There are 96 military veterans in the United States Congress. Forty-five served in the Army, twenty-four in the Navy, twelve in the Marine Corps and fifteen in the Air Force.

Of those fifteen, exactly one flew fighters.

Rep. August Pfluger of Texas flew the F-15 und die F-22. At the Air Force Association’s conference on 16 September he pointed out that the 119th Congress contains a record seven former Navy SEALs, and asked, in the politest possible terms, where everybody else had got to.

Who Else Is Up There

Pfluger is not the only Air Force aviator on Capitol Hill, which is worth saying because the headline number can mislead.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska flew on the EC-130H Compass Call and the RC-135. Rep. Troy Downing of Montana served in combat search and rescue. Rep. Zach Nunn of Iowa was an airborne intelligence officer. That is a respectable amount of aviation experience.

But none of them flew a fighter, and none of them has flown a fifth-generation one. When the argument in a committee room turns to what an F-35 costs per hour or whether an F-22 fleet can be sustained, there is one member who has actually done the job.

“I am the only fifth-generation pilot in Congress. I need some wingmen to come join me. God bless my Navy SEAL friends, and they are dear friends, but we’ve got a lot of them in Congress. What we don’t have is a lot of air and space expertise.”

Rep. August Pfluger — R-Texas, at AFA Air, Space & Cyber, 16 September 2026

The Mach 1 Caucus Is Going the Wrong Way

In 2022 Pfluger founded something called the Mach 1 caucus with three former Navy fighter pilots. Four members.

Four years and two elections later there are three: Pfluger, Rep. Jake Ellzey of Texas and Rep. Scott Franklin of Florida. A caucus of fighter pilots that is shrinking is not a promising trend line for an air force that needs to explain itself to 535 people.

What He Actually Wants

Pfluger’s argument is that the Department of the Air Force has carried a disproportionate share of recent operations and has not been funded accordingly. He listed Epic Fury, Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve as cases where, in his description, the department was there every single time.

His framing of the problem was blunt: the Air Force is the oldest and the smallest it has been, and he does not think it is too late to recapitalise. What he objects to is defence budget increases being divided evenly between services when the operational load is not divided evenly.

He also had a request for Air Force leadership, which is the sort of thing a member of Congress does not usually say out loud.

The Practical Ask: Multiyear Procurement

Beyond advocacy, Pfluger pointed at a specific lever Congress controls. Multiyear procurement authority lets the Pentagon sign contracts spanning several years rather than renegotiating annually, which locks in lower prices and gives manufacturers a demand signal stable enough to justify building capacity.

Congress has to approve each programme individually. It has already done so for a range of munitions, and members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have voted to authorise multiyear procurement for the F-35 and the F-15EX as part of the 2027 defence policy bill. That bill has not passed.

Pfluger said he is very convinced the expanded authorities are close. Whether he is right will be visible in the F-35 and F-15EX lines within a year.

The State of the Air Force keynote from the same conference, where the recapitalisation argument was made from the uniformed side.

There is something faintly absurd about a service that spends hundreds of billions of dollars having its case made on the floor of the House by one man who used to fly Raptors. Pfluger evidently thinks so too, which is why he keeps asking for wingmen.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; Air & Space Forces Association; U.S. House of Representatives