakes plainly:
"USAF's proposed fighter force structure plan raises potential issues for Congress regarding the size, capability, affordability, and feasibility of achieving planned inventory levels."
That sentence covers a lot of ground. Size and capability are self-explanatory. Affordability, given the sustainment cost spike, is an open wound. And feasibility, whether the Air Force can actually build, staff, and maintain the fleet it says it wants, remains the least answered question of all.
Pilot and maintainer shortages compound the aircraft gap
Even if new jets roll off production lines faster, someone has to fly and fix them. The CRS report identified workforce constraints as a serious concern, questioning whether the Air Force can produce enough pilots and maintainers to support its planned fleet size. The 2025 Air Force report acknowledged training bottlenecks, but neither document provided specific numbers on how far short the service currently falls.
Some next-generation programs have shown progress. The B-21 Raider bomber and F-47 fighter are both reportedly running ahead of schedule, a rare bright spot in military procurement. But building airframes faster does not solve the human capital problem. Training a fighter pilot takes years. Retaining experienced maintainers in a competitive labor market takes money the Air Force says it does not have enough of.
The Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve face their own modernization crunch. The CRS report noted that Congress should consider how quickly aircraft transfer to reserve components and whether an upgraded F-16 might be the right fit for Guard units that cannot absorb fifth-generation fighters immediately.
Lessons from Iran and the real-world test of assumptions
The CRS report also pointed Congress toward lessons from what it described as "the war in Iran," suggesting those lessons could "potentially support or challenge the assumptions underlying the 2025 DAF report." The report did not elaborate on the specifics of that conflict or its timeline, but the implication is clear: real-world combat operations test planning assumptions in ways that spreadsheets and force-structure models cannot.
If the war validated the Air Force's emphasis on next-generation platforms and uncrewed systems, Congress may feel more comfortable funding the proposed buildup. If it exposed gaps in older airframes or pilot readiness, the pressure to accelerate retirements and procurement grows. Either way, lawmakers now have a research arm telling them to look at actual combat data before rubber-stamping the Air Force's wish list.
Defense procurement failures are not hypothetical. Boeing has been repairing hundreds of cracked parts on the new Air Force One jets while cost overruns on that program alone have exceeded $3 billion. Congress has reason to be skeptical when any branch of the military promises it can build more, faster, and on budget.
Congress holds the pen, and the responsibility
The statutory minimum of 1,145 fighters exists because Congress decided that number represented the floor for national defense. The Air Force has fallen below it. The service's own plan would not close the gap until well into the next decade, and even that timeline depends on funding, production capacity, and workforce growth that remain unproven.
Lawmakers face a choice. They can accept the Air Force's proposed metric change, which would redefine compliance without adding combat power. They can fund the larger procurement plan and hold the service accountable for delivery. Or they can do what Congress often does with defense shortfalls, hold hearings, express concern, and let the gap persist while operational demands on Air Force assets keep growing.
The CRS has done its job. It identified the shortfall, quantified the cost increases, and framed the questions. Now the people who wrote the 1,145-plane requirement into law have to decide whether they meant it.
A nation that sets a minimum standard for its own defense and then fails to meet it for years running is not projecting strength. It is advertising a gap, and not just to Congress.
