USAF

In a sign of the times, for the first time in many years, U.S. Air Force fighters have returned to an air defense alert posture at Eareckson Air Station in Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands. This represents a notable development in efforts to strengthen NORAD’s ability to defend North America’s northern and Pacific approaches from a key strategic stronghold on Russia’s back doorstep. The deployment culminated in a multinational air defense mission involving U.S. and Canadian fighters operating across thousands of miles, reflecting a growing focus on the increasingly strategic Arctic and North Pacific regions.

Fighter operations at Eareckson date back to the Cold War, when F-4s and F-15s deployed to the island to support air defense missions against Soviet aircraft. The base’s routine fighter mission ended in the early 1990s, making the October 2026 deployment a notable return to an alert posture at one of America’s westernmost military outposts. In the interim, we have seen fighters, including F-16s, return to Eareckson, but not in the context of air defense alert missions.

Packing live air-to-air missiles, the F-16s were deployed to Eareckson, on Shemya Island, from October 18 through 26, maintaining an alert posture before launching on October 25 as part of a homeland defense mission.

The latest mission began under Operation Noble Defender before transitioning into Operation Noble Eagle in support of northern sovereignty operations. It brought together F-16s operating from Eareckson, F-35As and additional F-16s from Eielson Air Force Base, and Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornets deployed from Cold Lake, Alberta.

The F-16s operating from Eielson were assigned to the 18th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS), a particularly unusual unit with roots as the 18th Aggressor Squadron. The unit was redesignated in 2024, shifting its primary combat focus from adversary training toward aerospace control and homeland defense in Alaska. Its Block 30 F-16s bring a combination of air defense capabilities and experience in replicating adversary tactics, making them a very specialized outfit, as you can read about here.

From their distributed locations, the Eareckson-based F-16s provided coverage in the southern portion of the theater, while fighters from Eielson operated in the northwest. Canadian CF-18s covered the northern approaches.

An E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson provided airborne command and control, supported by multiple U.S. KC-135 tankers and a Canadian CC-150 Polaris. An HC-130 Combat King II also participated, providing contingency search and rescue and personnel recovery coverage.

The distances involved illustrate the scale of the operation. Eareckson is approximately 1,600 miles from Eielson and 2,600 miles from Cold Lake, requiring substantial coordination and aerial refueling support to bring the different elements together.

Strategic Significance

Located at the western end of the Aleutian chain, Shemya occupies a strategically important position in the North Pacific, facing the approaches from Russia’s Far East and the wider Pacific region and acting as a gateway to the Arctic. While fighters operating from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, with additional support from Eielson when needed, normally provide coverage across this vast area, Eareckson puts combat aircraft dramatically farther west. Its reactivation as a fighter operating location gives NORAD another forward option, extending the reach of its air defense network well beyond Alaska’s principal airbases.

The island’s military significance was especially pronounced during the Cold War, when it supported detachments of RC-135 surveillance aircraft, including hosting Cobra Ball missile-tracking aircraft, as you can read about here.

Shemya’s potential role in a future conflict has attracted increasing attention from U.S. military planners in recent years. The island hosts the AN/FPS-108 Cobra Dane radar, a massive phased-array installation that provides critical ballistic missile warning and tracking capabilities. Its position in the western Aleutians, roughly 500 miles from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and approximately 1,000 miles from mainland Alaska, gives it considerable strategic importance but also leaves it isolated and potentially vulnerable.

The growing threat posed by one-way attack drones and cruise missiles also makes protecting Cobra Dane a significant force-protection challenge. Forward-deployed fighters provide a highly adaptable, wide-area defensive layer, intercepting aerial threats before they reach the island, much like the fighter deployments to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The vulnerability of Shemya and Cobra Dane has been the focus of several military exercises. In 2021, Green Berets assigned to Special Operations Command North participated in a NORAD exercise that involved deploying to Shemya and preparing to defend the Cobra Dane installation against potential attack. The troops arrived by sea and brought Stinger man-portable air defense systems, highlighting concerns about protecting the island against both conventional and unconventional threats.

In August 2023, elements of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, better known as the Night Stalkers, returned to the island as part of Operation Polar Dagger, as TWZ reported at the time. At least two MH-60M Black Hawk helicopters and associated personnel and equipment deployed to Eareckson, with a C-17 transporting personnel and materiel. The exercise explored the ability to rapidly project special operations capabilities into the remote region, protect critical infrastructure, and improve operational awareness in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Taken together, these developments point to growing interest in Shemya as a potential forward operating location in a wider North Pacific defense network. Its radar, long runway, and remote position offer considerable advantages, but its isolation also presents significant logistical and force-protection challenges.

The return of F-16s to an air defense alert posture at Eareckson adds another dimension to the installation. With its ability to host forward-deployed fighters, the base can maintain an alert posture and generate homeland defense sorties. Its location would be particularly useful for responding to activity approaching Alaska from the western Pacific and the Bering Sea. At the same time, having fighters at Eareckson provides an organic means of defending Shemya’s critical surveillance assets.

There are other potential benefits in dispersing fighter operations away from Alaska’s principal airbases. In a major conflict, those installations could be subject to missile strikes and other attacks, making alternative operating locations valuable. Eareckson’s long runway, ramp space, and arresting equipment provide a foundation for such operations, although sustaining fighters there over an extended period would require significant fuel, munitions, maintenance, and force-protection support.

Outside of Eareckson, Alaska has a network of remote airfields that can support dispersed fighter operations during contingencies. These include King Salmon Airport on the Alaska Peninsula, which hosted four 18th FIS F-16s during an Agile Combat Employment deployment in September last year.

All this comes as concerns grow about the level of protection afforded to Air Force airbases. There are growing calls for the U.S. military to invest in new hardened shelters, and the lack of physical hardening of bases has been hammered home by the experiences from the war with Iran, which have underscored the huge risks posed to aircraft sat out in the open on flightlines.

The October deployment does not mean Eareckson is being transformed into a permanently staffed fighter base. It does, however, demonstrate that NORAD can use this isolated installation as another node in its air defense network, extending the geographic reach and flexibility of its operations across the North Pacific.

For NORAD, having additional locations from which it can generate air defense sorties is a major plus. The combination of forward-based fighters, airborne command and control, aerial refueling, and Canadian participation demonstrates another way of distributing combat power across a broad geographic area rather than depending exclusively on a handful of major bases.

More broadly, the Aleutians are assuming renewed strategic importance as the westernmost part of U.S. territory, positioned at the intersection of the North Pacific and Arctic theaters. As military competition with both Russia and China intensifies, the island chain offers a valuable forward position for surveillance, air defense, and power projection, as well as a means of gaining time and distance against potential threats approaching North America or operating across the Pacific. The return of F-16 alert operations to Eareckson adds another piece to that defensive architecture, underscoring the continued military relevance of this remote island chain.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The U.S. Air Force has handed Lockheed Martin a $694 million contract for the production of AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missiles. In 2023, the service had moved to cancel ARRW, which had been in line to be the U.S. military’s first operational hypersonic weapon. At the time, we had reservations about the service’s intent and speculated the missile could make a major comeback or continue development in a classified setting. The program has since made an incredible turnaround, and there are already plans for another variant that will be able to use an all-new seeker to hit moving targets, including enemy warships.

The ARRW contract was awarded on September 29, but only announced today. It is not immediately clear how many missiles are to be built under this deal or when the Air Force expects to start taking delivery of them. The Air Force has previously disclosed plans to integrate the missiles onto its B-52 and B-1 bombers. Other aircraft with sufficiently large payload capacities and physical space to carry outsized stores could potentially carry AGM-183As, or variants thereof, in the future.

“The contract was executed under the Department of War’s Enterprise-Wide Agile Acquisition Contract to modernize America’s Arsenal of Freedom,” according to an Air Force press release. “This milestone marks the formal transition of the boost-glide hypersonic missile program from prototyping and flight testing into production, solidifying the Air Force’s commitment to fielding standoff, high-speed strike options.”

As noted here, the AGM-183A is a so-called boost-glide vehicle-type hypersonic weapon, which uses a rocket booster to bring it first to an optimal speed and altitude. The nose cone on ARRW then breaks away, and a wedge-shaped unpowered boost-glide vehicle concealed within is released.

The vehicle then glides to its target along a relatively shallow flight path within the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speed, defined as anything above Mach 5. It is capable of maneuvering along the way, sometimes erratically. The mix of speed, flight trajectory, and maneuverability creates significant challenges for opponents in terms of spotting and tracking the glide vehicle, let alone attempting to intercept it. As a result, hypersonic weapons of this type offer particular benefits for piercing enemy air defenses to very rapidly strike time-sensitive and otherwise high-value targets.

The ARRW production contract “is a turning point in our advanced weapons roadmap,” Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said in a statement accompanying today’s release. “By moving ARRW from test to production, we’re providing our combatant commanders with a credible, high-speed strike weapon capable of penetrating the most advanced anti-access and area-denial systems.”

“Fielding ARRW enhances our ability to hold targets at risk anywhere around the world,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in his own statement. “This hypersonic weapon provides the Joint Force a flexible and rapid response option for highly contested environments.”

As mentioned, the Air Force had moved to cancel ARRW in 2023, following a number of failed flight tests. The explicit intent at the time was to shift resources to the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) effort. HACM is an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile that functions in a completely different way from ARRW. HACM is still in development, and the program has now moved into flight testing, as TWZ was first to report earlier this month.

There had already been steady signs in recent years that ARRW’s fortunes were changing and that it had not actually been axed, despite the Air Force’s stated plans to do so. The Air Force’s 2026 Fiscal Year budget request last year confirmed that the service had fully rebooted the program and was seeking new funding to procure actual missiles.

The service’s 2027 Fiscal Year budget request, released earlier this year, revealed further plans “to begin [ARRW] INC 2 [Increment 2] technology efforts such as but not limited to integrating pre-planned product improvements, design, trade studies, hardware upgrades, facilitization, affordability initiatives, and testing.”

A request for $296 million would support “the design, test, and evaluation of Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) Increment 2 with terminal seeker and data link capability and other cost reduction production initiatives into ARRW,” those same documents added.

In general, the U.S. Air Force has historically framed hypersonic weapons, including ARRW and HACM, as being especially critical for success in future conflicts, especially high-end fights, such as one in the Pacific against China. This was underscored by the launch of an AGM-183A with a live warhead from a B-52 flying from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam in 2024. The future anti-ship variant could be even more relevant in a Pacific context.

As TWZ has written previously:

“…the Guam test sent clear signals to China. The Air Force has made no secret of how important it views the development and fielding of hypersonic weapons as part of larger preparations for a potential future high-end fight against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Pacific. This is further underscored by the fact that the mention of the ‘terminal seeker and data link capability’ for Increment 2 of ARRW is actually contained in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) section of the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request.”

“In the context of a major conflict in the Pacific, there would also be a very high demand for prompt, long-range anti-ship capability. The ability to conduct those strikes even in the face of dense anti-air defenses would be even more attractive for engaging very high-value vessels, such as China’s growing fleets of aircraft carriers or big deck amphibious assault ships. The PLA Navy’s (PLAN) combat fleets, overall, continue to grow in scale and scope at a prodigious rate, as well. This, in turn, has put additional emphasis on the development and fielding of new and improved anti-ship capabilities that can be air-launched, as well as employed from the maritime and ground domains, across the U.S. military in recent years. Increment 2 ARRWs could also offer another means to strike mobile, high-value targets on land, such as ballistic missile transporter-erector-launchers.”

“For its part, the PLA has been actively developing and fielding various types of hypersonic weapons, including boost-glide vehicle designs. Its ever-growing arsenal of traditional ballistic missiles now includes several air-launched types, including ones with nuclear and conventional warheads. The latter are widely believed to be capable of being employed against enemy ships, as well as targets on land.”

If nothing else, after moving to cancel the ARRW three years ago, the Air Force has now fully reversed course and has placed its first order for production examples of this hypersonic missile.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The U.S. Air Force is exploring options for adding air-to-air combat capabilities to its bombers as part of efforts adjacent to its latest fighter force structure plans. The service has raised the possibility of the B-21 Raider, specifically, taking on an air-to-air role, and potentially doing so in cooperation with Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones, in the past. As TWZ has explored for years, the B-21’s inherent attributes – size, extreme range, high operating ceiling, broadband low-observability (stealthiness), and advanced sensors – could actually make it especially well suited to taking part in air-to-air combat missions. The Air Force’s other bombers could also be part of these future plans.

Aviation Week was first to report on the potential for bombers to help bolster the Air Force’s air-to-air combat capacity after obtaining a copy of a new long-term fighter force structure report submitted to Congress last week. Media coverage of this report first began to appear earlier this week following a roundtable on Tuesday with Lt. Gen. David Tabor, the service’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs. The full report, which is unclassified, was not disseminated to reporters at that time.

The Air Force’s central goal now is having 1,509 combat-coded fighters in inventory by 2035, which is hundreds more than it has in service today. This will come from the acquisition of new F-35As, F-15EXs, and F-47s. There are already questions about how realistic this plan might be, and the service has acknowledged several hurdles it will need to overcome. You can read more about this in our initial reporting here.

“Accordingly, the USAF is also evaluating additional recapitalization options, including a new capacity fighter, increased reliance on CCAs [Collaborative Combat Aircraft], and developing air-to-air capabilities on bombers,” the latest fighter force structure report says, per Aviation Week.

“A new capacity fighter” may refer to the possible acquisition of new-production F-16 Vipers, which Lt. Gen. Tabor said at the roundtable could be an option in the future, according to an earlier story from Air & Space Forces Magazine. He also said making any such decision was not an “urgent” priority. This is just one possibility here. The Air Force has floated ideas for other new fighter concepts beyond the F-47 in recent years. Lockheed Martin has talked about the potential for expanding on the F-35 design.

At the roundtable on Tuesday, Tabor also made clear that the introduction of CCAs would influence future fighter force structure plans, but the expected scale and scope of those impacts remain unclear. He does not appear to have addressed the role bombers could play in this equation at that time. The new fighter report itself does not elaborate further on the potential use of bombers, based on Aviation Week’s story. TWZ is seeking more information.

When it comes to the possibility of Air Force bombers, and the B-21 more specifically, taking on an air-to-air role, this is not the first time the possibility has been raised, as mentioned earlier.

“As the NGAD [Next Generation Air Dominance] review goes forward, like, is it possible that what that ends up with could be the B-21 taking a larger role?” reporter Stephen Losey, working at the time for Defense News, asked then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin at the Military Reporters & Editors (MRE) Conference in 2024.

“We have not taken that off the table,” the Air Force’s top officer said in response to Losey’s question, but did not elaborate.

B-21 Takeoff and Landing

At that time, the Air Force’s NGAD program was undergoing a deep review, and the future of the sixth-generation fighter component of the effort had come into question. The decision was ultimately made to continue pursuing plans for what has now become the F-47.

For years now, TWZ has been highlighting how the B-21 could serve in multiple roles beyond just that of a traditional bomber, including in an air-to-air capacity. Air Force officials have themselves described the Raider as having multi-mission capabilities, which could extend into the realm of air-to-air combat.

“If we were to characterize it [NGAD] as a fighter, we would be… thinking too narrowly about what kind of airplane we need in a highly contested environment,” then-Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Pleus told what was then just Air Force Magazine back in 2019. This could be “a B-21 that also has air-to-air capabilities” and can “work with the family of systems to defend itself, utilizing stealth – maybe that’s where the sixth-generation airplane comes from.”

Pleus’ comments had tied in with adjacent discussions at the time and thereafter about how the B-21 might operate together with future CCA drones. Pleus, who was subsequently promoted to lieutenant general and whose lasting posting was as Director of Staff at the Air Force’s top headquarters at the Pentagon, retired in August of this year.

It remains unclear how the Air Force might be considering employing the B-21, or any of its other existing bombers, in air-to-air combat. This could entail loading out bombers for direct air-to-air engagements, or the integration of new capabilities to help them find targets or to otherwise enable new supporting roles, or a mix of all of the above. The process of achieving air superiority is not limited to neutralizing aerial threats, either.

As TWZ has written in the past in the context of an air-to-air role for the Raider in particular:

“The Raider has the potential to serve as a launch platform for air-to-air missiles, especially outsized very long-range types. Its payload capacity would give it the ability to carry a large volume of smaller air-to-air missiles, as well. B-21s could also employ air-to-ground munitions in support of the suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses mission (SEAD/DEAD), which is also part of the air superiority equation.”

“Maybe most significantly, the B-21s could also act as airborne nerve centers in support of counter-air missions, especially for controlling drones like the Air Force’s planned fleets of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), and have the ability to do so even in the most heavily contested of airspaces. Uncrewed aircraft, in turn, could feed targeting data back to Raiders with air-to-air loadouts. B-21s might even be able to launch some of those drones themselves.”

Deeply networked ‘kill webs’ that bring together distributed arrays of sensors and other supporting elements across vast distances and multiple domains, coupled with very-long-range air-to-air missiles, open up new operational possibilities more generally. This applies to Air Force bombers beyond the B-21.

When it comes to longer-range air-to-air missiles, the Navy has notably already fielded the AIM-174B air-launched version of the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6). The service more recently disclosed another such missile in flight testing now, the AIM-424 Malice.

The Air Force has pursued similar missile developments in the past and put out a call for a new anti-air missile with a maximum range of at least 1,000 nautical miles just in June. The service has been exploring multi-stage types with modular designs that could be configured for longer- and shorter-range engagements, as well. These are all just programs we know about, and do not speak to the developments the Air Force and others could have underway in the classified realm.

There is also the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) LongShot program, which the Air Force, as well as the U.S. Army and Navy, have been involved with over the years. The aim of that effort is to demonstrate the concept of an air-to-air missile-carrying drone to help extend the reach and reduce the vulnerability of tactical fighters and bombers.

On top of all this, tactical fighters are generally ill-suited to, and in some cases outright incapable of, carrying the kinds of outsized payloads being discussed here. This underscores the potential value of incorporating bombers into this equation as a means to engage targets at extreme ranges.

Even in a closer proximity support role of fighter aircraft, B-21s, as well as B-52s, could contribute to air-to-air fight as arsenal ships for longer-range weapons, firing on demand from the rear in coordination with crewed and uncrewed platforms operating at the tip of the tactical edge. B-21s could also use their penetrating capabilities to command drones of their own that provide penetrating fighter-like capabilities.

New air-to-air capabilities on Air Force bombers could include self-protection systems, too. Years ago now, the B-21’s prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, patented an anti-missile defense system for stealthy aircraft designed to fire hard-kill interceptors. The Air Force, as well as the Navy, have openly expressed interest in similar defensive capabilities for aerial refueling tankers and other larger planes. Just being able to provide localized close-in defensive ‘bubbles’ around individual bombers could impact the calculus when it comes to future air-to-air combat requirements.

To reiterate, these are all concepts we have discussed in depth for roughly a decade.

Speaking more broadly about Air Force future fighter force structure demands, as we wrote previously:

“In recent years, sustainment costs, broadly, have only become an increasingly serious concern for the Air Force, as well as the other branches of the U.S. military, especially when it comes to complex manned platforms, such as the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Fleet size and the readiness of those fleets are also highly pressing issues. So, at least in the near term, it’s not surprising that NGAD may end up focusing more on exploring available lower-cost options with distributed capabilities as alternatives to traditional air combat assets with highly centralized capabilities, such as manned fighter jets packed with ‘exquisite’ technologies.”

Despite the decision in the end to proceed with the more exquisite F-47, these points have only become more pronounced as time has gone on. How many F-47s the Air Force ultimately intends to buy is another question that looks to remain unanswered by the latest fighter force structure report. At the same time, there are clear signs that the Air Force is planning to significantly increase its planned B-21 fleet size. The official acquisition target has long been at least 100 Raiders, but the Air Force and Northrop Grumman have said a new topline figure is expected to come in the Fiscal Year 2028 budget proposal next year. The service is now explicitly aiming to have at least 500 CCA drones in service by 2032, too. All of this will compete for funding and other resources, at least to a degree.

In the meantime, there has been a “persistent decline in AA [aircraft availability] rates across the USAF tactical fighter fleet,” which “is the direct mathematical consequence of operating an inventory with an average age exceeding 31 years,” the Air Force’s latest fighter force structure report says, according to Aviation Week. “As legacy platforms – such as the F-16C/D, F-15E, and A-10C – operate well beyond their original engineering service lives, they experience compounding structural fatigue, widespread corrosion, and subsystem degradation.”

“Achieving the mandated AA rates required for a peer-conflict scenario necessitates aggressive divestment of the oldest airframes to fund the procurement of highly available, modernized platforms like the F-35A and F-15EX,” the report adds, per that outlet. Furthermore, “to counter the [Chinese] industrial capacity and numerical advantage in fielding fighters like the J-20 and J-16, the USAF must embrace a hybrid force of manned and unmanned systems.”

With all this in mind, active consideration of new air-to-air roles for bombers, as well as the possibility of “increased reliance on CCAs” and the potential to acquire new current-generation F-16s, at least seems to reflect a hedge strategy on the part of the Air Force.

If nothing else, the door clearly remains open to bombers being a key part of the Air Force’s ‘fighter’ vision in the future.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The U.S. Air Force says any decision on whether or not to acquire new production F-16 Viper fighters is likely a year or more away. The service’s top officer in charge of force structure planning has also now raised the prospect of using a “spectrum of capability” to eventually supplant aging older-model F-16s. All of this comes as the Air Force has laid out a new vision to have 1,509 combat-coded fighters in inventory, hundreds more than it has now, by 2035, amid questions about whether industry and budgets can keep up.

Inside Defense and Air & Space Forces Magazine were among the first to report on the Air Force’s latest long-term fighter force structure plan late yesterday. This followed a roundtable with Lt. Gen. David Tabor, the service’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs. At the time of writing, an unclassified copy of the report, which was submitted to Congress last week, has not been released publicly. TWZ has reached out for more information.

Tabor said yesterday that the target fleet of 1,509 combat-coded fighters by 2035 would be approximately 40 percent F-35s, 40 percent F-15s (inclusive of F-15E Strike Eagles and F-15EX Eagle IIs) and F-16s, and 20 percent F-22 Raptors and F-47s, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. As an aside, the final expected F-47 fleet size remains unclear, though the Air Force continues to say it plans to acquire at least enough of those jets to replace its 185 F-22s on a one-for-one basis.

The current breakdown of the service’s fighter force structure is 45 percent F-16s, 30 percent F-35s, 15 percent F-15s, and 10 percent F-22s. Last year’s long-term fighter force structure report said the service was aiming for an eventual inventory of 1,558 combat-coded fighters and hoped to hit a milestone of 1,369 aircraft by Fiscal Year 2030. As of the start of Fiscal Year 2026, the Air Force had 1,168 combat-coded fighters, not including 103 A-10 Warthog ground attack jets, which have been part of this force structure planning in the past. The plan now is for the last of the A-10s to be retired by 2030. The new 2035 figure also does not include the hundreds of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones the service wants to have acquired by that time, something we will come back to later on.

Currently, the Air Force expects fighter fleet expansion to be driven by the acquisition of new F-35As, F-15EXs, and F-47s. This was also the case when last year’s fighter force structure report was released. The possibility of the Air Force also acquiring new-production F-16s has come up several times in recent years. Most recently, there were several reports last month that prime contractor Lockheed Martin had made a new pitch to the service for a version of the latest Block 70 version of the fighter, tentatively dubbed the F-16G. New Block 70 and Block 72 F-16s, which differ in what engine they use, are being actively produced at Lockheed Martin’s plant in Greenville, South Carolina. At that time, TWZ did a deep dive into the benefits that this could offer the Air Force.

“There is a spectrum of capability that we might want to replace the F-16s with,” Lt. Gen. Tabor said amid a discussion about the prospect of acquiring new Vipers at the roundtable yesterday, per Air & Space Forces Magazine. “It’s not urgent, frankly. What we don’t want to get to is a point where it is urgent, and we haven’t done the homework and decided ‘hey, this is really the right place to be.’ We do have time to churn through that and make sure that we have a good option going forward.”

“We’re not in a position where that decision has to be made immediately,” Tabor added, while acknowledging that “we are very conscious” that older-model F-16s are set to begin reaching the end of their lifespans in the 2030s. He also said any such planning was unlikely to be part of the process of developing the service’s Fiscal Year 2028 budget proposal, which will be released sometime early next year.

The Air Force is “in the initial phases of analyzing options for the next Future Years Defense Program,” a spokesperson for the service had told us last month without specifically mentioning any particular type of aircraft. “At this stage, we have neither defined the precise mission requirements nor the spectrum of options that could fill it.”

When it comes to the current F-16 fleet, the Air Force had 774 Vipers in inventory at the start of Fiscal Year 2026 and expected that number to drop to 768, according to past budget documents. This includes a mixture of subvariants, and not all of them are assigned combat-coded units. The Air Force has been substantially upgrading at least a portion of its existing F-16s, including with the addition of new active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars and electronic warfare suites, to ensure their operational relevance for years to come.

The Air Force has also already been taking newer F-16s from squadrons transitioning to the F-35 and using them to replace older Vipers in other units. Last year’s fighter force structure report explicitly highlighted plans to supplant Block 30 F-16s in five Air National Guard formations – three combat-coded squadrons and two training units – with Block 40 and 50 types in this way.

As we’ve previously written:

“A new F-16 offers a fresh and highly mature airframe — one with a full service-life ahead of it, on the order of 12,000 flight hours without the need for structural upgrades — double that of the original F-16. This is compared to existing F-16s in the inventory with the decades of wear and fatigue already accumulated on them, with structural upgrades keeping them in the air. That difference in remaining structural life is arguably the single biggest advantage a new-build aircraft has compared with extending an existing one.”

“Dumping more money into existing F-16s is becoming questionable. Service life extensions and technical upgrades can only go so far and supporting these jets is becoming harder as parts dry up and suppliers who made them are long gone. A new airframe would give the Guard many decades of highly efficient service and the piece of mind for future force planning that goes with it.”

…

“The new [F-16G] proposal would let some Guard and Reserve units swap their F-16s for vastly improved F-16s — the same logic that drove the F-15EX buy — while also keeping the Greenville line hot, which is a significant benefit in its own right. And it accomplishes both in the most efficient way possible: not just in acquisition cost, but in sustainment cost, which is really the more problematic burden of the two. In the end, this points to another glaring reality check for the all-stealth-force concept, a vision the Air Force has effectively already abandoned.”

“The Air Force has spent years describing the F-35 as the replacement for its F-16 fleet, yet it now has to contend with aging F-16s, delayed or constrained fighter production, a larger stated requirement for total fighter capacity, and the lengthy transition toward the F-47 and uncrewed combat aircraft. In that environment, a new-build F-16 provides an option that sits between extending legacy aircraft and buying the most sophisticated — and expensive — fighters available.”

You can read our full prior deep analysis on this topic here.

Lt. Gen. Tabor acknowledged many of these exact same points at the roundtable yesterday. He notably described acquiring new F-16s as “maybe the lazy” option, but also one that would benefit from “practically a ready-made aircraft” that is in production now, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“The question is, can industry produce at those levels?” he also said, speaking more generally. “They’ve assured us that they can, and we believe them, but we also actually need to see it manifest.”

In the context of acquiring new F-16s, especially, it is important to note here that Lockheed Martin order books are very full already as a result of demand for these fighters from U.S. allies and partners. The company’s capacity, at least at present, to add a substantial new Air Force acquisition program on top of that is a real question. This, in some ways, mirrors questions that surround Boeing efforts to meet surging Air Force demand for F-15EXs.

On top of all this, the Air Force’s still-evolving CCA plans remain something of a wildcard in these discussions. The Air Force has ordered General Atomics FQ-42 Vengeance and Anduril’s FQ-44 Fury CCAs into production, and is now aiming to have a combined fleet of at least 500 of these drones in inventory by 2032. The service is also still expecting to acquire additional CCAs, which could be of entirely different types, through a second iterative development cycle, or Increment 2, under this program. This is influencing the service’s crewed fighter force structure plans, but the full scale and scope of those impacts remain to be seen.

“CCA is very much a reality,” Tabor said yesterday, per Air & Space Forces Magazine. “It is going to be a part of our future, and there is absolutely a world in which the incorporation of CCAs into the force will mitigate the requirement for the number of fighters. That’s not the CCA that we have right now, but it is advancing very, very rapidly. We’re confident that it will play a major role in future versions of the fighter force structure report.”

The Air Force’s F-22s are currently set to be its first ‘aerial quarterbacks’ for CCAs, with F-35s and F-47s expected to follow. At the same time, TWZ has highlighted previously how CCA could offer particular value when paired with fourth-generation fighters like the F-16. This, in turn, could actually bolster the case for new Viper acquisitions as a more affordable force multiplier.

The Air Force’s ability to secure necessary funding and other factors will play in all this, too. 2035 is a long way off from a budgetary perspective. It also stretches across multiple election cycles, including the one that will decide the next presidential administration, all of which could lead to major changes in defense spending priorities. Congress can and routinely does demand that the U.S. military alter major procurement plans. Just in the past two years or so, legislators have intervened to force the Air Force to move ahead with the acquisition of new E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning and control planes and to save the U.S. Navy F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter program.

In the meantime, the Air Force clearly faces many continued questions about how to balance the need to modernize its fighter fleets while ensuring it retains enough tactical airpower to meet current and future operational demands. Even so, the service says it sees no need to rush to make a decision about whether to choose the “lazy” route of just buying new F-16s.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com