Tactical airpower, and specifically the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-15EX Eagle II, are big beneficiaries of recently proposed legislation put forward by Republican leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Of the roughly $150 billion in potential extra investments into defense, the spending package includes $7.2 billion set aside for tactical aircraft procurement and modernization.
It should be noted that the Democrats still have the opportunity to amend the bill before it is sent to the House Budget Committee, although the packaging of the deal under the “reconciliation” process is designed to speed its progress and avoid a filibuster.
Of the $7.2 billion for tactical airpower, the biggest winner is the F-15EX, with this program earmarked to get an additional $3.1 billion “to increase production.”
The F-15EX, which at this stage of its career is primarily an air superiority platform, was approved for full-rate production in June of last year. Most recently, the Air Force had said it wants to buy 98 F-15EX aircraft, although the numbers have been subject to various changes throughout the life of the program.
The 98-aircraft fleet is just about sufficient for five operational squadrons of 18 aircraft, plus a handful of training and test aircraft. Previously, there were plans to cap the number of F-15EXs at 144 jets.
We have reached out to the Air Force for clarity on the wording in the bill since it’s not immediately clear if the funds allocated are for additional aircraft production, beyond the 98, or whether they will be used to accelerate production of the aircraft already in the program of record. The unit cost of an F-15EX has been pegged at between $90 and $95 million in recent years. If the money in question is strictly for more airframes, it would buy between 32 and 34 jets, but funds for additional personnel and infrastructure would also have to come from other sources.
In addition to being good news for the F-15EX, the proposed spending plan includes $127.46 million “to prevent the retirement of F–15E aircraft.” What exactly this entails isn’t immediately clear, as the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for the 2025 Fiscal Year, which was signed into law in December 2024, already blocked the retirement of any F-15E Strike Eagles until Oct. 1, 2027, at the earliest. That came in response to an Air Force plan to retire 119 of its 281 F-15Es, or roughly half of the Strike Eagle fleet, by Fiscal Year 2028, which quickly proved to be controversial, to say the least.
The Fiscal Year 2025 NDAA does make exceptions for “individual F-15E aircraft that the Secretary of the Air Force determines, on a case by case basis, to be no longer mission capable and uneconomical to repair because of aircraft accidents, mishaps, or excessive material degradation and non-airworthiness status of certain aircraft.”
Additional funding could help the Air Force pay to maintain the F-15Es it is now legally required to keep in inventory, or avoid divesting individual jets it might otherwise decide are too costly to keep flying. It might also allow the service to upgrade and sustain the aircraft beyond 2027.
The F-15Es that had been on the chopping block were the surviving examples powered by the older Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-220E turbofan engines, with the remaining 99 aircraft being equipped with more powerful F100-PW-229s.
As far as the Air Force is concerned, it needs to retire older F-15Es to help free up resources for its future modernization plans, but lawmakers have been concerned about dwindling numbers of available tactical aircraft if this were to happen.
At the same time, the F-15Es are arguably the Air Force’s most in-demand tactical jets thanks to their highly desirable blend of speed, range, payload capacity, crew size, and other capabilities. Furthermore, with the F-15EX entering service primarily in the single-pilot air-to-air role, there’s no like-for-like replacement in the pipeline.
In the meantime, work continues to upgrade the F-15E, with the most significant recent development involving the installation of a sophisticated new radar warning and electronic warfare suite, the AN/ALQ-250 Eagle Passive/Active Warning Survivability System, or EPAWSS, which you can read more about here.
Aside from funds for the F-15EX — the Air Force’s newest in-service fighter — and the well-established F-15E, the newly proposed spending package also adds funds for next-generation airpower programs. Both the F-47 crewed sixth-generation fighter and the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drone program get more funds to accelerate development and production: $678 million and $400 million, respectively.
The Navy’s sixth-generation fighter, the F/A-XX, also gets a boost from lawmakers, with another $500 million to accelerate that program.
In terms of older assets, the bill on the table now also allocates just over $361 million to prevent the retirement of older block F-22s. Like the F-15E, the F-22 has long been threatened with axing a portion of its fleet as the Air Force seeks to prioritize other programs.
In the past, the Air Force has argued that upgrading its 32 older Block 20 F-22s — almost a fifth of the current Raptor fleet — would be prohibitively expensive, but this proposal has been met with notable pushback. Last summer, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made clear its concerns about the Air Force’s plans to discard those older F-22s in a report that we discussed at the time.
Beyond tactical jets, the proposed legislation includes $4.5 billion to help accelerate the B-21 Raider stealth bomber program. There has been growing talk in recent months about potentially increasing purchases of the bombers beyond the current program of record for 100 aircraft. This also follows Northrop Grumman’s disclosure earlier this month of a $477 million loss on the B-21, which was described as “largely relating to higher manufacturing costs.” The company announced a nearly $1.2 billion loss on the Raider last year, which was blamed on a combination of “macroeconomic disruptions” and “higher [than] projected manufacturing costs.”
Elsewhere, the bill includes $440 million to increase C-130J production and $474 million to increase EA-37B Compass Call production. Finally, lawmakers propose to allocate $160 million to accelerate nacelle improvements for the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft.
Returning to the F-15EX and F-15E portions of the reconciliation bill, there remain questions about exactly how these funds will be used. In particular, there is a lack of clarity about F-15EX production numbers and how long a portion of the F-15E fleet will be protected from retirement. Overall, however, lawmakers have firmly made their position clear when it comes to the continued utility of the two closely related tactical air assets.
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com