Hawaii U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele wants the Pentagon to beef up its Air Force funding amid simmering tensions with China and Russia.

Last week, Kahele and a group of bipartisan lawmakers sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressing concern that “while the Air Force’s budget request appears commensurate with the other service branches’ budget requests, $39 billion of the $212.8 billion budget ‘passes through’” the department to fund other government agencies.

With the chaotic conclusion of the American military presence in Afghanistan this summer, the service branches are now increasingly committing to a future in the Pacific, the Pentagon’s largest theater of operations. Hawaii, home to the military’s Indo-Pacific Command at Camp Smith, has long been the nerve center for those operations in the region.

However, the military has also increasingly faced scrutiny for how it has spent its money over the past two decades on both its missions oversees and new technology. That’s put the branches into a fight for funding.

In a phone interview, Kahele, a Democrat who also serves as a Hawaii Air National Guard officer, said, “I don’t think we have very many Air Force people that are outspoken here (on Capitol Hill). … I’m working on it.” He added, “I’m just a new freshman, but I do bring 20 years of service in the Air Force in the Air National Guard to the House Armed Services Committee.”

Eleven other lawmakers signed the letter, including Republican Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Pat Fallon and August Pfluger of Texas. All three are former Air Force officers.

“Decades of underfunding the Air Force has led to the deterioration of its competitive advantage in key missions like air superiority, long range strike, and next generation unmanned aerial vehicles suitable for peer conflict,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We believe that there is an urgent need to equitably fund the Air Force and equip this service branch with the resources it needs to counter ongoing aggression by the Chinese Communist Party and the Russian government.”

But Dan Grazier, a military researcher at the Project on Government Oversight, said complaints about pass-through spending are a “trope” that Air Force leaders have used for decades whenever they’re in a wish-list funding fight. He points out that of the Navy’s proposed $211.7 billion budget, $47.9 billion of it will go to the Marine Corps along with other pass-throughs.

Oahu serves as headquarters for the Navy’s vast Pacific Fleet, which includes ships, planes and submarines that conduct near-­constant operations across the region and is the largest presence among the branches. The Marine Corps also is reorganizing its entire force, starting with troops here, with an eye toward operations at sea.

The U.S. Pacific Air Forces, headquartered on Oahu, also conducts operations across the region. Lately, the Air Force has engaged in what it calls Agile Combat Employment, which includes spreading aircraft across islands and at airstrips throughout the region to make it harder for Chinese missiles to strike them in the event of a conflict.

“What pass-through funding is doing is it is obscuring real Air Force funding, which is a direct and causal factor in the Air Force’s inability to transform its force into the future design that our nation desperately needs and what we desperately need in the Indo-Pacific,” Kahele said.

A portion of the Air Force’s pass-through spending now goes to the newly formed Space Force, which technically falls under the Department of the Air Force. The Space Force is mostly made up of former Air Force personnel and takes on jobs the Air Force previously handled. Much of the Air Force’s other pass-through spending is classified.

“Most of it gets into space systems for the National Reconnaissance Office,” said Grazier, who argues they directly relate to the Air Force mission.

Kahele contends that the pass-through practice shortchanges the Air Force’s needs for new planes to replace old ones. Congress has scaled back some replacement orders in recent years, including Lockheed Martin’s F-22 and F-35 fighters.

“We need as many stealth platforms as possible, we need as many of those F-35s as we can get off the production line,” he said.

The F-35 in particular has been controversial. Originally pitched as a relatively low-cost jack-of-all-trades, the jet has been plagued with development problems, delays and has become one of the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons programs.

Grazier said, “We continue pumping money into these programs. The problem is that we keep pursuing programs that end up flopping.” Further, “The top-line figure, I think, is somewhat less important than how the money is actually spent.”

Among the criticisms of the government’s handling of these projects is a “revolving door” of officials who get jobs at the companies developing them, which critics say makes oversight more difficult. A 2018 report found 645 instances of top defense contractors hiring former military officers, lawmakers and senior legislative staff as lobbyists, board members or senior executives.

Kahele acknowledges that three companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — have come to largely dominate Air Force acquisitions, giving them significant sway in the halls of Congress and the Pentagon. He said it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

“Twenty, 30, 40 years ago, you had a dozen or so prime contractors that built prototypes and had design teams and competed for those contracts. Today, you have only three,” Kahele said. “We have created that, Congress has created that, and we need to figure out a way to undo some of those things, if we want to infuse competition into our defense acquisition.”