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Since FY2023, the United States Air Force has tried to send five different combat jets to the boneyard, and Congress has blocked, capped, or delayed every single attempt through NDAA language and statutory minimum-fleet mandates. This list ranks those five fighters and attack jets by fleet size. Congress forced the Air Force to keep 32 Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors protected through at least FY2028 up to a mandated floor of 103 Fairchild A-10 Warthogs the service wanted to be gone entirely by FY2026. Along the way, it named the exact NDAA provision or minimum-fleet mandate behind each save, and what the Air Force wanted to spend the money on instead.
The pattern, as Aerospace Global News has broken down, is always the same: the Air Force proposes retiring older jets to free up money for a replacement program, and Congress responds that the replacement isn’t ready yet, so the legacy jets keep flying. 247WallSt has called several of these aircraft “legendary” for exactly that reason. By the time you reach #1, you’ll know which single jet has now been protected by Congress more times, and for longer, than any other fighter in the Air Force’s inventory.
F-22A Raptor Block 20 — Congress Blocks A Divestment Meant To Fund NGAD
32 jets protected until at least FY2028
In 2023, the Air Force asked to retire 32 of its oldest F-22 Raptors, the Block 20 training-configured jets that can’t be economically upgraded to combat standard, in order to redirect the savings toward the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. House authorizers blocked the plan within months, and the divestment has been rejected in NDAA language every year since.
According to Defense One, lawmakers have now blocked the same 32-jet divestment request in back-to-back defense bills, prohibiting the Air Force from retiring any Block 20 Raptor until at least FY2028. Gagadget reported that the service estimated the retirements would have saved billions of dollars over the program’s remaining service life, money that instead stays tied up in a jet Congress has decided it isn’t ready to lose. The numbers explain why the Block 20 debate has become a recurring fight between the Air Force and Congress. The service sees 32 training-configured Raptors that would require substantial investment to bring up to combat standard, while lawmakers see an existing fleet asset that should not be discarded without clearer evidence of the savings, readiness impact, and alternatives. Until the Air Force provides the cost and readiness data Congress has requested, the 32 Block 20 jets remain protected — regardless of how attractive their potential savings might be for NGAD.
According to the Government Accountability Office, as cited by Air & Force Technology, the Air Force has also failed to provide Congress with the cost and readiness data lawmakers requested before approving any future divestment, further hardening opposition. As Simple Flying has broken down operating costs across the fighter fleet, the F-22 remains one of the most expensive aircraft in the inventory to fly per hour, which is exactly the bill Congress keeps deciding is still worth paying.
F-15E Strike Eagle — Retirements Capped At 51 Jets Through 2029
Congress rejects a plan to retire 47 Strike Eagles early
The Air Force wanted to retire 26 of its oldest McDonnell DouglasF-15Es in FY2025 and another 21 in FY2026, a combined 47 jets pulled from a fleet that still forms the backbone of the service’s strike capability alongside the newer F-15EX. Congress said no to both tranches.
The 2025 NDAA specifically halted the retirement of the oldest F-22s and F-15Es, and a subsequent compromise NDAA capped total Strike Eagle retirements at 51 jets through 2029, a number higher than what the Air Force had originally proposed cutting but still far short of full fleet drawdown. Lawmakers have simultaneously pushed the Air Force to keep buying new-build F-15EX jets even as it holds onto the oldest airframes in the fleet.
The math matters here: a cap of 51 is technically higher than the 47 jets originally proposed for retirement, which on paper looks like Congress conceded ground. In practice, however, the legislation prevented the Air Force from executing the planned two-year drawdown and instead limited the total number of F-15E retirements through 2029. That gave the service more time to balance the Strike Eagle fleet against the arrival of new-build 
Boeing F-15EXs, rather than removing the oldest aircraft as quickly as the original budget request envisioned.
F-15C/D Eagle — The “Platinum Eagles” Get A New Retirement Date
63 home-defense jets kept flying into the 2030s
The Air Force originally planned to retire its entire McDonnell Douglas F-15C/D fleet, nicknamed the “Platinum Eagles” for their age and pedigree, by 2026. A November 2025 “Long-Term Fighter Force Structure” report reversed course, according to Zona Militar, keeping 42 jets in service until 2028 and a further 21 flying into the early 2030s, a combined 63 airframes that had already been marked for the boneyard.
Most of the surviving fleet flies continental air defense alert duty rather than front-line combat missions, a role Congress has been unwilling to hand off before a replacement is fully in place. The War Zone has reported that the last cohort of F-15C/D instructor pilots is now in training, effectively locking in several more years of home-defense sorties even as the type approaches its fifth decade of service.
As Yahoo News has noted, the Air Force’s own language has shifted from treating the F-15C/D as a liability to describing the reversal as a bridge until next-generation air-dominance capability actually exists. For context on how the type’s performance still stacks up, Simple Flying’s comparison of the Eurofighter Typhoon against the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 notes that even fourth-generation airframes built decades ago remain competitive on raw performance, which is part of why Congress keeps finding it easy to say no to retiring them.
The extension also highlights an awkward reality for the Air Force: the F-15C/D is no longer being kept because it represents the future of air superiority, but because it remains useful for a mission that cannot simply be switched off. Keeping 63 aging Eagles available for homeland defense gives the service more time to field their eventual replacements without leaving gaps in the continental air defense network. For an aircraft once scheduled to disappear by 2026, that is a remarkably long final chapter — and one driven as much by the needs of the mission as by the capabilities of the jet itself.
F-16C/D Fighting Falcon — A Statutory Pause Blocks 73 Retirements
No F-16 leaves service until Congress gets a report
The Air Force proposed retiring 11 Lockheed Martin (then General Dynamics) F-16C/Ds in FY2025 and a much larger 62 jets in FY2026, a combined 73 airframes pulled from one of the largest fighter fleets the service still operates. Congress didn’t cap the number this time; it stopped the process altogether.
The FY2024 NDAA barred the Air Force from retiring any F-16 until it submits a detailed fleet report to Congress, a statutory pause that remains in effect. A rundown of what the FY24 policy bill actually contains confirms the report requirement was written broadly enough to cover the follow-on FY2026 retirement request as well, meaning both tranches remain frozen under the same provision. Separately, Defense Magazine’s review of the Air Force’s overhauled 2026 budget shows the F-16 drawdown was bundled with the A-10’s full retirement push and Boeing E-7 cancellation in the same budget cycle, all of which Congress ultimately blocked or scaled back.
Unlike the F-22 and F-15E cases, where Congress set a number and allowed some retirements to proceed, the F-16 pause is a full stop: no jets leave the fleet until the Air Force complies with the reporting requirement. For scale, Simple Flying’s count of every fighter type in the Air Force’s active inventory shows just how large a share of the fleet the F-16 still represents, which helps explain why Congress wanted the paperwork before letting dozens of them go.
A-10 Thunderbolt II — Congress Extends The Warthog’s Life Toward 2030
A mandated fleet floor of 103 jets
The Air Force’s FY2026 budget request sought to retire all 162 remaining A-10s in a single year, the most aggressive single-type divestment on this list. Army Recognition reported that the FY2026 NDAA blocked the plan outright, mandating that at least 103 A-10s remain in the inventory and that 93 stay coded as primary mission aircraft through September 2026.
This is not the first time lawmakers have stepped in. Zona Militar has tracked repeated delays to full retirement stretching back years, and Aero News Journal’s reporting on the FY2026 defense bill grouped the Warthog save alongside the F-15E cap as the two biggest fighter-fleet reversals in the same legislative package. Military Machine has laid out the recurring case for keeping the type: no other jet in the inventory is purpose-built for sustained close air support at the A-10’s cost per flight hour.
The most recent development pushes the timeline even further: in June 2026, a House panel backed keeping the A-10 in service through 2030 while simultaneously directing the Air Force to study autonomous successors rather than simply retiring the type outright. As Senator Rick Scott put it in a widely circulated Wall Street Journal piece, the question of why America is still flying a “Cold War relic” has been asked for years, and every year Congress has answered it the same way: because nothing else built to do the A-10’s job is ready to replace it yet.
