Gen. Jim Slife stepped into the role of Air Force vice chief of staff at a Dec. 29 ceremony at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, ending the service’s three-month stretch without Senate-confirmed officers in its top two leadership posts.
Slife’s project to the Air Force’s second-highest position is a component of a wide-ranging shuffle of the branch’s top brass that began in the autumn. His promotion to four-star had sat in limbo since September as a part of Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s lengthy blockade of over 400 military nominees that ended Dec. 19.
“Leaving things higher than whenever you found it … is considered one of his hallmarks,” Gen. David Allvin, who became the service’s uniformed boss in November, said at Slife’s swearing-in event. “I couldn’t be happier to find a way to have this ceremony, put these stars on and get to work with Jim.”
The profession special operations pilot replaces Allvin as vice chief of staff following a yearlong stint as deputy chief for operations.
As vice chief, Slife will help drive recent policies to prepare, train and equip 689,000 uniformed and civilian employees across the energetic duty Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve. Together, he and Allvin will tackle a slew of recent military challenges starting from lackluster recruiting, to sweeping deployment reforms, to a number of digital-age threats.
Slife will even join the Pentagon’s other No. 2 officers in shaping requirements for major acquisition programs because the Air Force tackles its own multibillion-dollar modernization plan.
“We stand on the precipice of a different strategic environment,” he said on the ceremony. “[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ] Brown called on us to speed up change. [Air Force Secretary Frank] Kendall has empowered us to truly take into consideration … what we’d like to must be competitive for the subsequent several many years.”
Slife’s Air Force profession began at Auburn University, where he earned his commission through the Reserve Officer Training Corps. He went on to grow to be a decorated pilot with greater than 3,100 flight hours on the MH-53 Pave Low search-and-rescue helicopter and the MQ-1 Predator attack drone, amongst other platforms, in accordance with his official biography.
He also led Air Force Special Operations Command for greater than three years and served because the vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.
It’s the primary time in greater than a decade that neither the Air Force chief of staff or its vice chief hail from a fighter background.
While Slife’s proponents have praised him as a strategic thinker who looks to enhance airpower overall fairly than push parochial interests, others have criticized him for what they see as searching for change on the expense of military readiness.
“He’s not very patient. He’s not willing to have a look at things and shrug his shoulders,” one retired general said of Slife last May. “I believe they’ll probably be, type of, [Allvin] as the concept guy … after which Slife because the executor.”
Sarah Sicard is a Senior Editor with Military Times. She previously served because the Digitial Editor of Military Times and the Army Times Editor. Other work may be found at National Defense Magazine, Task & Purpose, and Defense News.
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.