The Air Force is entering what leaders say might be its most transformational period in a generation, because the service looks to position itself as a world powerhouse for many years to return.
If their vision comes true, the Air Force would enter the 2030s as a smaller but more flexible force that is best positioned to win America’s wars, with sharper leaders and savvier airmen.
Just give it time.
“You’re going to see more change in the following 4 to 6 years than I’ve seen in my entire over-30-year profession,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne Bass told Air Force Times Aug. 28.
Facing its first period of relative stability because the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks kicked off greater than 20 years of U.S. military involvement within the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the Air Force is seizing the chance to overhaul all the pieces from the way it trains and promotes its members, to the roles they hold and the way they deploy overseas.
Those updates come amid a historic downturn in recruiting, which saw the Air Force miss its annual goal across all three components for the primary time since 1999, and growing concerns that China’s bid to outpace America as a world superpower may lead to war.
“We would like China to succeed, but to succeed by working inside the foundations that profit all nations, including China,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a Sept. 11 keynote address on the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference outside Washington.
“If our power projection capability and capability usually are not adequate to discourage Chinese aggression, against Taiwan or elsewhere, war could occur,” he said. “If it does, and we cannot prevail, the outcomes could solid a protracted shadow.”
Restructuring the force
Understanding the massive picture starts with numbers.
After plunging to around 311,000 lively duty troops in 2015, the Air Force has rebuilt its workforce to hover around 325,000 members — far below its Cold War peak of around 608,000 airmen in 1986.
Service leaders say that’s enough to handle today’s largely peacetime mission. But fighting one other country whose military capabilities rival that of the U.S. would require something higher.
“We’re … asked to do a mission [that] we usually are not capable of, based on our workforce,” Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, the Air Force’s personnel chief, told Air Force Times Sept. 8.
But neither Miller nor Bass said they buy the argument that the Air Force doesn’t have enough people. As a substitute, they said, the service needs to make use of its manpower otherwise.
“I’m not convinced that we don’t have enough airmen,” Bass said. “We’d like to be sure that we’re focused on what the Air Force must appear to be and [if] we now have the programs in place to … win our nation’s wars.”
Last 12 months, the Air Force began an intensive effort to undo its top-heavy enlisted corps that it believes lacks enough experience in middle management and has too few lower-level troops for day by day grunt work.
Ideally, the Air Force says, the project will create a sturdy corps of midlevel enlisted to administer a bigger pool of younger airmen. If the plan works, half of the enlisted Air Force will occupy the ranks of E-4 or below.
In its first 12 months, the hassle has shrunk the variety of master sergeant and technical sergeant jobs by 0.5% each, and 0.6% of staff sergeant jobs — shedding several hundred of those billets in total, in response to figures provided to Air Force Times. Conversely, the E-4 corps grew by 2.2%, or about 1,300 senior airmen.
Master Sgt. Deana Heitzman, an Air Force spokesperson, said that because of upper than expected retention, the service ended up with more noncommissioned officers — staff sergeants and technical sergeants — than planned in 2023, despite plummeting promotion rates to those grades.
The service still needs to chop 0.2% of its senior airmen airmen jobs; 1.4% of its staff sergeant jobs; and 1.5% of its technical sergeant jobs, to satisfy its goals in fiscal 2025.
“The Air Force has continued to make progress towards the specified grade structure and restoring noncommissioned officer experience,” Heitzman said Aug. 30. “The Air Force continues to advance toward the FY25 goal.”
On the officer side, tailoring the promotion system to be more conscious of the needs of every profession field has helped higher-caliber airmen stand out from their peers and commenced to even out manning across fields, Miller argued.
How airmen are judged for promotions is changing, too. The Air Force has begun emphasizing interpersonal skills and technical expertise and stopped considering how long someone has been within the service, amongst other tweaks to the software they use and after they file job reviews every year.
Leaders need to know: “Are you able to communicate? Are you able to set a strategic plan? Are you able to be sure that your airmen are ready?” Miller said.
“Previously, it was whatever you desired to say,” she said of performance reviews. “‘You probably did great on the chili cookoff,’ or whatever. It didn’t matter.”
Now it ought to be easier for supervisors to see if an airman is lacking a specific skill, or missing crucial job experience.
“We will have a far more robust conversation based on what we value,” Miller said.
Time will tell whether well-rounded airmen begin moving up the ladder more often.
However the transition has not been easy. Some enlisted airmen have taken to social media to grumble about failing to satisfy a better bar for promotion, despite studying for the battery of tests on which midlevel troops are judged and compiling what they consider are impressive resumes and performance reviews.
Some said they’ll consider separating from the Air Force as an alternative of being stuck at lower ranks. Others encouraged their wingmen to stay it out and deal with personal goals, whether or not they earn one other stripe or not.
One Reddit user argued that low promotion rates demoralize airmen who’re omitted despite a “promote now” or “must promote” suggestion from their supervisors.
“You find yourself with dudes with ‘promote now’ and years of solid service being told ‘you continue to usually are not ok,’” user FlyingThrowAway2009 wrote in August 2022. “It’s straight up insulting.”
Bass urged airmen to think about the broader needs of the service and their field as an alternative of constructing rank.
“More experience is a great thing,” Bass said. “I believe that we are going to see the fruits of our labor as time goes on.”
The subsequent generation
The military’s recent recruiting slump further complicates that process. Billets that move to the bottom enlisted ranks can sit empty with out a regular flow of airmen through boot camp and technical school.
About 39,000 recent enlistees joined the Air Force in fiscal 2023. Greater than 3,800 of them got here in under a program that gives 1000’s of dollars in bonus pay for entering the service’s most in-need fields, like special warfare and cyber operations, Heitzman said.
Recruiters will try to enhance on that performance as they drive toward a loftier goal of 25,900 lively duty recruits in fiscal 2024.
It’s unclear how the service’s failure to bring nearly 48,000 enlisted airmen into the lively duty Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve this 12 months will affect operations at home and abroad.
Missing the goal this 12 months is prone to stress communities which might be already chronically undermanned and will hinder a few of the Air Force’s broader force management initiatives.
Bass indicated it’s going to place further burden on noncommissioned officers to choose up the slack of a smaller cadre of newcomers — something else to juggle amid the opposite effects of enlisted force restructuring.
“We’re … on the lookout for what impacts we’re going to have and the best way to lessen that impact at probably the most tactical level,” Bass said. “What it’s going to mean is that our NCO corps shoulders the challenges.”
Air Force Recruiting Service leaders warned in April that lagging recruitment would exacerbate a shortfall of 1,800 maintainers, 700 security forces, 300 munitions specialists, 100 fuel experts and more.
“Airmen will almost definitely be asked to work longer hours, cover more shifts and make sacrifices of their personal lives to satisfy the mission demands essential to our national security,” Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, who retired in June because the service’s recruiting chief, wrote to the force. “The nation is depending on us.”
Get in, stay in
Once Americans join the Air Force, it’s as much as the military keep them.
The Air Force retained about 93% of its officers and 90% of enlisted airmen in fiscal 2023, Heitzman said. Those numbers are on par with retention rates over the past several years.
That’s a vibrant spot in an otherwise gloomy personnel outlook, leaders said: When people join the Air Force, they have a tendency to remain.
The service is attempting to ward off any sharp dips in those numbers by offering bonuses to remain in uniform and multiple programs to enhance airmen’s quality of life.
Around 900 airmen have opted to reenlist since April under the most recent enlisted retention bonus program, Heitzman said.
Greater than 870 aviators have signed recent contracts to increase their time in service under a pair of programs created to maintain pilots in uniform. Nearly 7 in 10 officers who’re of their last 12 months of the time they promised the Air Force after ending flight school have opted to remain longer.
Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force’s current vice chief of staff who’s nominated to steer the service, told lawmakers Sept. 12 the service has issued waivers to permit enlisted airmen to stay in uniform past their “high 12 months of tenure,” or the 12 months they need to retire in the event that they usually are not promoted to the following rank.
The Air Force has also asked outside researchers to discover other ways to retain airmen. Service leaders acknowledge that tackling tough problems, like ensuring that troops have sufficient pay, health care, child care and food, are a part of that solution.
Katherine Kuzminski, a military personnel expert on the Center for a Latest American Security, raised the likelihood that a now-resolved funding snafu, which caused the Air Force to pause airmen’s moves to recent bases and bonus pay programs, could have a chilling effect on retention.
The service must offer airmen and their families stability through “effective forecasting and the predictable and consistent application of policy and process,” especially in stressful situations like moving, she said in an email.
Keeping people in uniform is one step toward making the military’s workload more bearable. One other is ensuring that individuals are effectively distributed across those jobs, whether on the national or local level.
Talking to reporters Sept. 12, Air Force Reserve boss Lt. Gen. John Healy recalled a recent town hall where airmen complained about their growing list of duties.
That typically happens in units which have a glut of individuals in certain roles but too few in others, he said. Nevertheless it’s an issue he can’t control.
“I used to be like, ‘You’re 113% manned straight away. You could have overages within the spots that you simply don’t need them,’” Healy said. “‘What do you wish me to do? Balance the units.’”
‘Break the AFSC structure’
Now the service must profit from the people it has.
Leaders see the mid- to late-2020s as a crossroads at which the Air Force must embrace the digital age or lose its future wars. On top of bolstering the NCO corps and training airmen to think strategically, which means taking a critical take a look at what tomorrow’s jobs entail.
Air Force officials are considering what the general pool of jobs should appear to be, and the best way to distribute troops amongst them. Those talks come because the service plans to retire lots of of its stalwart airframes, some without direct replacements, and repurpose airmen into recent missions.
Other aircraft which might be replacing older models, just like the C-130J Super Hercules airlifters and EC-37B Compass Call, require fewer crew members onboard. What to do with those troops?
Bass argues the Air Force could stand to lose some specialties. She believes there are too many Air Force Specialty Codes overall, and too few in areas like information warfare and cyber operations.
The service should look many years into the longer term to make your mind up what skills can be most significant and begin constructing those profession fields now, she said.
Asked what success would appear to be, Bass said it’s too early to inform.
“The working groups that we now have arrange straight away that incorporate a few of our futurists, and the people who find themselves considering deeply concerning the mission sets and the weapon systems that we now have, are all performing some of that homework,” she said.
Bass has also asked the Air Force’s profession field managers to think about what their jobs might appear to be in 10 years — or in the event that they’re still needed in any respect.
Miller suggested airmen could see the forms of careers being offered begin to alter in the following two to 3 years.
Assignments could turn into less specialized, she said, or require airmen to carry different certifications. The goal is to shrink the Air Force’s overseas footprint by packaging a smaller variety of airmen with a greater set of skills right into a deployed unit.
That’s part of a bigger push to show the Air Force into a company that prioritizes support to combatant commanders all over the world over staffing home bases.
“I don’t know where we’re going to finish,” Miller said. “It might be that we completely break the AFSC structure.”
Airmen can even begin to see recent profession opportunities inside specialties as well.
The Air Force will test the opportunity of splitting profession fields into two tracks: one to construct commanders of operational squadrons and one to construct subject material experts. The experiment will begin with cyber operations officers, or the “17D” field, Miller said.
It’s unclear how widely airmen will embrace the thought. In 2018, the service tried an analogous approach with mobility pilots that offered airmen the prospect to spend their profession within the cockpit or to transition into leadership roles. Just two people applied for the “flying-only” track.
The Air Force hasn’t considered bringing back that program, Allvin told Congress in September.
Whether the service’s ambitious slate of reforms result in the outcomes it wants stays to be seen. But officials say they’re already beginning to see airmen more fully embrace the decision to service — to discourage enemies and fight when needed.
“I believe we now have a greater sense of why we wear this uniform, and what we now have to do to be sure that each single airman is ready appropriately … to defend our nation,” Bass said. “The strategic IQ has absolutely increased … and that’s probably what I can be most happy with because the chief master sergeant of the Air Force.”
Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times in March 2021. She served as senior reporter until October 2023. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.