NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A brand new era of war fought within the digital realm, touching all facets of combat and rife with disinformation, would require the Air Force to redefine its jobs and reinforce its rigor, the service’s top enlisted airman said here Wednesday.
In what could also be her last major speech to the force while within the job, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne Bass cautioned airmen to not “underestimate the cyber and the knowledge domains” as major drivers and amplifiers of conflict.
“Warfare has taken on a brand new dimension,” Bass told a packed room on the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference.
“Our adversaries understand the facility of data, and so they seek to use it, weaponize it and use it against us,” she said. “They aim to sow discord, erode trust and destabilize nations through the spread of disinformation and propaganda through emerging technology.”
She warned that “armies of bots, swarms of trolls and legions of ‘sock puppets’” run by nefarious parties are manipulating information online to distort perceptions of reality and shape society to their advantage.
That may seem like Russian-linked social media operations to influence American voters in U.S. elections, phishing and hacking campaigns, or fake text and pictures generated by artificial intelligence.
Without naming specific social media, Bass said the service must educate airmen on the difference between “using these platforms and getting used by them.” To prove her point, Bass said she had used the substitute intelligence language model ChatGPT to generate a part of her speech.
Air Force leaders often raise concerns about falling behind in an age of digitally driven asymmetric warfare, and the changes that maintaining would require. The service in 2019 pulled information operations under the identical umbrella as its intelligence and cyber divisions to start bridging those gaps, but has struggled to recruit and retain the workforce to handle those missions.
In an exclusive interview with Air Force Times on Aug. 28, Bass said she believes the Air Force has too many profession fields overall, and too few within the areas that may matter most in tomorrow’s wars.
“We’ve to take a powerful take a look at our weapon systems, our platforms, the [jobs] that fill our Air Force,” Bass said. “Probably where we want to expand is in information, cyber and space.”
She declined to specify which Air Force specialty codes might be on the chopping block, or what number of airmen the service might have to fill cyber and data ops jobs.
“I’m not the most effective person to give you the option to say, ‘Here’s what now we have an excessive amount of of,’” she said. “What I’ve asked is [for] the profession field managers to think deeply about their profession fields, think deeply about what our Air Force goes to seem like 10 years from now.”
She pointed to groups of airmen who’re exploring what the longer term force could seem like and said data evaluation is underway to light up the best way forward.
“We’ll proceed as an Air Force to iterate to what we want to seem like,” she added. “But we’re doing loads of the groundwork and the homework at once.”
During her keynote, Bass reminded airmen that falling in need of the Air Force’s conduct and appearance standards ultimately hurts the larger objective: presenting a unified front against America’s adversaries.
In June, she published an open letter to the force that pushed airmen to carry one another to high standards of professionalism to avoid damaging the service’s popularity and talents.
“History shows that when standards erode, military capabilities and readiness decline,” she wrote. “We are able to’t afford to let this occur and still expect to maintain pace with the rapid expansion of the Chinese military, Russian aggression, and other emerging global challenges.”
The Air Force has tried to implement more common sense regulations for hairstyles, clothing and more that allow flexibility without hindering combat capability or unit cohesion. But Bass warned of taking it too far.
“If we’re more focused on … ourselves, as an alternative of the greater good of the force, then we’re probably off-target,” she said.
Reflecting on her 30 years of service, Bass began to cry.
“I actually have greatly loved 4 things in life: my faith, my family, my country and this Air Force,” she said. “That is greater than only a job. … That is our higher calling.”
Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.