Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force’s No. 2 officer, is the frontrunner to turn out to be its next chief of staff, 4 people acquainted with the deliberations told Air Force Times.
Allvin, a profession mobility pilot and strategist who has served as Air Force vice chief of staff since November 2020, is the service’s internal pick for chief, in line with one current military officer, two retired officers and one other expert outside of the Pentagon, all of whom were granted anonymity to debate the problem.
He’s the popular candidate of Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the Air Force’s current top officer who is predicted to earn President Joe Biden’s nomination for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The competition has been “very personality-dependent,” based on who Brown wants as his successor, one source said.
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Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations and a pacesetter within the special operations community, is in line to turn out to be Allvin’s right-hand man as Air Force vice chief of staff, two sources added.
If nominated by Biden and confirmed by the Senate, Allvin and Slife would take over the third-largest branch of the armed forces, an almost $180 billion portfolio spanning around 689,000 uniformed airmen and civilians. They’d inherit a sweeping effort to modernize the service’s inventory of decades-old aircraft, adapt the force to the digital era and encourage young Americans to enlist.
The pair still requires Biden’s approval for the highest jobs, sources cautioned.
Their nominations aren’t a “done deal,” said one former military officer with knowledge of the discussions. One other source believes the method is around 80% complete and that the race has been stable for a number of months.
U.S. Transportation Command boss Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost could still be within the running as well if Biden seeks to interview her, in line with current and former officers. Sources out and in of the federal government have viewed Van Ovost, who previously oversaw the Air Force’s airlift and tanker fleets, as a top contender for the job. She is one in all three female four-star officers within the Defense Department.
One other potential pick, Pacific Air Forces boss Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, was recently nominated to steer Air Combat Command.
It’s unclear when candidates would interview with Biden or when he would log off on the nomination.
An Air Force spokesperson said it’s premature to comment on whether Allvin is in line for chief of staff. The National Security Council didn’t reply to a request for comment.
“Presidents don’t all the time accept or follow the ‘recommendations’ of the DoD as to who for a specific position, especially a service chief,” said Arnold Punaro, a defense consultant and retired Marine Corps two-star general who served because the staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
For instance, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin could reject the service’s suggestion and recommend his own favorite, as could the president himself, Punaro said.
A retired four-star who spoke on condition of anonymity said Allvin and Austin have worked together however the vice chief spends more time in meetings with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
Once senior military nominees are approved by the Pentagon, they head to the White House Military Office and the National Security Council for further scrutiny.
“While the fundamental process is well-known and well-used and has plenty of paperwork, even for the military, each administration and every president has their very own approach for probably the most senior military nominations,” Punaro added. “Once the president comes to a decision, then there may be a number of SASC and Senate paperwork that needs to be accomplished.”
In brief: “There isn’t a such thing as a routine four-star nomination,” he said.
The ‘consummate insider’
A 1986 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Allvin began his profession as a cargo pilot within the C-12F Huron and C-141 Starlifter while stationed in Washington state and Germany.
He modified tack to turn out to be a test pilot in 1994, flying the C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J Super Hercules airlifters because the Air Force built its first squadrons of those airframes within the mid-Nineties.
Allvin hoped to parlay his test pilot experience right into a job as an astronaut, but decided it wasn’t the best time to affix NASA and turned to academics as an alternative, a former general told Air Force Times.
He spent two years as a student on the Air Command and Staff College and School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and joined Air Mobility Command headquarters as a part of the commander’s motion group in 1999.
Over the following decade, he would bounce between command positions at pilot training wings nationwide and policy jobs within the Pentagon. All told, Allvin amassed greater than 4,600 flight hours in nearly a dozen airframes.
He pinned on his first star in September 2010 and took command of NATO’s aviation training command in Afghanistan, then returned to Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois a yr later.
There, he led the 618th Air and Space Operations Center — AMC’s hub for tasking tanker and airlift missions around the globe — from April 2012 to June 2013. He also served as its vice commander for eight months.
As a general officer, Allvin has risen through multiple strategy and planning roles on the Pentagon, Air Force headquarters, U.S. European Command and the United Nations over the past decade. That have has positioned him because the “consummate insider,” a stronger advocate for Air Force interests and deft navigator of the federal bureaucracy, sources said.
After Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014, Allvin — who became EUCOM’s strategy and policy director in 2015 — drew up a brand new war plan for the command, the retired four-star said. That landed him a job on the Joint Staff in 2018 because the vice director, then director, of strategy, plans and policy.
“When he was a J-5, he was considering in a way that’s larger and different,” said Clint Hinote, who recently retired because the Air Force’s lieutenant general answerable for long-term force planning. “That’s been a trademark, and I believe that’s going to be something we want.”
‘The one within the trenches’
Allvin took over as Air Force vice chief of staff in November 2020, where he plays a central role in shaping the service’s budget and managing its acquisition programs.
Sources described him as a well-read, professorial leader with the self-discipline and Washington know-how to make an impact.
He seeks out insight across and outdoors of the federal government when crafting an opinion on a subject, and is secure enough in his own perspective to respectfully debate others, multiple retired officers said.
“I even have had sparring matches with him that I believe lots of senior leaders would have been very off-put by having a three-star challenge them,” Hinote said. “We’ve actually grown closer in our working relationship due to it.”
One in all Allvin’s most vital accomplishments as vice chief has come because the leader of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and other strategic planning groups inside the Pentagon, Hinote said. His leadership ensured more Air Force priorities were included within the Defense Department’s recent budget requests than could have been otherwise.
“We got an incredible amount of victories and plus-ups within the budget,” Hinote said. “There’s a lot that’s different than what we had before, and I believe he really deserves lots of credit for that because he’s the one within the trenches every meeting, attempting to make the case for the Air Force.”
While Allvin has a wealth of Pentagon experience, he has less operational command experience than predecessors like Brown and Gen. David Goldfein. That will concern some observers, but Hinote thinks there are methods to resolve the problem.
“I actually think you should use social media just a little bit in another way, and you can have lots of town halls and listening sessions” to herald the perspectives of rank-and-file airmen, Hinote said.
Allvin has sought out those perspectives.
He has spearheaded a brand new group to rethink recruiting policies and skilled development initiatives to assist airmen pursue nontraditional careers within the service, and mentors generals and other staffers which are earlier on of their careers.
His version of the annual “Vice Chief’s Challenge” invites airmen to submit their ideas on agile combat employment, the Air Force’s term for deploying quickly and and not using a large logistics footprint to reply to threats more easily.
He has cultivated a detailed relationship with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and works well with Slife, a similarly strategic thinker who looks to enhance airpower overall somewhat than push parochial interests, sources said.
Slife, a former helicopter and drone pilot, arrived on the Pentagon in December after leading Air Force Special Operations Command for greater than three years and serving because the vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.
“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. “I believe they’ll probably be, sort of, [Allvin] as the concept guy … after which Slife because the executor.”
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.
Gen. Norton Schwartz, a mobility pilot, and vice chief Gen. William Fraser, a bomber pilot, served because the Air Force’s top two leaders for a few yr together in 2008-2009. Schwartz overlapped with Gen. Larry Spencer, a finance officer, for lower than a month in 2012 as well.
“Some will say it with a way of, ‘This might be really good for the Air Force since you’re not having the groupthink problem.’ After which there’ll be some folks that say, ‘Oh, my God, the Air Force goes to pot. They’re not even letting combat pilots lead it anymore,’” Hinote said.
He believes the Air Force’s plan to divest airframes just like the older F-15 Eagle models and the A-10 attack plane, and to purchase fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighters than initially planned, while investing in additional advanced drones and communications technology would occur no matter what top brass previously flew.
One other source identified that Lt. Gen. Scott Pleus, a profession fighter pilot currently serving as deputy commander of U.S. Forces in Korea, is nominated to maneuver to the Pentagon because the Air Staff director to be sure that perspective isn’t lost.
As the brand new face of the Air Force, Allvin will need “sharp elbows” to fight for the service’s interests in upcoming budget and strategy debates inside the Pentagon and with Congress, and persuade the general public of its value, one retired officer said.
The Air Force is pushing Congress to grant its $185 billion budget request for fiscal 2024 and green-light a sweeping plan to retire a whole bunch of older aircraft that leaders say can be ineffective in future wars.
If Allvin is chosen, he’ll inherit “lots of the identical problems” that Brown has faced, the retired four-star said, “that are primarily the best way to persuade the system that, after 30 years of underfunding the Air Force, it’s going to take some fairly drastic measures to allow them to meet up with the efforts China has made.”
The brand new chief will even play a key role in reversing the Air Force’s struggle to recruit and retain airmen — particularly pilots, maintainers and cyber operators.
After nearly 40 years within the military, Allvin believes he has more to offer to resolve those problems.
“He really wants the job,” the retired four-star said. “He thinks he can do a very good job at it and he thinks there are things that should be done.
“He thinks he’s prepared, and his family is ready, to undergo this,” he added. “And that’s vital.”
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.