Breaking the Eggs, Buying the Shells: The Airpower Procurement Paradox Published May 21, 2026 By Melvin Deaile, Phd, Col (ret.), USAF The Office of the Secretary of the Air Force recently celebrated a bipartisan legislative package that would authorize 200 new F-15EXs, boost the minimum fighter fleet to 1,369 aircraft, and improve aircrew manning and retention. These are not unworthy goals. Pilots matter. Manning matters. But the framing of this package, and the institutional appetite it reflects, risks enshrining in law a dangerously incomplete vision of American airpower at the precise historical moment when combat operations have demonstrated the opposite lesson. Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury did not validate the tactical fighter. They vindicated the strategic bomber. The First Objective The Air Force's primary mission has not changed since Giulio Douhet first theorized command of the air in 1921. Air superiority is the first objective of every campaign.[1] John Warden drew the thread through two world wars and every proxy conflict of the Cold War, and concluded what no serious airpower theorist has successfully refuted: no country has won a war in the face of enemy air superiority, and no state has lost a war while maintaining it. That principle has governed every air operation the United States has conducted from Desert Storm to Epic Fury, and it will govern whatever comes next. What the doctrinal consensus has not always acknowledged clearly is how air superiority has actually been achieved — and by whom. The answer, across every major U.S. air campaign of the past thirty-five years, is the bomber. Douhet understood this. His prescription for attaining command of the air was not the fighter sweep or the defensive patrol — it was the bomber striking aircraft before they could leave the ground, 'breaking the eggs in the nest.'[2] The historical record validates the theory. In Desert Storm, low-level B-52s attacked Iraqi runways and aircraft shelters on the first night while F-117s struck command and control. Coalition forces achieved air superiority within seven days.[4] In Operation Allied Force, when European cloud cover defeated laser-guided bombs and Serbian SAM operators proved more adaptive than anticipated, six B-2s — six aircraft — provided continuous bombing capability that kept the campaign alive. Restricted by weather and an adaptive enemy, fighters could only strike in 12 days what they had struck successfully previously in Desert Storm's first 12 hours.[5] It was B-52s launching Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missiles (CALCMs) and B-2s employing JDAMs that ensured the NATO coalition had air superiority. In Operation Enduring Freedom, two B-2s per night for the first three nights penetrated Afghanistan and destroyed the Taliban's air force on the ground in the opening nights. Air superiority was achieved within three days.[6] In every case, the bomber broke the eggs. The fighters swept the airspace that the bombers had already made survivable. The author argued this case in a sister AU publication four years ago, drawing on firsthand combat experience in both the B-52 and the B-2, and warned that two decades of air dominance over Iraq and Afghanistan had allowed thinking about the fight for air superiority to atrophy.[3] The Iran conflict is now the empirical proof of what was then a theoretical argument. Operation Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury are the latest entries in the bomber's unbroken record. Iran's integrated air defense — more capable than anything the United States has faced since Yugoslavia — did not prevent B-2s from reaching Fordow. The bombers broke the eggs once again. Now consider what the proposed legislative package actually buys. The F-15EX is a modified fourth-generation aircraft (essentially a gen 4.5 aircraft). It is a superb platform within its design parameters — but it was designed for a threat environment that peer competitors have spent thirty years specifically engineering against. The S-400 is not a system built to stop the F-16 of 1985; it was built to stop the F-15EX of 2025.[7] Forward-deployed fourth-generation fighters, operating from bases that Iranian ballistic missiles have already demonstrated they can reach, flying into airspace defended by IADS networks that have had three decades to study U.S. tactics, will not gain air superiority against a peer or near-peer adversary. That is not an argument against fighters. It is an argument against this generation of fighters performing that mission. If air superiority against China is the planning problem — and INDOPACOM Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee makes clear it is — then the solution is not 200 more fourth-generation aircraft. The PLAAF fields 2,250 combat aircraft operating from more than 70 military airfields, backed by an integrated air defense in depth that dwarfs anything the United States has previously contested.[8] The platforms capable of 'breaking the eggs in the nest' in that environment are penetrating fifth- and sixth-generation systems: the F-35, the B-21, and whatever follows them. An F-15EX cannot penetrate the Chinese IADS. A B-21 can. The procurement debate is not really about fighters versus bombers. It is about whether the United States will buy the platforms that can actually execute the Air Force's primary mission, or whether it will optimize its force for wars it has already won. What the Missions Actually Required On June 22, 2025, the United States executed the largest B-2 operational strike in American history. Seven B-2 Spirit bombers departed Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew east for eighteen hours, crossed the Atlantic and Mediterranean, refueled multiple times in flight, and penetrated Iranian airspace to destroy the hardened nuclear facilities at Fordow and Natanz, delivering fourteen Massive Ordnance Penetrators, which no other aircraft in any nation's inventory can carry.[12] Iran's fighters did not fly. Its surface-to-air missiles did not engage. The element of surprise, maintained across nearly 6,000 miles, was total. Secretary Hegseth's assessment at the post-strike briefing was not rhetorical: no other country on the planet could have done this.[13] When Operation Epic Fury commenced on February 28, 2026, all three legs of the bomber triad answered the call. B-2s struck hardened ballistic missile facilities with 2,000-pound precision munitions. B-1s conducted CONUS-to-CONUS missions before deploying forward, kicking down the door in the operation's opening phase. B-52s extended the reach and magazine depth of the strike package. In the conflict's first ten days, U.S. forces struck over 5,000 targets across Iran. The bomber force was not a supporting player; it was the instrument of decision.[14] This is the operational reality that the current fighter procurement debate systematically ignores. The Kill Record Nobody Mentions There is a comparison that advocates for expanded fighter fleets have conspicuously avoided: the last time an American fighter shot down an enemy aircraft, and the last time an American bomber dropped a bomb. The last U.S. air-to-air kill against a crewed aircraft occurred on June 18, 2017. A Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22 Fitter over the town of Ja'Din — the first aerial kill since May 1999, an eighteen-year gap.[9] It was a fleeting, defensive, opportunistic engagement against a Soviet-era aircraft over a civil war battlefield. This was not the product of a sustained air superiority campaign. Of note, this was not the result of U.S. fighters contesting airspace against a state actor's integrated air defense. Observers of air power should note that this incident represented the totality of American fighter air-to-air combat in the twenty-first century: one kill, one aging target, one chance engagement, eighteen years apart. The irony runs deeper. That same F/A-18E, the sole U.S. fighter to score an aerial kill in the 21st century, was unofficially observed launching strike sorties from USS Gerald R. Ford during Operation Epic Fury.[10] America's only aerial kill artist spent the Iran War dropping bombs. Meanwhile, an F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran, the first U.S. combat aircraft lost over Iranian territory, not by an adversary fighter, but by Iranian air defenses.[11] The fighters that were supposed to shoot down planes ended up being shot down themselves. The bomber's record, by contrast, is unbroken. B-52s have dropped bombs in every major American conflict from Vietnam through Epic Fury. B-1s have been continuously combat-deployed since 1998. B-2s struck Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Fordow in 2025. The fighter's primary justification is air superiority and the aerial kill. Its 21st-century record is one kill in twenty-five years. The bomber's primary justification is striking targets that achieve the joint force objectives. Its record is uninterrupted across four decades of continuous combat. The Basing Problem Nobody Wants to Name The F-15EX is an exceptional aircraft. It exemplifies the 'battleplane' envisioned by Douhet — a plane that can fight its way to the target, deliver its weapons, then secure its egress.[15] It is also an aircraft that needs a runway, a fuel depot, a maintenance infrastructure, and, critically, a host nation willing to accept the political and military consequences of American strike operations launched from its soil. That willingness is not guaranteed. It is, in fact, becoming more unreliable. During the ‘Twelve-Day War’ in June 2025, Iran struck al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar with ballistic missiles. Iranian officials reportedly gave Qatar advance notice of the attack, a signal of just how fraught the basing relationship had become.[16] By the time Operation Epic Fury began in February 2026, Qatar was absorbing repeated Iranian missile salvos. Iranian strikes hit Kuwait's Ali Al Salem Air Base. Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan was struck in the war's opening phase, with an AN/TPY-2 radar associated with a THAAD battery destroyed and the debris visible in satellite imagery.[17] The very bases on which a fighter-centric strategy depends became targets the moment the shooting started. A fighter placed close to the fight is a fighter placed inside the threat envelope of an adversary with hundreds of ballistic missiles and the demonstrated will to use them. The forward-basing model that underwrote American airpower from the Cold War through the Gulf Wars now operates in a fundamentally different threat environment, one in which near-peer and regional competitors have specifically designed their missile arsenals to neutralize it. The B-2 flying from Missouri has no such vulnerability. It does not need a Turkish overflight. It does not need a Qatari airfield. It does not need a Saudi fuel depot that an Iranian Zolfaghar can reach in eleven minutes. It needs tankers, airspace, and the will of the President of the United States. Loiter Time, Tanker Dependency, and the Range Calculus Proponents of expanded fighter fleets sometimes acknowledge range and access constraints but argue that aerial refueling solves the problem. This argument deserves scrutiny, not acquiescence. Tankers are not a free good. They are themselves limited in number, high in demand, and increasingly at risk. During Operation Midnight Hammer, mass tanker movements from European bases were essential to enabling the strike. These aircraft took steps to avoid detection while operating across an extraordinary logistics chain. Even so, Air Force Global Strike Command's deputy commander publicly acknowledged after the mission that communications and command-and-control architecture failed to keep pace with the operation's demands.[21] This is precisely the shortfall this author identified four years ago as a priority to fix before the next major campaign.[3] An F-15EX operating from a forward base has a combat radius of roughly 800 nautical miles on internal fuel.[18] To reach targets deep inside a peer adversary's territory from a survivable standoff distance, it requires multiple tanker hookups, extended exposure in contested airspace, and the assumption that those tankers will not themselves be targeted. It carries a fraction of the payload of a heavy bomber. Its loiter time over target is measured in minutes. And it cannot carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator — the only conventional munition capable of threatening deeply buried, hardened facilities like Fordow.[19] The B-2, by contrast, flew continuously for 37 hours during Midnight Hammer and remained operationally effective throughout.[20] Authorizing 200 more F-15EXs might contribute to the margins of future fights, but the F-15EX is still a fourth-generation (plus) aircraft. Assuring the procurement of a fleet of sixth-generation B-21s is the investment that ensures America maintains an asymmetric edge in the fight that actually matters. Retired Col. Mark Gunzinger of the Mitchell Institute stated it directly: “The operational demand for bombers continues to go in one direction: up.”[23] The Deterrence Argument There is a deterrence dimension to this question that fighter-procurement advocates may cast aside. Strategic bombers do not merely strike targets. They communicate resolve, capacity, and reach in ways tactical aircraft cannot. The Bomber Task Force mission model, forward deployments to the Pacific, the Arctic, and Europe, has provided exactly this signaling function. Air Force Global Strike Command executed more Bomber Task Force missions in the past year than in the preceding decade combined: 496 days of deployed operations demonstrating American reach and unpredictability to adversaries who needed to see it.[26] A B-52 transiting the South China Sea, a B-2 appearing unannounced over the Korean Peninsula, a B-1 conducting a CONUS-to-target-to-CONUS strike; these are signals that no F-15EX fleet, however numerous, can replicate. The credibility of extended deterrence rests partly on the visible, survivable, and globally reaching bomber. The Air Force's own budget documents reflect this reality. The FY2027 request includes $342 million for B-1 modernization through 2031, which ensures its lethality and relevance through 2037. It also calls for $1.35 billion for B-2 modernization over the same window.[25] Global Strike Command has confirmed the B-2 will remain at Whiteman 'for as long as it is needed' even after the B-21 comes online.[24] The Air Force is already voting with its budget for the bomber. The question is whether Congress will follow suit or continue funding a generation of fighters designed to address threats the Air Force's own budget implicitly concedes it cannot overcome. The View from the Pacific If the Air Force's institutional voice is insufficient to settle this debate, consider the testimony of the one commander whose theater has the most to lose from a misallocated defense budget: Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 22, 2026, Paparo did not ask for more F-15EXs. He asked for 200 B-21 Raiders.[28] The combatant commander whose theater encompasses China's military expansion, North Korea's nuclear arsenal, and the most consequential deterrence challenge the United States faces in this century, went before Congress and told lawmakers that long-range penetrating strike, not tactical aviation, is what he needs. His reasoning is inseparable from what just happened in Iran. Operation Epic Fury required the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and components of the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, forces normally assigned to the Pacific, to be retasked to the Middle East.[29] Every carrier strike group committed to the Arabian Sea is not patrolling the South China Sea. Every destroyer firing Tomahawks at Iranian targets is one not positioned to deter a Taiwan contingency. The B-2 flying from Whiteman imposed none of that cost. It did not drain Paparo's fleet. It reached its target, destroyed it, and returned — leaving INDOPACOM exactly as it was. That is strategic efficiency, and it is precisely what a 200-aircraft fighter expansion cannot replicate. Paparo also raised a warning that applies with equal force to the Pacific: magazine depth. The Iran conflict has consumed finite levels of precision munitions at a pace that concerns the INDOPACOM commander.[30] A fighter-heavy force structure is inherently munitions-intensive. Fighters require precision-guided weapons on every sortie and have limited internal capacity. A B-52 configured with a full load of JASSMs or LRASMs is a flying magazine capable of holding dozens of targets at risk across a vast threat axis. A flight of F-15EXs is not. Most importantly, Paparo identified the strategic lesson China is drawing from the Iran conflict: that small, low-cost munitions can close geography, threaten forward bases, and deny access to the airfields on which a fighter-centric American force posture depends.[31] If Beijing concludes it can replicate Iran's playbook, saturating forward bases with ballistic and cruise missiles and denying the access that American tactical aviation requires, then the answer is not 200 more fighters vulnerable to exactly that strategy. The answer is a bomber that takes off from Missouri and does not ask Beijing's permission to arrive over its targets. The Right Lesson The legislative package currently before Congress is not wrong to address manning and retention. Aircrews are irreplaceable, and the Air Force's pilot shortage has imposed real operational costs. Multiyear procurement authority is genuinely useful as a cost-control mechanism. These elements deserve support. But 200 additional F-15EXs, justified in part by boosting a minimum fleet size, reflect a fighter-centric institutional bias that the last eighteen months of combat operations have directly challenged. The question is not whether America needs tactical fighters; it does. The question is not even whether it needs fifth-generation fighters; it clearly does, and the F-35 is part of the answer to the Pacific air superiority problem. The question is whether fourth-generation fighters can substitute for strategic bombers on missions that actually require them, and whether Congress should be buying more of a platform that its own combatant commanders have not asked for, rather than accelerating the one they have. The Air Force should accelerate B-21 production and confirm a bomber fleet of 200-plus aircraft, as both the now-retired Air Force Global Strike Commander and the USSTRATCOM Commander testified and advocated.[32] Air Force programming must protect tanker recapitalization, invest in the command-and-control architecture that Midnight Hammer exposed as inadequate, and ensure the legacy bomber fleet can sustain its operational tempo until the Raider fleet is fully fielded. That is the portfolio that the last year's combat operations validate. That is the investment deterrence required. As Gunzinger observed, Midnight Hammer “was one of the tipping points toward buying back both bombers.”[33] The Air Force has already drawn that conclusion with its budget. Congress should draw the same conclusion with its legislation. America already ran the experiment. The bombers flew from Missouri and broke Iran's nuclear program. The fighters flew from forward bases still at risk to Iranian missiles. The lesson is not complicated. The question is whether the Air Force and Congress are willing to learn it. The author is a faculty member at Air Command and Staff College and Director of the School of Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies concentration, and the author of Always at War. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of War, or the U.S. Government. [1] Air superiority is defined as 'sufficient control of the air to make air attacks on the enemy without serious opposition.' Warden, The Air Campaign (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1988), 13. Warden's corollary: 'No country has won a war in the face of enemy air superiority; no state has lost a war while it maintained air superiority.' [2] Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2019), 31. Douhet's prescription: striking enemy aircraft before they leave the ground — 'breaking the eggs in the nest' — was more efficient than aerial combat. [3] Mel Deaile. "The Future of the Bomber in an Air Superiority Role: Fighting an Adaptive, Complex Enemy in the Pacific," Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, Air University Press, August 1, 2022. [4] Desert Storm air campaign, January 17, 1991: B-52s attacked Iraqi runways and aircraft shelters on the first night; coalition forces achieved air superiority within seven days. Stealth and precision assets accounted for only 2 percent of sorties but attacked 43 percent of planned targets. David A. Deptula, Effects-Based Operations (Arlington, VA: Aerospace Education Foundation, 2001), 10. Although the F-117 carried a fighter designation, it had no air-to-air missile capability, making it, in practice, a single-seat bomber. [5] Operation Allied Force, 1999: Six B-2s provided continuous bombing through European cloud cover that prevented the employment of laser-guided bombs, sustaining the campaign until air superiority was established. It took twelve days to strike the same number of targets NATO hit in the first twelve hours of Desert Storm — a direct result of Serbian adaptive SAM tactics—Adam J. Herbert, "The Balkan Air War," Air Force Magazine, March 2009. [6] Operation Enduring Freedom, October 7–9, 2001: Two B-2s penetrated Afghanistan and destroyed Taliban airfields and radar on the first three nights, establishing air superiority within three days. One mission was a record-setting 44.3-hour combat sortie—author's personal firsthand account; also documented in AFGSC historical records. [7] The S-400 Triumf (SA-21 Growler) was specifically designed to defeat fourth-generation and some fifth-generation aircraft. Russia has explicitly marketed it as a counter to F-15- and F-16-Class fighters. Its engagement envelope of 400km and track-while-scan capability against low-observable targets represents a qualitative leap beyond systems U.S. fourth-gen fighters have previously faced. [8] PLAAF order of battle: 2,250 combat aircraft, including 1,800 fighters of which 800 are fourth-generation. Operating from 70+ military airfields, backed by an integrated air defense of SA-10/20/21 and indigenous CSA-9 systems within 300nm of the coast. DoD, Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2021 (Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, 2021), 55, 80. [9] Last U.S. air-to-air kill against a crewed aircraft: June 18, 2017. Lt. Cmdr. Michael 'Mob' Tremel, VFA-87, USS George H.W. Bush, downed a Syrian Air Force Su-22 Fitter with an AIM-120 AMRAAM over Ja'Din, Syria. First U.S. air-to-air kill since May 1999 (F-16 vs. Serbian MiG-29, Operation Allied Force) — an 18-year gap. Same Lagrone, "UPDATED: U.S. Navy Super Hornet Shoots Down Syrian Jet Near ISIS Stronghold Raqqah," USNI News, June 18, 2017. [10] That same F/A-18E was unofficially observed launching strike sorties from USS Gerald R. Ford during Operation Epic Fury, February–March 2026 — flying ground attack missions against Iran, not air-to-air intercepts. Nicholas Slayton, "Navy F-18 That Got the US's First Air-to-Air Kill in the 21st Century Is Taking Part in the Iran War," Task & Purpose, March 14, 2026. [11] An F-15E Strike Eagle from the 48th Fighter Wing (RAF Lakenheath) was shot down over Iran during Operation Epic Fury, April 3, 2026 — the first U.S. combat aircraft lost over Iranian territory. One of two crew members was recovered by special operations forces; the second remained missing. Haley Britzky et al, "US Fighter Jet Shot Down Over Iran, 1 of 2 Crew Members Rescued, US Sources Say," CNN, April 3, 2026; NBC News, April 3, 2026. [12] Operation Midnight Hammer, June 21–22, 2025. Seven B-2 Spirits flew from Whiteman AFB, delivering 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Fordow and Natanz. No other nation possesses an aircraft capable of delivering the MOP. [13] Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, post-strike press briefing, June 22, 2025. [14] Operation Epic Fury commenced on February 28, 2026. All three bomber variants — B-1B, B-2A, B-52H — participated. Over 5,000 targets were struck in the first ten days, according to the U.S. Central Command. [15] Douhet, The Command of the Air, 22. The 'battleplane' concept: a multi-role aircraft capable of fighting to the target, striking, and returning under its own defensive armament. [16] Iranian ballistic missile strikes on al-Udeid Air Base, Qatar, June 2025 and February–April 2026. An advanced Iranian notification to Qatar was cited in regional media and confirmed by Qatari officials. [17] Iranian missile strikes on Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait, and Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan, February–March 2026. Destruction of AN/TPY-2 radar confirmed via commercial satellite imagery. [18] F-15EX Eagle II combat radius: approximately 800 nautical miles on internal fuel. Boeing/Air Force official specifications. [19] GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator: 30,000 lb. weapon deliverable only by B-2A Spirit. No other operational aircraft, U.S. or foreign, can carry or employ this munition. [20] B-2 Spirit flight duration during Operation Midnight Hammer: approximately 37 hours CONUS-to-target-return. Confirmed by AFGSC public affairs. [21] AFGSC deputy commander post-Midnight Hammer remarks on C2 deficiencies, July 2025. Also flagged as a priority shortfall in Deaile, JIPA, 2022. [22] Stephen Losey. "Air Force Plans to Keep B-1s Through 2037, Fly B-2s Longer," Air & Space Forces Magazine, April 24, 2026. [23] Ret. Col. Mark Gunzinger (Mitchell Institute), quoted in Losey, Air & Space Forces Magazine, April 24, 2026. [24] AFGSC statement, April 2026: 'The B-2 will remain a critical long-range strike option for the President and will be maintained as a viable capability for as long as it is needed for national security.' [25] Pentagon FY2027 budget: $342M for B-1 modernization, $1.35B for B-2 modernization (2027–2031). DoD budget documents, April 2026. [26] AFGSC Bomber Task Force operations: 496 deployed days in the past year. AFGSC public affairs. [27] Adm. Samuel Paparo, Commander USINDOPACOM, testimony before SASC, April 22, 2026, quoted in Patricia Kine, "Iran Conflict Holds Lessons for U.S. Adversaries, INDOPACOM Commander Says," USNI News, April 22, 2026. [28] Paparo SASC testimony, April 22, 2026: INDOPACOM supporting acquisition of 200 B-21 Raiders, nuclear triad modernization, attack submarines, surface combatants, and combat logistics vessels, in Kine. [29] Paparo SASC testimony, April 22, 2026: Abraham Lincoln CSG and components of Tripoli ARG retasked from the Pacific to support Epic Fury. Six warships shifted theaters, in Kine. [30] Paparo, Brookings Institution, November 2025, and SASC, April 22, 2026: operations 'eating into stocks'; dissatisfied with 'magazine depth' in Kine. [31] Paparo SASC testimony, April 22, 2026: China observing 'the power of small, low-cost munitions on the ability to hold key geography at risk,' referencing Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz in Kine. [32] Former AFGSC Commander and USSTRATCOM Commander testimony and advocacy for a 200+ B-21 fleet. Multiple congressional hearings, 2024–2025. [33] Col. (ret) Mark Gunzinger (Mitchell Institute), April 24, 2026: Midnight Hammer 'was one of the tipping points toward buying back both bombers.' in Losey, Air & Space Forces Magazine.