Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh has said the branch needs more funding to fully invest in technology, human capital and training infrastructure, Defense News reported Sunday.
“Those things are institutional imperatives if you are going to be successful as a service that is focused and based on technology and staying ahead of it over time,” Welsh told Defense News in a recent interview.
He explained that the service finds it hard to generate enough training sorties as a result of workforce size reductions, according to Aaron Mehta‘s article.
Welsh believes the F-35 program is necessary for the military to conduct full-spectrum defenses and fight airborne threats in the coming decades.
He told the publication that U.S. military services have a responsibility to ensure that the public understands the organizations’ budget requirements to protect the nation.
“We have to be able to explain what we need to do, what we need to have, how we need to train and what it costs to do those things,” he added, according to Defense News.
He predicts that the Air Force’s modernization and readiness programs will continue to suffer as long as automatic budget cuts continue.
“As long as we are under sequestered budgets, we are going to be looking at what we cannot do that we had previously planned to do.”
