Doolittle Raid on Tokyo,B-25 Leaves USS Hornet
Bettmann Archive
April 18th marks 84 years since then-Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his Raiders launched 16 B-25s from the deck of the carrier USS Hornet to strike Japan. Their mission delivered a badly needed jolt of hope in one of the darkest moments of World War II. We honor them because they proved that courage, innovation, and audacity can achieve what many thought was impossible.
But the deeper lesson of the Doolittle Raid is that while America can always count on heroism to overcome combat challenges in the moment, the nation should never put its warfighters in a position where heroism is an essential ingredient to offset chronic, known capability and capacity shortfalls.
Those adverse circumstances face today’s Air Force. We are once again drifting toward a moment when American airmen will be asked to do the near-impossible because the nation failed to buy, build, and field the Air Force the threat demands—especially if deterrence fails against China.
The U.S. Air Force is now the smallest and oldest force in its history and crews are flying at record low levels. That should alarm every American. If the nation is serious about deterring great-power war—and winning one if it comes—then rebuilding the Air Force is no longer optional. It is urgent. That demands more airplanes, munitions, and sustainment.
America entered World War II dangerously unprepared. In 1938, when Nazi Germany invaded the Sudetenland, the U.S. Army Air Corps possessed just 13 B-17 bombers and aircraft like the P-51 and B-29 did not yet exist. Pilots were restricted from practicing aerobatics because the risk of losing scarce aircraft was considered too high. In 1939, Lt. Gen. Frank Andrews warned that America was a “sixth-rate airpower.”
That was the state of U.S. airpower when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
So, when Doolittle’s Raiders launched their 16 B-25s on 18 April 1942, the mission was extraordinary—but it was also revealing. It was not the opening blow of a sustained, decisive air campaign. It was a one-off raid mounted by a country that had not yet built the force needed to fight and win a global war.
The same was true in Europe. The Eighth Air Force did not fly its first raid against German forces until July 4, 1942, and even then, they used bombers borrowed from the Royal Air Force. The first truly American strike with U.S. B-17s came a month later—with only 12 B-17s. The thousand-plane raids that later defined the strategic air campaign did not become reality until 1944. In both Europe and the Pacific, it took years to build the industrial base, production lines, and training pipeline needed to generate the force that victory required.
From today’s vantage point, it is easy to romanticize that period. America mobilized. America innovated. America won. But history’s happy ending should not blind us to the dangerous beginning. Nor is that positive outcome assured for tomorrow’s challenges. American supremacy takes clear-eyed investment; it is not a birthright.
Separating the legend from reality is more important than ever, for the United States once again faces a rising great power. How this contest plays out is yet to be determined. However, one thing is certain: we are underprepared.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States steadily reduced the Air Force’s combat capacity. The service’s fighter and bomber inventories were cut by over a half and needed modernization programs like the B-2 and F-22 were truncated well below requirements. Instead, aircraft built decades ago were pushed far beyond their intended service lives. Then came conflicts in the Middle East, which imposed relentless wear on both aircraft and people. The result is today’s Air Force is smaller, older, and under more strain than ever before.
Meanwhile, China has not stood still. It has built a military designed specifically to challenge the United States and blunt America’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific. Its airpower growth is particularly concerning. As Mitchell Institute China expert Mike Dahm has warned, China’s Navy and Air Force together could field a fighter force as large as the entire combined U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps fighter inventory by 2028. It would then have the largest fighter force in the world—and will continue expanding from there.
Just as important, China is building the industrial capacity to sustain that growth. Since 2021, it has added more than 8 million square feet of aircraft manufacturing space—more than Lockheed Martin’s F-35 facility in Fort Worth. Dahm assesses that China could soon have the capacity to produce roughly 300 fourth- and fifth-generation fighters annually.
Compare that with the U.S. Air Force. Its leaders have stated that to simply maintain the average age of its fighter aircraft—currently close to 30 years—it must buy 72 new fighters per year. Except for one year (FY24) the Air Force has not purchased more than 72 combat aircraft in a year since 1993—33 years ago.
In the FY27 baseline defense budget, the service is set to buy just 48 new fighters: 24 F-35s and 24 F-15EXs. The proposed addition of 14 more F-35s through reconciliation is not assured given congressional dynamics. New bombers will take up to another decade to arrive in operationally consequential numbers. Collaborative combat aircraft may be promising, but they too will take dozens of years to field at scale. In the FY26 budget request, the Air Force proposed retiring 258 aircraft while buying only 45 new ones.
That is not recapitalization. It is managed decline at a time when China’s air combat capabilities and capacity are both surging.
The broad force structure numbers tell the story more clearly. At the end of the Cold War, the Air Force had more than 4,000 fighters, most less than 10 years old. Today it has roughly 1,100 fighters available for real-world operations, with an average age of around 30 years. Only about 185 F-22s, 10 F-15EXs, and roughly 400 F-35s qualify as truly modern. The bomber force has fallen from over 400 aircraft at the end of the Cold War to about 140 today. Two-thirds of those bombers were built before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and only 19 are stealthy B-2s.
The rest of the Air Force faces similar challenges. Tankers, cargo aircraft, trainers, search and rescue helicopters, ISR aircraft, and airborne command-and-control aircraft are all aging under heavy demand. This is not just an Air Force with modernization gaps. It is an Air Force carrying too much operational risk across nearly every mission area.
Recent combat operations have exposed those risks.
Operation Midnight Hammer was a major operational success. B-2 bombers, backed by fighters, tankers, other mission aircraft, and space-based capabilities, achieved results that were amazing. But the mission also revealed a hard truth: because the B-2 force is so small, that one-time strike effectively required the nation’s entire B-2 inventory. Regenerating that force for another attack of similar scale would have an extended period of time.
That is not depth. That is fragility.
The same dynamic appeared during Operation Epic Fury. To sustain bomber operations, B-2s had to be supplemented by non-stealthy B-1s and B-52s over Iran. At first, those aircraft relied on standoff weapons to mitigate Iranian air defense threats. But as inventories of those munitions tightened, those legacy bombers had to fly with increased risk from Iran’s remaining defenses.
The same strain showed up elsewhere. Fighter units were stretched thin, which saw types like the soon-to-be-retired 40-year-old A-10 deployed to the fight because commanders still needed the capacity it provided. MQ-9s also carried a heavy load. AWACS, tankers, and airlifters were all in high demand. This is what overstretch looks like in practice.
The most important takeaway is this: today’s Air Force can still execute brilliant raids and short duration operations against a regional power. However, that is a very different force than what is required to sustain a major campaign against a peer military.
That distinction matters. A raid force can produce spectacular headlines. A war-winning force can deliver sustained combat power over time, absorb losses, regenerate, and keep fighting. Against Iran or Venezuela, a raid-force capacity may appear sufficient. Against China, it is not even close. That matters, for a peer fight is when existential interests are on the line.
The comparison to the Doolittle Raid is more than rhetorical. America now fields just 19 B-2 bombers. Doolittle launched 16 B-25s. That is an uncomfortable parallel and a warning.
To be clear, the Trump administration deserves credit for requesting record levels of defense investment in the FY27 budget. That reflects welcome recognition that the U.S. military needs a reset. Air Force leaders also deserve credit for pushing harder on readiness, munitions, and retaining aircraft that had previously been slated for divestment. Those moves matter, but they do not solve the core problem: Air Force combat aircraft procurement remains far too low.
According to the FY27 budget justification, Air Force combat aircraft procurement declines by $2.149 billion. The service spent $14.711 billion on combat aircraft procurement in FY26. The President’s Budget Request and reconciliation recommendation together seek only $12.562 billion in FY27.
Meanwhile, the Navy is investing $34.4 billion in their aircraft procurement—$3.759 billion more than the Air Force, in addition to $65.825 billion for shipbuilding. In total, the Navy gets over $100 billion in procurement funding and the Air Force, $30.641. Yet today, the Air Force has over 2600 aircraft made up of 10 aircraft types whose first flights were over 50 years ago. The Navy has only one ship (other than the USS Constitution) that is older than 50 years.
This is what a modernization death spiral looks like. Air Force combat forces continue to get smaller, and its aircraft get older with each passing year. Readiness gets harder to sustain as older airplanes are pushed hard. This demands more readiness funding, which in turn robs money from procurement. This is a compounding problem, which each cycle making the next potential correction more expensive and more difficult.
The consequences are already visible. Some Air Force units no longer have combat aircraft because none are available. Kadena Air Base lost its F-15Cs before replacement F-15EXs were available. In 2025, Maryland became the only state without a flying unit after its A-10s retired with no replacements assigned. The E-3 AWACS fleet was cut in half in 2023, yet the E-7 will not arrive in meaningful numbers until late this decade at best. Demand has not gone away—capacity has.
This is not a resource allocation problem at the margins. It is a strategic choice. And right now, it is the wrong one.
Yes, industry will struggle to increase production after years of unstable demand. But that is exactly why stable, multiyear procurement is essential. Industrial capacity does not magically appear. It responds to predictable orders. Instead, the F-35 buy has swung between 24 and 60 aircraft in recent years—the opposite of what production efficiency requires.
At this point, if a U.S. combat aircraft is in production, the Air Force should buy as many as practical. That includes the F-35, F-15EX, and B-21, but also systems like the F-16 and MQ-9 where additional capacity still has value. The same logic applies to the KC-46, T-7, and collaborative combat aircraft. The Air Force does not have the luxury of choosing between modernization and capacity. It needs both.
That brings us back to Doolittle.
We should honor those Raiders not only for what they did, but for what their story teaches. Their mission was a triumph of courage under conditions of scarcity. However, we should not ask today’s airmen to do the impossible. We need to properly equip them for success, especially when the means of doing this are readily attainable.
China is building the capacity to fight and sustain a major war, while the United States is still behaving as though a small, aging, and overextended Air Force will suffice. It will not. If we want to deter conflict, prevail if deterrence fails, and truly honor the legacy of the Doolittle Raiders, then America must start funding a larger, newer, and more capable Air Force built to win sustained wars—not just execute another heroic raid.
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