AURORA, Colo. — The Air Force said Monday it is going to create a brand new forward-looking capabilities planning command, refocus its training enterprise, and rethink how airmen deploy as a part of a set of 24 initiatives designed to reorient the service to outpace China’s military ambitions and prevail in future conflicts.
The Air Force and Space Force’s top civilian and uniformed leaders unveiled the sweeping slate of plans on the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here following a monthslong, department-wide review that began in the autumn. Its results comprise probably the most significant reorganizations because the end of the Cold War.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the goal is to prove the Department of the Air Force’s competitive resolve to U.S. adversaries — particularly Russia and China — and to execute those plans with urgency.
“We are able to not regard conflict as a distant possibility or a future problem that we might need to confront,” Kendall said. “The chance of conflict is here now, and that risk will increase with time.”
Amongst the largest shakeups is the launch of a brand new Integrated Capabilities Command. The organization will turn into a central planning hub because the service crafts its requirements for the many years ahead — removing that responsibility from the service’s other commands and allowing the Air Force to think more holistically about its needs.
The brand new command, to be led by a three-star general, is “just what the name infers,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin said.
“That is where the operators will test operational concepts against our force design,” he said. “They may also be certain that when we now have modernization initiatives, those are rationalized to make sure … we don’t unintentionally put modernization on platforms that basically don’t have a long-term play in the longer term force design. It wastes money.”
The move also frees up the Air Force’s major commands, which organize, train and equip troops for missions across the globe, to deal with every day operations fairly than future force planning.
The Space Force will create the same organization, Space Futures Command, to put the groundwork for expanding the service’s missions through experiments and wargames.
While much of the proposed updates aim to revamp the Air Force and Space Force’s acquisition enterprise — including several more offices that may lend greater focus to the department’s highest-priority projects, like nuclear modernization and knowledge warfare — the services also hope to enhance how airmen and guardians are trained throughout their careers.
To that end, Allvin said, the service will replace its Air Education and Training Command with a brand new Airman Development Command. While few details accompanied the announcement, Allvin said the renamed command goals to streamline the academic pipeline, in order that when troops move “from one a part of our Air Force to a different a part of our Air Force, they don’t must relearn the systems and tools they usually can develop faster.”
“We imagine we’re going to have a more coherent force … that may move rapidly through the longer term,” Allvin said. “We’re all also reinforcing mission-ready training.”
Many details of this week’s announcements, on which the service had raced to construct consensus by Monday’s keynote, are still being finalized. It’s unclear where the headquarters of latest organizations will likely be positioned, or how quickly the department can launch them.
Senior leaders had discussed the potential for consolidating the Air Force’s nine major commands right into a more streamlined system, in accordance with two sources outside the military who’re aware of the inner discussions.
But fairly than mix or eliminate commands, Allvin said, the service can do more to focus on the varied roles inside them — particularly, how they supply forces to the larger joint combatant commands like U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Transportation Command.
That features a plan to maneuver Air Forces Cyber from under Air Combat Command and elevate it to a service component command. AFCYBER would report back to U.S. Cyber Command for every day offensive and defensive operations on military networks and systems. Doing so may allow CYBERCOM to more seamlessly direct Air Force cyber units and provides the organization a bigger role in managing its own training and resources.
The shift marks Air Forces Cyber’s third major move since 2018, when the organization moved from Air Force Space Command to Air Combat Command. It later combined with Air Force intelligence units to create sixteenth Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.
Because it seeks to turn into more nimble and conscious of the joint combatant commands that direct every day operations all over the world, the service may also turn its operational wings into “units of motion,” categorized as deployable combat wings, in-place combat wings and combat generation wings, the Air Force said.
The concept is to create standardized packages of combat assets, like aircraft, maintainers and other support staff, that may deploy alongside the identical squadrons with which they train, without shortchanging bases of the airmen needed to run every day operations and protect their perimeters.
The plan is predicted to contribute to more predictable deployment schedules, a top focus for the service after leaving Afghanistan in 2021.
Allvin also said the Air Force will aim to mount a brand new service-wide training exercise within the Indo-Pacific in fiscal yr 2025 that tests how pieces of the force work together, fairly than limiting those lessons to individual commands.
Hints of other planned personnel changes have already trickled out, including news that the service will bring back warrant officers to bolster the Air Force’s technical expertise in cyber operations and knowledge technology. The Air Force’s last lively duty warrant officer retired nearly 50 years ago after the service deemed them too inflexible to fulfill its personnel needs, in accordance with the Warrant Officer Historical Association.
The Department of the Air Force isn’t requesting specific funding for the changes within the fiscal yr 2024 or 2025 budgets, but will ask Congress to maneuver money around mid-year if obligatory, Kendall said. Recent funding will likely be built into the fiscal 2026 budget request that’s beginning to take shape, he added, but officials will largely try to make use of existing appropriations in recent ways.
One challenge the Air Force faces will likely be defining the separate responsibilities of every organization, one retired general officer told Air Force Times. Defense organizations are inclined to multiply over time since it’s typically easier to arise a brand new unit to deal with an issue than to repurpose existing ones, he said, so leaders will need to have a transparent implementation plan and ensure airmen understand the long game.
One other retired general officer questioned whether the Air Force and Space Force have enough time to place the plans into motion before Kendall, a political appointee, may leave his post at the top of President Joe Biden’s current term.
The department must see its vision through to the top to make sure piecemeal changes don’t cause more confusion than good, he said.
“The query is, will it’s done right?” he said.
Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The Recent York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.
Rachel Cohen is the editor of Air Force Times. She joined the publication as its senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared within the Washington Post, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), Air and Space Forces Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy and elsewhere.