Air Force seeks modernization for full-spectrum fights: Striking a familiar tone with other top Air Force officials, Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the service's acquisition chief, said the force is not ready for a high-end, high-spectrum fight, adding that the U.S. military must modernize for fights in contested, anti-access/area denial environments.
“We have a large, great capability in the permissive and we’ve got to modernize to be more capable,” he said Wednesday at the Unmanned Systems Defense conference in Arlington, Virginia.
“What we have been so focused on from a training perspective … we’ve listened to our service chief and our secretary, we’ve talked about our readiness level for a high-end fight is not there,” he said. “We’ve not been able and we have not trained at the level we need for our combat air forces to be able to operate in that kind of an environment. That is the area that we are focused on.”
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has said just as much, noting in July that when she asks around the force, “the answer … I get anyway, is 50 percent of our combat air forces have that degree of readiness” to fight against higher-end threats.
"That’s not good enough,” she asserted.
