Warnings are mounting that the US Air Force lacks the capability and capacity to defeat China in a high-end conflict. But the deeper problem is not whether American airpower can strike China hard and fast enough — it is whether the US can sustain a fight without exhausting munitions, fracturing alliances or triggering escalation it cannot control.
This month, the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, the US Air & Space Forces Association’s think tank, the only in Washington D.C. dedicated exclusively to the study of air and space power, said in a report that the service is too small, too old and insufficiently modernized to simultaneously defend the US homeland, deter nuclear threats and counter a Chinese assault, particularly in a Taiwan scenario.
The study attributes these shortfalls to more than 30 years of force cuts, deferred modernization and constrained budgets, which have reduced aircraft inventories, limited the acquisition of advanced systems and left munitions stockpiles inadequate. The report calls for sustained funding increases over at least a decade to reverse what it describes as decades of underinvestment.
Mitchell Institute wargaming conducted in 2025 showed that current force levels cannot sustain the intensity and scale of operations required to defeat China’s military, forcing reliance on episodic “pulsed” strikes that create exploitable gaps for adversary forces.
The report concludes that without a sustained surge in funding to expand force size, accelerate procurement of next-generation aircraft, and rebuild readiness, the US Air Force risks failing to deter or win a peer conflict, leaving policymakers facing what it describes as a narrowing choice between investing for victory or accepting heightened risk of defeat.
The US Air Force’s challenge in a Taiwan contingency is to maintain pressure and decision advantage despite attrition, degraded command and control, distance and base vulnerability that disrupts sortie generation and tempo, while ensuring operations remain sustainable beyond the opening phase without triggering uncontrolled escalation.
At the tactical level, that challenge becomes a fight to maintain continuous combat pressure as aircraft, crews, and munitions are steadily attrited.
Highlighting the vulnerability of US aircraft and facilities in the Pacific, a January 2025 Hudson Institute report by Thomas Shugart III and Timothy Walton stresses the lack of hardened aircraft facilities in the region, where aircraft and support systems are exposed to precision strikes that can disable combat capabilities before they are used, primarily on the ground.
That vulnerability extends to runways themselves. Kelly Grieco and others highlight in a December 2024 Stimson Center report that Chinese missile strikes on runways and taxiways can halt flight operations by denying essential surfaces for takeoff, landing and support, including for tankers.
They estimate that Japanese bases could be offline for about 280 hours (11.7 days) for fighters and 800 hours (over 33 days) for tankers, with Guam experiencing shorter disruptions.
Even if aircraft survive, tempo remains at risk. Michael Blaser argues in a July 2024 Proceedings article that the central tactical challenge is whether sortie generation can outpace an adversary’s targeting cycle, a key assumption underlying the US Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) concept.
He warns that advances in AI-enabled surveillance could compress enemy kill chains to under 24 hours, while ACE operations may sustain only about one sortie per aircraft per day, raising the risk that adversary targeting could outcycle US operations.
Despite the challenges posed by a lack of hardened infrastructure, vulnerable aircraft on the ground and faster enemy targeting, Christopher Watterson and Peter Dean emphasize in a War on the Rocks article this month that maintaining combat effectiveness during mass attacks depends on early missile warning, track quality, and interceptor management through networked sensors and distributed decision-making.
They note that multiple sensors providing targeting data help maintain responsiveness and coverage, but without coordination, parallel engagements risk overuse and interceptor depletion, increasing vulnerabilities. At the operational level, the problem shifts to preserving campaign rhythm as these tactical pressures combine to collapse sortie generation and disrupt the sequencing of effects.
Travis Sharp, in an April 2025 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) report, argues that sortie generation in a Taiwan scenario depends on trade-offs among mission profile, geographic distance, and basing dispersion, with no single dominant strategy that optimizes all variables.
He finds that higher-tempo options, such as rapid turnaround, increase sortie rates but impose greater fuel, munitions, and maintenance demands, while more dispersed basing improves survivability but reduces sortie throughput due to less efficient ground support and logistics.
A February 2026 Hudson Institute report by Timothy Walton and Dan Patt emphasizes that modern airpower faces systemic disruption from integrated, large-scale attacks that target not only runways but also the broader logistics network, including fuel, munitions, and command-and-control systems that enable sustained air operations.
Addressing those challenges from a training perspective, a March 2026 RAND report by Emmi Yonekura and other writers emphasizes the need to train for time-sensitive operations amid degraded communications, limited resources and dynamic operating conditions to support effective sortie generation.
The report highlights the importance of regular monthly practice, team-based training and cross-functional coordination, noting that intact teams and cross-training can improve performance under stress, particularly for complex tasks prone to skill decay.
However, it also identifies significant barriers — including resource constraints, inconsistent standards and competing training demands — that limit the US Air Force’s ability to fully prepare for sustained operational pressure.
Strategically, maintaining tempo and decision advantage requires aligning target selection, escalation control, alliance access, and industrial capacity to sustain operations beyond the opening phase without triggering catastrophic escalation.
The strategic problem is a misalignment between operational ambition and the political–industrial system needed to sustain it, in which target choice, escalation risk, alliance behavior and production capacity interact to affect deterrence.
Targeting high-value conventional targets can trigger escalation spirals, requiring careful calibration relative to nuclear thresholds. Prolonged conflict intensifies these pressures as nuclear coercion becomes more plausible over time.
At the same time, allied participation depends on geography, vulnerability and political will, shaping access and sustainment, even as industrial shortfalls risk exhausting munitions within days and taking years to replenish.
To address those constraints, the US should align target sets with escalation thresholds, integrate allies into both posture and production, and build scalable, resilient industrial capacity to sustain denial without crossing catastrophic thresholds.
Unless the US aligns operational tempo with escalation limits, coalition politics and industrial output, early battlefield success may prove fleeting. The decisive factor will not be whether the US Air Force can fight harder or faster, but whether the broader system behind it can endure, adapt and scale under the pressures of a prolonged war.
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