Arlington, VA | December 2, 2025 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies is pleased to announce a new entry in its Policy Paper series, It’s Time to Invest: Enhancing Current and Future U.S. Air Force Airlift by Col Robert C. Owen, PhD, USAF (Ret.), nonresident senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute.

The current U.S. airlift system lacks the capacity and does not have the right mix of mobility aircraft to deliver and sustain air and surface combat forces in a future conflict against a peer competitor in a highly contested environment. At the same time, emerging service operational concepts and the sheer expanse of the Indo-Pacific theater place greater stress on this strained mission. The decline of the nation’s military airlift enterprise severely compromises the nation’s ability to conduct operations across the globe and
places the entire American military at risk of failure.

The Department of Defense and the Air Force must take immediate action to expand and sustain the capacities of the airlift system. However, restoring the nation’s military airlift fleet to adequacy will still require years of committed investment and improvement to overcome decades of underfunding and patchwork investments, resulting in airlift shortfalls. The Air Force must develop and commit to a plan that will restore the nation’s mobility backbone, its air mobility fleet.

The Mitchell Institute Policy Papers is a series presenting new thinking and policy proposals to respond to the emerging security and aerospace power challenges of the 21st century. These papers are written for lawmakers and their staffs, policy professionals, business and industry, academics, journalists, and the informed public.

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Copies of Policy Papers can be downloaded at https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/category/publications/