The Wall Street Journal
By. Kate Bachelder Odell

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Americans are starting to wonder if the U.S. could win a war against a formidable adversary like China. So here is an accumulating risk that deserves more attention: American military pilots aren’t getting enough preparation for high-end combat.

The armed services are still trying to recover from sequester budget cuts, which started in 2013 and brutalized readiness. Many pilots who came up in the aftermath of those cuts haven’t had the flight hours they need to perform superbly in a fight with a near-peer military. Cramped and inconsistent budgets are compounding this skills deficit, even as the world grows more dangerous.

Congress has been funding the government with patchwork measures known as continuing resolutions, and the Pentagon could end up stuck on a stopgap budget for the remainder of the fiscal year, though lawmakers are reporting progress toward a spending deal.

The Air Force has said that under a continuing resolution, it would have to “execute a flying hour program well below what is required to maintain high levels of proficiency.” The Navy told reporters it would “reduce the flying hour accounts to all our pilots, Navy and Marine Corps by 10 or 20% in the last quarter and a half of the fiscal year.” These hours are lucrative targets for penny pinchers given the high costs of flying. At the same time, inflation is crushing the Pentagon’s purchasing power and fuel prices are up.

Flying is often compared to surgery: a skill that atrophies rapidly without practice. John Venable, who commanded the Air Force Thunderbirds squadron and is now at the Heritage Foundation, has written that an Air Force fighter pilot needs at least 200 hours of flight time a year to stay sharp. An average fighter pilot is developing into a better one with four sorties a week and holding steady at three. At one or two, a pilot is deteriorating in ability and comfort in the cockpit.

Air Force flight hours and sortie rates for fighter pilots in 2020 “fell to historic lows” amid the pandemic, Mr. Venable writes in Heritage’s 2022 Index of U.S. Military Strength, “as the average line combat mission-ready fighter pilot received less than 1.5 sorties a week and 131 hours of flying time that year.” This works out to 10.9 hours a month, a level Mr. Venable says is on par with the proficiency Russian pilots had during the Cold War.

Training needs vary across service and type of aircraft. But Rep. Mike Garcia, a California Republican and former naval aviator who recently launched a caucus focused on fighter aviation, tells me he flew a healthy 25 to 30 hours a month as a junior F/A-18 pilot in the early 2000s and up to 60 on deployment. Pilots fly more on deployment, but for decades mostly in environments like the Middle East, where the U.S. dominates the skies.

Chinese fighter pilots appear to be flying 150 hours a year, Mr. Venable estimates based on available data and anecdotal reports from pilots who have operated in the region. Caveats are in order—Chinese pilots haven’t been tested in a fight. But consistent hours, Mr. Venable explains, “translate directly into combat capability.”

The risks aren’t confined to combat. Congress in 2019 established a commission to investigate military aviation accidents, with 224 dead and 186 aircraft destroyed from 2013 to 2020. The commission traveled the country asking military pilots: What will cause the next accident in your unit? Insufficient flight hours, declining proficiency and inconsistent funding were repeated answers across rank and type of aircraft. Midcareer pilots “reported having as many as 200 fewer career flight hours than previous generations,” the commission said.

Some in the services want to rely more on simulators: An hour in an F-35 simulator in 2019 cost about $600 compared with $17,000 to $23,000 for an hour in the air. Simulator training can be valuable, Mr. Garcia notes, but it can’t substitute for giving tactical aviators the “practical experience of hearing 50 people on the radio at one time or seeing 60 to 80 planes in the sky” in a large exercise. This is essential to approximating “the nervousness” that would accompany flying in combat, say, over the Taiwan Strait.

Pilots also can’t fly more without ready airplanes—and only roughly half of the F-22 fleet is considered mission capable, for example. The Air Force’s fleet is about 30 years old on average, and aging planes are expensive to maintain. To fly more hours, the services need commensurate resources for spare parts and maintenance, and this money needs to arrive predictably, not halfway into the fiscal year. A confounding challenge is getting the services to ask Congress for more. The Air Force has cut its hours request in recent years, in part because operations in Afghanistan tapered off. Mr. Venable says the Air Force hasn’t made flight hours enough of a priority even amid increased operations funding.

At bottom, there simply hasn’t been the real growth in military spending that would allow the services to be ready for a fight that breaks out tonight while also fielding better equipment for a fight that might arrive in the 2030s. The House Appropriations Committee offers $706 billion, and the Senate’s draft is $725 billion. Mr. Garcia says the defense top line needs to be closer to $800 billion.

As Washington’s budget fights drag on, a Navy F-35C sank into the South China Sea in January after crashing while trying to land on the USS Carl Vinson. It was the aircraft carrier’s fifth major flight mishap in two months. Investigations are under way, and the incidents may merely reflect the risks of the unforgiving environment of carrier aviation.

But five incidents in short order on a deployed national asset could be one more indication that American pilots don’t have the resources they need to operate effectively in peace and, if necessary, to dominate in war.