Air Force Reoptimizing for China Threat, Necessary but ‘not Sufficient’

AFA NEWS: Air Force Reoptimizing for China Threat, Necessary but ‘not Sufficient’

Air Force photo

AURORA, Colorado — The Air Force is not organized and equipped to deter China, which is why the service announced a package of 24 changes to its organizations to improve readiness and modernization. But unless Congress and industry step up, the reforms won’t be enough to get ahead of the China threat, the service secretary said.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall announced a reoptimization effort in September, and that triggered a four-month sprint, resulting in “24 key decisions we have made to improve both the readiness of the current force and our ability to stay competitive over time to continuously generate enduring competitiveness,” he said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium Feb. 12.

Broadly, the goal is to separate readiness and modernization functions, unify requirements development, streamline acquisitions and build deployable units — all with a focus on “integration.” The initiatives fall under four categories: develop people, generate readiness, project power and develop capabilities.

Changes range from creating warrant officer positions in cyber and IT fields to standing up new offices and commands. Other changes involve adjustments to air wings to create “units of readiness” that can quickly deploy and conducting large-scale exercises that build capability and also reveal gaps that need to be addressed through changes in tactics, training and systems, service leaders said.

“There’s an Integrated [Capabilities] Command that we’re forming, it’ll be a three-star level command on the operational side of the Air Force,” Kendall told reporters during a Feb. 13 roundtable. “There’s a new office in the secretariat, [the] Integrated Capabilities Office, which will essentially be a chief engineer, chief architect’s office — chief systems engineer might be a little bit more accurate.

“On the acquisition side of the Air Force, there’ll be an Integrated Development Office as part of the Air Force Materiel Command headquarters,” he continued. “And all of these organizations are going to be working together to try to sort out what the best way to modernize and move forward is just to have competitive capabilities.”

Kendall said the reforms under the “Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition” initiative “tend to be necessary for us to be more competitive, but not sufficient.”

Without regular and predicable budgets from Congress and without industry delivering on time and on budget, the Air Force will still struggle with readiness and modernization. So, for now, the Department of the Air Force is focusing on what it can control, he said.

“It’s easiest for us to address the organizational ones. They’re not expensive to fix in the procedural ones about how we focus exercises, and so on. We can do a lot of those things within existing resources,” he said.

“And we’re going to move on quickly to implement them. We also don’t need additional authorities from the Congress,” he said.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin reiterated to reporters the effort is focused on what the service can control. “And it really is about … looking at what we expect to face and understanding how we got to where we are over the past 30 years of the way we train, the way we exercise, the way that we develop our capabilities that was designed for another environment.

“I don’t believe that this will address all of the challenges, but the things we can control we need to be getting after, making sure that we’re as ready as we can be with the dollars that we have,” he said.

“I think some of the first outcomes you hope to see is as we orient towards larger-scale exercises, we should be able to see ourselves more clearly,” Allvin said.

The service is planning a large-scale exercise in the Indo-Pacific in 2025 as the first test of the reoptimization, he said.

“I think as we take these units of action — these wings that we want to train together to be able to deploy together — once we understand how much of that we actually have, how many coherent units, we’ll have a better way to articulate just how much Air Force we really have, how much Air Force that we can really apply and generate and produce a combat power.

“Because my sense is there may be a misunderstanding of that because we’ve been spread so thin, but we haven’t been tested in the depth,” he continued. “So, we haven’t been able to see the impact of not having as much depth, and I think this is really going to help us assess our capabilities and our risk to be able to meet the pacing challenge.”

Travis Sharp, fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said in an email the organizational changes will take time and will be difficult to measure. Some of the results will be visible after the large-scale exercise.

“The audience for these exercises will be not only adversaries and allies, but also U.S. policymakers and legislators looking for signs that the Air Force’s reforms have borne fruit,” Sharp said.

The service will try to make the changes internally using existing resources, but some of the changes will require additional funding, he noted. That will be difficult for a service that is already facing funding limitations on moving forward with its readiness and modernization objectives.

“We’ve got $30 billion sitting in our five-year plan roughly to move all that work forward,” Kendall said. “The first $5 billion is in [fiscal year 2024] and we’re still waiting for that.

“You look at the health of the current Air Force from the perspective of readiness — aircraft availability rates is a good example — that we’re at the edge of where we’d like to be there. We don’t want to go any lower than we already are to have an acceptably ready force,” he continued.

“But when I look at the tradeoffs across the department, for me, we have got to get on with the modernization,” he said. “So, we’re going to keep our current force at an acceptable level to meet our current commitments, and we’re going to put as much as we can into modernization to try to move that forward as fast as possible.”

A major focus of the “Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition” effort is breaking up the existing dynamic where many of the major commands are working on both readiness and modernization, Allvin said during the Feb. 12 keynote address.

“And when you do that, by your nature you are deliberately making internal trades because you’re trying to manage the risk of each, which means you’re optimizing for your current function — your part of the Air Force — you’re not optimizing for the whole Air Force. But we asked you to do both. We’re not doing that anymore,” he said.

Thus, the goal is to clearly separate offices and commands focused on readiness and those focused on modernization and capability development.

“We want the commands who are accountable for their readiness to be able to focus on readiness,” Allvin said.

“They will design, and they will put the requirements in and test one Air Force, not some of our functional Air Forces, and we have to put them together later,” he said.

“That’s important, we have a force design. And we want to ensure that we develop an Air Force that can improve upon that force design, or test that force design. And this is one of the things that Integrated Capabilities Command will do,” Allvin said.

“This is where the operators will test operational concepts against our force design,” he continued. “They will also ensure that when we have modernization initiatives, those are rationalized to ensure our current force … gets to the future force in a way that makes sense.”

While the service moves forward on the reoptimization, which is expected to take about a year to complete, the Air Force is also trying to move forward on major acquisition programs, despite the lack of a 2024 budget.

Regarding the collaborative combat aircraft program, increment one is moving forward with five vendors and that will be winnowed down to two in the coming months, Kendall said.

“We’d like to have three — three is going to be difficult because [of] the level of funding we have in the budget,” he said. “With some cost sharing from industry, I think we could do three.

“Hopefully, the next phase is going to take us into development for production, then we’ll be moving forward and a couple of years to downselect for production. And how many we’ll be able to carry in a production is still uncertain,” he said.

“Everything depends upon fiscal year [2024] being appropriated, we had a big increase in funding coming in fiscal year 2024,” he added.

The service intends to award increment two of the program in fiscal year 2025, he said. “It’ll be concept definition, preliminary design type of work. For that increment we’re going to try to possibly involve some international partners,” he said, adding they would be close partners.

Andrew Hunter, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the CCA program is more than just the five vendors currently on contract to build air frames.

“There is another slew of contractors that are also part of the vendor base for CCA, many of them working specifically on software,” he told reporters. “And that will continue, that’s independent of individual increments. That is a core capability.”

The software is one of the “foundational architectures” of the CCA program, he said. “And so, it will be very similar across increments. And it’s one of the things that when the secretary discusses working with international partners, that’s a capability that we can make available to them.”

Topics: Air Force News