Keynote Address—The Guardian Experience: Answering the Call, Building the Force
September 23, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
CMSSF John Bentivegna:
Well, good afternoon, everyone. Hopefully you had a good lunch and you didn’t eat too much. I’ll try to keep this exciting and keep you awake as we go through this. Hey, I’m glad to be back. I just want to say a warm thank you to AFA, General Field, General Skoch. Thank you so much for hosting and for allowing us to have this environment where we can get together as members of the Department of the Air Force and be able to talk about the criticality of space superiority and air superiority. And for those of you online who are watching, welcome. I’m glad you had a chance to kind of dial in. You know, for all the things that AFA does, you know, it’s not just the conferences that occur here. There’s many other programs and initiatives that they do. I had the privilege on Sunday to do the final leg of the Monument to Monument Ride, which helps support wounded warriors. It’s the Wounded Airmen and Guardian Program that AFA is a sponsor of. I had a chance to do that on Sunday. And if you had a chance to go on to the exhibit floor, I think there’s an M2M booth where you can get some more information to sign up. It’s an amazing event. And the reason I bring it up is because I want to highlight how important the initiative is to support our wounded warriors. But also, if you see me walk up here a little funny, it’s because I’m a little sore from 73 miles on Sunday. So give me some grace, if you will, if you will. So we know that not everyone can be here. And I love coming to hear senior leaders talk. I love engaging with Guardians on sidebar conversations, walking through the halls, down on the exhibit floor, where I get a chance to understand what exactly is happening at the tactical level. What are the Guardians hearing? What are they thinking about? What is the feedback they have for me? I really value that in addition to everything else that this environment allows. But again, not everyone can be here. I mean, someone has to be at work securing our nation’s interests in front of a two-space. So what we decided to do was reach out to some Guardians who are actually executing the mission, who couldn’t be here, but I still value to understand what’s on their mind, what do they want to talk about. Now, I have to tell you, I have not seen these videos yet. There’s some video questions. Now, the team did prep me about some of the content of what the questions are, but I have not seen what the video is all about. So, General Saltzman, I trust my team. They said that they like me. So we’ll see how this goes. But again, very much ready to get into this and let’s hear what Guardians have to talk about. So with that, let’s roll the first question and see how this goes. There’s a question, I promise.
Video:
I’m Sgt. Cody Moeller from the 50th Civil Engineer Squadron. Considering the activation and unique mission of Space Base Delta 41, what are its most significant strategic implications across the space enterprise, particularly considering resilience, responsiveness, and command and control?
CMSSF John Bentivegna:
All right. I love it. First question, that’s from an Airman supporting the Space Force. That’s great. What is the significant meaning, why did we stand up Space Base Delta 41 at Schriever Space Force Base? It’s a great question. We stood that up earlier this summer. When you think about the application of space power, and hopefully Cody’s watching from Schriever because I know he’s not here answering this question. But when you think about the application of space power and how we project warfighting capability in the Space Force, really allowed us to have a unique force presentation. That’s our employed in place forces. Now, that’s a preponderance of how we project power from the Space Force’s Guardians. But we also have individuals who do deploy downrange, in theater, in hostile environments, in austere locations. But for the most part, they’re employed in place. There are Guardians that are executing the mission from our bases and installations, not only here within the United States, but also overseas as well. So when you think about the importance of Schriever Space Force Base and why that’s important, all three core functions of the Space Force really are executed from Schriever. Assured space access, global space operations, space control, all executed for the combatant commands from Schriever Space Force Base. So having a dedicated team focused on that mission set just made sense to be able to do that. That’s not to mention our mission partners, Missile Defense Agency, U.S. Space Command are also on Schriever.
So Cody, great question. And as an Airman who’s working in civil engineering, here’s what I would ask you to think about. When you come to work every single day, you’re not just maintaining facilities, you’re not just working on the base and the installation, you are operating our power projection platforms. That’s exactly what you’re doing. All the Airmen who support the Space Force are operating our power projection platforms. You know, yesterday the Secretary talked about readiness and he talked about going to visit and see some F-15s that are on the flight line and looking to see, hey, parts weren’t there and what’s the readiness of the fleet? And in the same breath, he says, but we also fight from our facilities and installations. That is so true for the Space Force. Which is why that relationship, when General Saltzman said earlier today to General Hoffman, thank you very much because of how we leverage and lean on our Airmen and on the Air Force is so vitally important. So Cody, and for all the Airmen that are out there, all the leaders, for your Airmen, security forces, civil engineering, finance, medical, I don’t care if you are an Airman assigned to a Space Force base. When you go to work every day, you are helping us operate from a power projection platform. This is also the reason why I have Chief Sean Milligan, who is in the office. He is our senior enlisted Airman, advisor to me. When I only talk about making sure that Airmen who are supporting the Space Force are taken care of and recognized, that’s leadership stuff. We do it all the time. But it’s discussions about, I ask Sean, hey, what’s the deployment rate of security forces out of a squadron? What’s the manning rate? How are we doing with talent management? What senior enlisted leaders are we bringing over to the Space Force? Because it’s not just an assignment, it’s these men and women who are allowing us to project space power from our bases. Because that’s exactly how we operate. So that’s the significance of why Schriever Space Force Base became an independent space base Delta 41. Because think about the immense capability that comes from that patch of land and the importance that all of you have. Whether you’re wearing Spice Brown, whether you’re wearing a suit, or you’re wearing Space Force Blue on Schriever Space Force Base. It’s a power projection platform. Thank you very much for the question. I hope that kind of answers it. All right. Next question, please.
Video:
This is Lieutenant Colonel Liam Conley, commander of the 319th Combat Training Squadron, Officer Training Corps. My question is, how are Space Force leaders approaching the task of right-sizing the service in accordance with the officer, enlisted, and civilian narratives, such that the enlisted corps comprises the vast majority of our technical and tactical force, while officers can step back into planning and leadership roles?
CMSSF John Bentivegna:
Hey, thanks, Colonel Conley. Hey, congratulations to 319th commander. That’s great. I mean, last time I saw you, I think you were still at the Pentagon working with me with JTAGS transfer from the Army. And congratulations, too, on the first graduating class. He’s the 319th commander of the Officer Training Corps. It just happened, I think, in August. So a lot of work, amazing work being done within STARCOM and the 319th. So let me just go back to the premise of your question. Officers stepping back from operations. I think this is a misunderstanding of how we’ve been talking about and outlining officer, enlisted, civilian roles and responsibilities. If you’re a Guardian, you’re doing operations, period. That’s it. When you look at the Officer Training Corps that I just talked about, officers are getting commissioned and are going to learn cyber operations, intelligence operations, space operations, force modernization or acquisition. The reason it’s Guardianship first because it’s operator first. And if the example that General Saltzman talked about when he showed the video this morning in the relationship between System Delta 81 and Mission Delta 4 for missile warning did not project the fact that it’s all about operations, then you’re not listening to the conversation. We might have just missed that nuance, but there is no stepping back from operations for anyone who’s a Guardian. Regardless of whether we’re wearing a suit or wearing a uniform. So we lost the narrative in a little bit, sir. We’ve got to make sure that we understand that. It’s all vitally important. If you’re an aggressor in STARCOM, man, that’s operations. I went down to visit some of the SSC personnel down in Kirtland on the operations floor that they’re doing. And if you don’t have a mission area focused mind, a space minded warfighter working in SSC acquiring next generation systems for space domain awareness or orbital warfare, we’re never going to get to where we need to go. It’s all about operations and mission area. There is no stepping back. Now, I think maybe the nuance is, is in order to do the things we need to do as a service, and this year we’re going to have I think about 10,400 Guardians in the service. We’re small, but man, we are mighty. But here’s the thing. Our FTOs and CTOs, those mission planners and integrators, those operators, we need them on the joint staff. We need them in the combatant commands. We need them in the service components. We need them in other agencies, our mission partners. So when we talked about how the enlisted were going to come in and kind of focus on operations, really what that meant was for our NCOs and our enlisted Guardians, talk about the combat squadron, the combat crew, the combat detachment, with a lieutenant or a captain who’s a crew commander, but how do we as enlisted members step up, execute those tactical operations, then that enables those mission planners, integrators, those officer operators to go off and do those other things that we need them to do. That is not enlisted Guardian work, but it is Guardian work. So like I said, on the narrative, we might have lost a little bit, but please don’t misunderstand. If you’re a Guardian, you’re an operator. Stop. That’s exactly what we do. And we cannot bifurcate or separate operations from acquisition, from our institutional forces, our operational forces. It’s all operations. It’s just us getting the force structure correct so we can do all the things that we need to do as a service. But it’s all ops. All right, next, I think I have one more question.
Video:
Hello, I’m Specialist 4 Amelia Talbot from Space Delta 7. How is the Space Force designing its enlisted career path to ensure technical expertise is equally valued and rewarded alongside traditional leadership progress, especially given our service’s unique need for highly specialized skills?
CMSSF John Bentivegna:
Man, I love it. I love it. Young specialist asking about career development, how to make sure she has the best Guardian experience she possibly can have. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We talk about the talent that we’re bringing into the service. That’s amazing. So thank you very much for the question and keep doing what you do and invest in yourself. Think about your future. So I think that there’s a maybe a misunderstanding, if you will, or a fallacy to think that we can separate tactical operations and being a subject matter expert and leadership. And here’s what I mean by that. If you’re coming into Space Force, you want to be a Guardian, you want to be really good at your job and think that you will never have to interact with the human weapon system, you may be in the wrong job because every single day it’s about teamwork. It’s about teamwork. And we need Guardians who are subject matter experts. But we also need them to teach, to train, to mentor. That kind of falls into the leadership bucket. So there is no saying I want to be a technical subject matter expert. I want to do operations. I don’t want to lead. There is no such thing. We all lead at our levels. We all have influence over others. And that’s what leadership is about. So there is no separation. Think about the Guardian commitment. Team leader, team member. For both of those, you have to understand leadership and interact with the human weapon system. And so as we work through that, it’s important to understand we cannot bifurcate them. Because we do need super smart, dedicated, who love executing the mission, the subject matter experts. But it also needs you to be willing and able to pass on that knowledge. To lead a team through mission execution if you’re on a combat crew. That’s what it means to be a Guardian as we go through that. So there’s no kind of separation as we do that. Now, we have had a lot of discussion talking about what it is that we’re trying to grow and trying to develop within the service. What is the career path for enlisted men and women? And this kind of ties into technical leadership tracks. What do we need to do?
And I think what we’ve learned over the last couple of years, just last year, as we started to look at how we develop officers specifically, looking to see what the officer enlisted civilian roles and responsibilities outlined, look at force presentation with combat squadrons, combat detachments, combat crews. We realized that where we needed to focus enlisted development specifically was really at the Master Sergeant level and below. So we said, if we focused on creating world-class Master Sergeants, it would be successful for the service. Bring up that slide. World-class Master Sergeants. The reason we bring that up is because if we focus on the 600 or so, about 12 percent of the enlisted force are Master Sergeants right now. They’re the ones that probably have the most influence and interaction on the daily operations, on developing and influencing NCOs, and the most touch points with our junior enlisted. And if we put our time and effort into developing world-class Master Sergeants, then senior and chief are easy because the talent pool that we have is strong. So rather than looking at how do I create the next Caleb Lloyd or Chief Rosnick or Chief Pogue, how do I create kick-ass Master Sergeants who can lead the fight, who can lead operations, who can influence every single day the Guardians we need to unleash to execute the mission? So we came up with world-class Master Sergeants. That’s why when you look at this slide, the pinnacle of this slide or the focus really is on developing Master Sergeants. But it’s a journey. And let me say this too. I call this a framework. This is not a, I don’t want to call it a road map, because each of us are going to develop in our own unique way. There is no one-size-fits-all as we go through this. But this is a philosophy. This is a framework of how we’re going to get after to develop world-class Master Sergeants. And this has been an evolution. You’ve seen me show this slide as it’s been matured over the last couple years because we’re trying to be very deliberate working with the S1 and feedback from the field on what exactly we’re trying to build and what we need for the success of the service.
So let’s start with scouting before we talk about this. And Colonel Kano and the team are doing an amazing job with the scouts that we have, looking to find out what the strategy is. How do we get the talent that the service needs? You might have read recently in an article, they came out where they’re going to be partnering and getting some feedback from the scouts of the Washington Nationals, the professional baseball team. What is their approach as an elite organization? How do they go out and scout talent? What’s their philosophy? What’s their process? When we’re looking to scout about 800 to 900 Guardians a year enlisted-wise, we have an ability to embrace our small size and maybe look at the approach a little differently. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re scouting for talent. And we’re going to go out and get best practices that we possibly can. Then we go to BMT. I recently had a conversation, General Saltzman and I sent, General Saltzman had a guidance and intent out to STARCOM looking at what is it that we specifically need to do to transition civilians into Guardians, civilians into Guardians, that they understand what it means to be a space-minded warfighter, a principled public servant. They embrace our core values. They know grit. They know that teamwork, being a team leader and a team member is foundational to what it is to be a Guardian. What do we need to do to develop that so we can make that transition successful? And then at the end of that journey, when those Guardians get their Space Force patch in the ceremony and they’ve earned the right to be called a Guardian, that is something that they feel they have earned. They earned that through the journey of BMT. That’s the beginning of that. And so we’re looking at what does that mean for us? How do we implement that as we go forward? And then training, subject matter expertise. We have got to make sure that we are giving our Guardians the training and education and the tools they need to succeed in this dynamic environment. How do we do that? What’s the infrastructure required? What do we have on orbit so they can have not only training where they train just like they execute, but it’s hard against a thinking adversary? How do they get the core skills to be a space operator, an intelligence operator, a cyber operator? So when they get to their first duty station and they get into the operational forces, they are ready. And that the weight of effort on the fourth generation squadrons that are within SPOC today, that that’s a minimal lift to be able to get them mission qualified and presented to the combatant commands. But that training also has to be rigorous. And again, when they graduate from that tech school, initial skills training, they feel like they’ve earned the right to be called a cyber operator. They’ve earned the right to be called an intelligence operator or a space operator. And this ties into on the yellow there, you see the fully qualified promotion system. Again, this is something we’ve talked about for the last couple of years. And I’m proud to say that finally in this year, in 2025, working with S1, we initiated the first step in implementing that modernized fully qualified promotion system. And the reason we want to go fully qualified promotion, because if BMT is difficult, and you’ve proven you understand what it means to be a Guardian, you’ve made it through that gauntlet, you’ve joined the team, maybe you’ve earned a strike. We should promote you for that. You go through initial skills training. You’ve made it through tech school. You’ve shown what it, you know, understand what it means to be a space minded warfighter. You’re ready to execute the mission on behalf of the nation. Maybe we should promote you because you’ve earned it. And you get your unit and you get your qualification training done. And then your commander or your or your D.O. says to you, hey, guess what? You have proven a competence and responsibility. I am now presenting you to the combat commands. I’m now asking you to do the mission on behalf of the nation in which you enlisted for and we trained you for. That should be your promotion. And then when you think about E5, and this is what we did this year for the first time. Where we had a centralized board for promotion E5. It was 100 percent opportunity to promote the E5 this year. We didn’t score the records like we normally did from the six and a half to 10 scale. And they do an order of merit and say, OK, this year we can promote 85 percent and we go down. No, it was a go or no go. We drafted out. What are the expectations that we expect to see out of an E4? What are the requirements to be a successful E5? And that was a board charge that we gave to the board. And they went through the records. They looked at the documented performance. They look at what the supervisor said, what the commander said, what their recommendations were. And then based on that standard. They promoted 96 percent to E5 this cycle. 96 percent. It’s not automatic promotion. There’s a standard you have to meet. There’s an expectation to be an E5. But rather than limit that, it was 100 percent opportunity. And we did that this year at a centralized board. Next year, next year, we’re going to take that same document, expectations. What do you expect out of an E4? What do we need out of an E5? And we’re going to give that to commanders, command teams, and let them make that decision at their level. So this is the iteration, the journey that we’re on for fully qualified promotion. And then what I talked about earlier for tech school, BMT, we become mission qualified and presented to the combatant command. That’s coming soon. We’re working through that. But the message is from E1 through E5, Guardians will not be competing against Guardians for promotion. Guardians shouldn’t be competing against the clock for promotion. They’re competing against the standard. What is it that we need from them? They’re proving themselves through training, through experience. They’re accepting greater responsibility. We should reward them from that. And that’s the model for fully qualified promotion you see on this slide. In the first year, I said we did it for the E5, 100 percent opportunity promotion. We promoted 96 percent. All right, so you’re promoted E5, you’re an E4, you’re now promoted and you’re CMR, combat mission ready. You’re presented to the combatant command. What are the expectations? Tactical operations. This is where when we talked about officer enlisted civilian roles and responsibilities, where end strength growth and where we need Guardians, enlisted Guardians specifically, is executing tactical operations. Not going to do it alone, so we’re going to have officers with us. But this is where all that training to get to the point where you are is to get the mission done, the mission of the service. SPAFORGEN, providing combat capability. That’s where you need to focus on and that’s where you need to hone your skill craft to be able to do that. And then when you get up to the tech sergeant level, what are the expectations? That you’re a tactical leader. Subject matter expert is what we need from you. We need our tech sergeants to be competent, where they can lead the crew, provide feedback, be an evaluator, be an instructor, be a tactician. That’s the expectation of the model. And then we talk about master sergeants. Operational leadership. And we say, “Master sergeant is where operational leadership, technical expertise, and influence collide.” Or in the Space Force, we call it a conjunction. But it all comes together. That’s the expectation that we have. Because if we can get this right, if this is where we focus and make the investment, that the talent, the Guardians that we will have, who make senior master sergeant, who make chief master sergeant, will be easy. Because that’s where the focus and emphasis should be on those master sergeants, who are leading those tech sergeants, who are guiding our NCOs and our specialists. And that’s where I think, after the analysis of what we’ve done, the direction that we want to go as a service. So, what’s the call to action after all this? Well, first, let me say to our industry partners and to academia, you see where we’re going. General Saltzman talked about it this morning. If you have ideas, if you have suggestions, I’m all ears. Help me build the cadre of enlisted warfighters that we need. What are the opportunities you maybe have in industry? We already have education with industry. We have other things. But what are the experiential opportunities or ideas that you have to help me build tactical leaders, operational leaders, subject matter experts across all of our core functions? Because we can’t do it alone. Can’t do it alone. To our tactical leaders, if you think that policy just coming out of the Pentagon is going to make that charter reality, you’re wrong. You’re wrong. I need squadron commanders. I need flight commanders. I need supervisors to take an active role in the development of every single Guardian within the formation. It is your responsibility to make sure they understand this chart. They understand where they should be going. They understand talent management, what they should be doing next. When we get together as a centralized talent management board, for example, and we go through the four questions that we do with talent management boards, what has a Guardian done? What do we think the Guardian can do? What are the needs of the service? And what’s in the best interest of that Guardian and their family? Those four questions should not only be asked at a central board at my level. Those are the things I need you to incorporate into your day-to-day mentoring and feedback to make sure that Guardians are on the right path. That what’s their unique journey within that framework that benefits them, benefits the Space Force, benefits the nation and their families. This is a unity of effort to build the future that we all know that we need. So my ask, my challenge to you is help me with that. Embrace that opportunity. Embrace that responsibility. And make sure that every single Guardian knows what their experience should be like. Provide them mentorship. Provide them feedback. Be honest with them. Make sure they understand that the journey, the experience they have is driven by their actions. What are they interested in? What are they good at? What does a service need? It cannot come from the Pentagon and from policy alone. We need tactical leadership engagement. So with that, I want to again thank AFA, thank General Burt, General Skoch. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Semper Supra and this is the way. Thank you.