Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall leads the panel discussion “Reoptimizing for Great Power ... [+]
Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, along with the Chiefs of the Air Force and Space Force unveiled their designs for optimizing the Department of the Air Force on February 12, 2024 at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual warfighting symposium. Their visions and rationale for them deserve acclaim as do the pragmatic plans for implementing their changes. Rarely in any large organization—much less one of the nation’s military departments—are reforms instituted of the magnitude and as important as the ones revealed today.
While the U.S. Air Force remains the most capable in the world today, it is at the same time the oldest, smallest, and least ready in its own history. That erosion has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union but accelerated during the 20 years of post 9/11 focus on counterinsurgency warfare to the exclusion of preparing for great power conflict. As a result, the Department of the Air Force was funded less than the Army and the Navy during those years leading to a set of air forces and space capabilities that desperately require modernization. To get the Department of the Air Force back on a vector to achieve the kind of modernization efforts not just to replace prior systems, but to deliver relevant capabilities for warfare in the future, Secretary Kendall established seven operational imperatives and three cross-cutting operational enablers.
However, Secretary Kendall has now made the point that it is not only modernization of the Air Force’s inventory of aging aircraft and Space Force capabilities that are required to deter and if necessary, win in a great power conflict. Over his tenure as Secretary it became clear to him that fundamental adjustments must also be accomplished to both the Air Force and Space Force ways and means of planning, preparing, organizing, and getting ready to fight against our most challenging potential adversaries.
He recently stated that the changes proposed by the Department of the Air Force leadership are, “...about more than organizational structure.” “It’s also about how we train people. … What kind of skill sets we want to have, what that mix of skill sets is. We’re looking at how we fight …. how we assess and evaluate readiness and how we create readiness.”
The changes addressed by the Secretary and the Chiefs of the Air Force and Space Force consist of 24 specific actions that fall into four categories: develop people, generate readiness, project power, and develop capabilities. The proposed changes are intended to rapidly re-vector the fundamental operating posture of the Department from how it was organized in the past to optimizing it for the threat challenges of today and the future.
Those challenges are many and growing. An honest assessment of the threats facing the U.S. today—a China rapidly growing in both military capability and capacity; Russia having already invaded a neighboring sovereign nation; a nuclear capable North Korea; and Iran with the ability to rapidly become a nuclear power currently using Arab terrorists as her proxies to destabilize the Mideast—reveals that we are facing more substantial security challenges to our Nation than at any time since World War II.
This is the backdrop for optimizing the Department of the Air Force. At a macro level, the changes to the Department focus on mission readiness by eliminating stovepipes to deliver cross-functional and lethal combat capabilities with the speed and agility required to meet the threats identified above. At the same time this masterwork of change acknowledges the necessity of preparing to optimally use what is available today to address immediate threats as required.
Among many proposed changes, perhaps one of the most significant is the standing up of a new command—Integrated Capabilities Command—with the mission of integrated capability development. The mission is fused into its name and its purpose is to ensure continuity and consistency in capability development across the entire Air Force. This is different from the current capability development process that is largely stove piped across multiple commands each with different mission objectives not necessarily informed by the greater Air Force enterprise requirements. Matched with a parallel staff element in the Secretariat—an Integrated Capabilities Office—it will ensure Department level oversight and continuity among major development efforts. This change alone stands to enhance the mission-effectiveness of the Air Force in the future.
A major organizational change for the Space Force includes establishment of a Space Futures Command with three associated centers: a Concept and Technology Center; a Wargaming Center; and the Space Warfighting Analysis Center. Combined together, these centers in this new command will develop and validate new space warfighting concepts, conduct experiments and wargame them to evaluate and iterate the concepts, and perform data driven mission analysis to inform concept design.
Air Force Materiel Command will receive several adjustments/realignments to better work the challenges posed by current and future threats: 1) a new three-star organization focused on electronic warfare, cyber, battle management, and command and control, known as the Information Dominance Center; 2) a new organization that is an expansion of the existing Nuclear Weapons Center, but elevated to a three-star position—the Air Force Nuclear Systems Center; 3) The Life Cycle Management Center will be re-designated as the Air Dominance Systems Center to better reflect its focus; and 4) an Integration Development Office to do what its name implies—integrate mission systems across all the centers described above and provide assessment of new operational concept feasibility.
These, in addition to the all the other changes identified by Secretary Kendall and his service chiefs are designed to rapidly adapt the Department to meet the demands that threats are presenting now as well as expected in the future. It was very refreshing to hear the Air Force leadership declare that these changes are not driven by efficiency, but by the need for improved warfighting effectiveness.
Having encouraged, participated in, initiated, and conducted some significant organizational changes inside the Air Force over my nearly 35 years on active duty, what I saw today is a masterful blueprint for coherent change at a magnitude greater than ever before in Air Force history and accomplished in a fraction of the time it took just to change the Air Force logo. By no means are these changes going to happen overnight, and they will be adjusted as they are implemented, but Secretary Kendall has made it clear; “change is hard, but losing is unacceptable,” adding that we are out of time so the changes must be accomplished immediately to a year from now—"we have no time to waste.”
However, all the changes proposed to enhance mission effectiveness of the Department of the Air Force, along with the required modernization of its force structure that has been deferred for decades, will all be for naught if the Air Force is not provided the resources necessary to accomplish these changes. The Secretary recently expressed his feelings regarding congressional budget dysfunction; “There is a chance that Congress will never appropriate the ’24 budget. And I will have been in office for three-and-a-half years and never seen a dime of the money I need to be competitive with China. That’s a crime.” He is right. The consequences of Congress failing to enact all 12 appropriation bills by April 30, 2024—according to the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA)—would reduce the Department of the Air Force’s topline funding to fiscal year 2023 enacted levels minus one percent.
These actions would not only stifle modernization, kill the plan to optimize for great power competition, but would inalterably yield advantage to our adversaries by reducing the Department of the Air Force’s buying power by $13 billion, when in fact it needs that magnitude of plus-up annually for the next decade to meet the demands of our current national security strategy.
The Department of the Air Force has delivered viable and executable plans to modernize, and now to optimize for great power competition—Congress now has to do its job and resource those plans, or risk losing when great power competition turns into conflict.
