Undersecretary of the Air Force Matthew Lohmeier speaks with reporters at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, on Feb. 5, 2026. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — Shortly after Matthew Lohmeier became undersecretary of the Air Force in July, the former fighter pilot was briefed about the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that took place just weeks earlier.
“One of the critical pieces of that operation was Air Mobility Command, our ability to refuel,” Lohmeier told reporters Thursday at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, the final stop on a two-week Pacific visit.
He was joined by Lt. Gen. Laura Lenderman, deputy commander of Pacific Air Forces.
“We committed a tremendous amount of transport and refueling to ensure a successful operation there, and it went off without a hitch — nearly without a hitch,” Lohmeier said.
“And now the question is, how do you pivot that into the Pacific, which is a much larger theater,” he said. “And we’re talking about sustaining conflict, not a one-off operation.”
The Air Force’s plan for sustaining a prolonged conflict is called agile combat employment, or ACE.
It calls for rapidly dispersing airpower from large bases, which are vulnerable to attack, to smaller, more remote airfields. From there, aircraft would move personnel, weapons and supplies where needed.
“One of the greatest benefits to this scheme of maneuver is that it complicates targeting for adversaries,” Lohmeier said. “It complicates their decision making.”
ACE was tested at scale late last summer during Exercise Resolute Force Pacific, or REFORPAC, during which about 400 U.S. and coalition aircraft surged throughout the Pacific.
A white paper published in December by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, however, argues that the U.S. airlift system lacks the capacity and right mix of aircraft to sustain air and surface combat forces in a 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 paper states.
The Air Force, in particular, may not have enough airlift to support its ACE concept, according to the institute.
“The USAF has not acquired significant numbers of aircraft capable of operating at the lower end of this requirement — delivering combat equipment and supplies into short and weakly surfaced forward airfields — and has no publicly-released plans to do so,” the paper states.
Lohmeier said that discussions are continually taking place at the Pentagon as to “what we need to buy in the future to make sure that we’ve got the right quality and quantity of our tanker and mobility fleet to sustain a fight.”
The air fleets of allies and partner nations, however, would complement existing U.S. airlift capability in any conflict, he said.
Lohmeier and Lenderman stressed the critical role pre-positioned supplies would play in sustained conflict.
“We’re working with our allies and partners to make sure that we can pre-position material there, so that we can use those locations as power projection platforms, as well as our main operating bases,” Lohmeier said.
PACAF experimented with an autonomous Cessna 208 Grand Caravan during REFORPAC, Lenderman said.
That fixed-wing aircraft, converted to a drone, can carry light equipment and passengers and could potentially be used for airlift between islands of an archipelago, she said.
Airlift capacity will also depend on the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which are civilian planes contracted by the Defense Department, Lenderman said.
“They might not go all the way into theater, but they would go into Alaska and potentially Hawaii, depending on the threat,” she said. “But that’s a big part of the puzzle that we depend on.”
