Keynote Address—The State of the Air Force
September 14, 2026
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Kathleen Ferguson:
Our next speaker has spent more than four decades preparing for and serving in combat, a command pilot with more than 6,300 flying hours. He has flown combat missions in operations Northern Watch, Southern Watch, and Enduring Freedom. Qualified in the F-15, F-16, MC-12, and F-22. He has devoted his career to leading Airmen and strengthening combat power. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 24th Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Ken Wilsbach.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
Doniel, did you start that standing ovation?
Dr. Doniel Wolfe:
It was Dave.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
Okay. All right. CMSAF, thank you so much. Very kind, everyone. Hey, listen, everybody. Good morning, Airmen and Guardian. It’s great to be here with you today. This year, our nation celebrates an extraordinary milestone. For 250 years, Americans have answered the call to defend an idea unlike any in history. Some crossed frozen rivers with General Washington while others stormed the beaches of Normandy or flew over Korea and Vietnam. Still, others stood alert through the Cold War. Many of us in this room answered that same call after the events of September 11th. Today, that responsibility belongs to another generation of Americans who volunteered knowing the world isn’t becoming safer. Strategic competition is intensifying. War continues to evolve, and yet they raised their right hands anyway. When I was invited to speak today, I wanted to spend time talking about those Airmen.
After what our forces experienced over the last year, there is no better way to understand where our Air Force stands today and where we need to go next, than through their stories. Their experiences reinforce three ideas I want you to remember this morning. We must be, one, ready to fight, two, built to endure, and three, integrated to win. General Field, thank you for the support the Air & Space Forces Association gives our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. For generations, AFA has championed American airpower and connected our military with the citizens we serve. Secretary Meink, thank you for your leadership. Your advocacy for our Air Force strengthens our ability to deliver airpower for the nation. And to our new Chief of Space Operations, General Schiess, congratulations. I look forward to working with you as we work together to make the DAF stronger. Most importantly, thank you to the Airmen and Guardians here today, including many of you who have spent time away from your families.
Since becoming the chief, I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Airmen throughout CENTCOM. I have walked flight lines, visited maintenance hangars, and stood inside operation centers where young Americans were managing missions overhead. Let me tell you about a few courageous Airmen I met on my recent trip to the Middle East. They told me about their experience on the flight line during an attack. As missiles were inbound, Airmen sprinted toward bunkers. Moments later, a missile struck nearby in a hangar and the aircraft inside burst into flames. The bunker stood the blast, but the force of the impact damaged the doors so badly they wouldn’t open, trapping the Airmen inside. Picture the scene. Fire was spreading, an aircraft was burning only feet away. Their teammates were trapped inside and they had no way out. Despite the danger, Airmen ran toward the flames. A security forces NCO grabbed a pry bar and forced the door open, calmly communicated with the Airmen trapped inside.
Seconds later, the ejection seat on the burning aircraft ignited, sending glass and metal fragments through the air. Finally, the door gave way and the Airmen escaped and ran for cover. Wherever I went, I saw Airmen with that steely-eyed look of warriors determined to get the mission done and protect their fellow Airmen. More than 30,000 Airmen deployed in support of Epic Fury to a dozen locations. They served alongside soldiers, sailors, Marines, Guardians, and coalition partners. Together, they carried out one of the most complex operations executed in decades. Before I talk about their accomplishments, I want to remember some of the teammates we lost this year. Every mission begins and ends with our people. The Airmen we lost aboard Zeus 95 and Torch 11 and every family forever changed by their sacrifice remind us of why readiness matters and why the work we do carries such consequence.
The crew of Zeus 95 were more than accomplished Airmen. Major Alex Klinner was a husband and a father of three young children who spent the hours before deploying filling his family’s freezer with meals to make life a little easier while he was gone. Major Ariana Savino was fiercely proud of her Puerto Rican heritage, loved flying, and was known for rescuing stray dogs and finding them homes. Technical Sergeant Ashley Pruitt was not only a skilled instructor boom operator, but a loving wife and mother whose care and empathy extended to her fellow Airmen. Captain Badger Koval was a husband to Heather and his first and only love, and a devoted father to their young son. His squadron knew him as a calm presence they could depend upon and a jack-of-all-trade who could build almost anything. Captain Rabbit Angst was the type of person who saw something that needed to be done and simply took care of it. Master Sergeant Pepe Simmons began his career as a defender before becoming a boom operator, and his teammates remember his infectious laugh and the way he made people feel like they belonged.
The Torch 11 crew leaves behind the same kind of legacy. Colonel Evil Watson invested deeply in people. Lieutenant Colonel Journee Estrella led with humility. And Lieutenant Colonel retired Vicky Middleton brought a contagious smile and a sense of humor to every cockpit. Major SMO Davis was a technical wizard known almost equally well for his puns. Major Bolton Dee refused to accept good enough. Major Slate Hovey built relationships that strengthened an entire community. Bobby Smith’s passion for the bomber mission was contagious, while Hustler Rischar never missed an opportunity to talk about the family he loved. They were parents and spouses, sons and daughters, mentors and friends. Their loss belongs first and most deeply to their families. Please join me in a moment of silence to remember each of them. And if you’re so inclined, join me in saying a prayer for their families.
Thank you. Operation Epic Fury will be studied for its scale, precision and speed. Over 38 days of combat operations, the joint force struck more than 13,000 military objectives. 500 aircraft executed 10,000 sorties, an average of more than 250 sorties every day. Our Airmen accomplished this through 1,200 alarm reds while executing 48 airfield repairs and completing more than 420 reportable explosive ordinance disposal long, lonely walks. That walk is exactly what the name suggests, one EOD technician leaving a place of relative safety and approaching a suspected bomb or unexploded munition to render it safe for everyone else. Behind those numbers were thousands of decisions made by Airmen who had to keep the mission moving while the enemy was actively trying to stop them. One was Garrett, a staff sergeant F-15E crew chief from East Texas. He joined the Air Force to travel and see the world. We sure allowed him to achieve that goal, but I’m not sure the Middle East was exactly what he had in mind.
On the second day of Epic Fury, Garrett was on the flight line launching four strike eagles when alarm red sounded. Airmen around him started running for shelter. Garrett’s adrenaline spiked. He knew exactly what that alarm meant. Danger was inbound, but his launch was not complete. A young Airman was working with him and Garrett sent him to the bunker. Garrett stayed. The rest of the team was separated so he armed the weapons and cleared the jet, procedures he had never formally been trained on. While everyone else ran for cover, he decided to stay. Garrett understood why those strike eagles were in theater. He knew they were one of their best lines of defense, so he stayed until the job was done. Only after the last fighter taxied out, Garrett finally took cover. Later, when someone asked why, his answer was simple, his fellow Airmen needed those airplanes in the air.
Garrett wasn’t the only one protecting the mission. Hundreds of miles away, two senior Airmen, Shanea and Nolan tracked a swarm of enemy drones headed toward their base. Shanea joined the Air Force to provide for her family. During the opening days of Epic Fury, she found herself protecting another family, the hundreds of Airmen depending on her. People sprinted for shelter as alarm red announced an incoming attack, but Shanea and Nolan stayed focused on the screens in front of them because every inbound track could be a weapon aimed at their teammates. Shanea is 27 years old and Nolan is 21. Think about the responsibility we placed on these two Airmen. Hundreds of lives depended on them to identify the threats and employee countermeasures. Every second mattered, the stakes were life and death. Together, Shanea and Nolan achieved more than 10 surface-to-air kills that night, defeating threat after threat before it could reach the Airmen they were protecting.
There were moments when they were afraid and most people would be, but courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is overcoming it. They stayed locked on, trusted their training and did the job everyone around them was counting on.
For decades, American air and space power has often operated from a position of sanctuary. Those days are over. We can no longer treat point defense as a side hustle. We must make it a core function of air and space power. That is why today I am announcing two major initiatives that will advance the Department of the Air Force’s point defense mission. First, we will establish the point defense weapon system, bringing together kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities to secure our air bases. Second, we have established a new career field of point defense Airmen. This new career field will be operational in two years. We have already welcomed our first two career field managers, Senior Master Sergeant Andrew Lewis and Senior Master Sergeant Brandon Spears. Senior Lewis is in the audience today. Can you stand up Senior Lewis? And let’s give him a round of applause.
Together, these two new initiatives will strengthen our defenses, reinforce our ability to generate air and space power under fire and protect our greatest advantage, our Airmen and Guardians. Protecting the force and generating combat power are inseparable. We need our Airmen trained, equipped, and ready to fight from the opening moments of a conflict. That brings me to our second imperative, built to endure. During Epic Fury, bomber crews launched from home station, crossed oceans, struck military objectives and returned from sorties lasting over 30 hours. Long before those jets left the chocks, another group of Airmen prepared the ordinance they would deliver to targets in Iran. Collin is a technical sergeant from Dallas. His phone woke him up shortly after midnight. An advanced team needed a position filled and his supervisor asked him to go. Collin went from a routine week to packing a bag and saying goodbye to his wife Jessica and five children in the middle of the night. He didn’t know what was next or when he’d come home. 24 hours later, he was on an airplane heading east.
This is one of the realities of service and it’s familiar for many of us in the room. Sometimes a late night phone call needs an extra long duty day. Sometimes it sends you halfway around the world far from your loved ones. Jet-lagged and tired, Collin went straight to work. He brought together Airmen from three wings to establish two explosive operating locations. With 80 other ammo troops, he assembled weapons for the largest contingency bomber force in decades. His Airmen built more than 1,700 2,000-pound weapons and more than 600 JASSMs. That’s a lot of firepower. They poured blood and sweat into assembling a massive weapons cache and it wasn’t long before they saw their work pay-off. They watched B-1s and B-52s take off with the ordinance they built. When the bombers returned with empty racks, they knew their long days were worth it.
One of the Airmen carrying those weapons into combat was a B-1 pilot with the call sign Rocket. Rocket did not begin his Air Force career sitting in a cockpit. 12 years earlier, he was a C-130 crew chief turning wrenches on the flight line. During Epic Fury, Rocket flew a 34-hour combat mission that required eight aerial refuelings. 11 hours into that sortie, he rejoined behind a KC-135 in darkness and heavy clouds. A high pressure leak sprayed jet fuel across his windscreen, suddenly he could barely see. Think about it. He’s flying a bomber only feet from a tanker at night in the weather and his most important visual references were gone. That’s not a situation you necessarily practice ahead for, but Rocket still had more than 20 hours of mission to go and turning around meant taking his weapons out of the fight. So what does he do? He adapted. Rocket described what happened next as literally refueling by braille. With the tanker crew as his eyes, Rocket transferred the fuel he needed to stay in the fight. 34 hours and eight refuelings make for a pretty long day at the office.
What I love about this story is that Rocket didn’t do it alone. A bomber pilot who couldn’t see depended on a tanker crew to guide him. The tanker depended on maintainers who generated the aircraft. Both depended on Airmen to protect the base, build the weapons and launch the aircraft. That is how our Air Force fights.
His mission demonstrated the importance of endurance. We often describe global strike in terms of range, payload and precision, but those capabilities depend upon ammo troops, maintainers, tanker crews, planners, and thousands of others whose work make that range possible. The same is true of rapid global mobility. Throughout Epic Fury, mobility Airmen transported personnel, munitions, fuel, medical supplies, aircraft parts, and other necessities across multiple theaters. More than 70 million pounds of fuel and 16 million pounds of cargo were offloaded. Peter is a senior Airman from New York who spent nine months in the Middle East as an air transportation Airman. With his team, he moved heavy ordinance, prepared missile systems and downloaded Patriot equipment while ballistic missiles and attack drones repeatedly target their airfield. One of those attacks became very personal. Enemy fire destroyed Peter’s living quarters and nearly everything he had brought from home. Imagine coming back after a 12-hour shift to find the wreckage of your hooch. The few pieces of home he carried halfway around the world, were gone. Peter’s response told me everything I needed to know about him. He said that his possessions could be replaced, but the mission could not.
Behind Peter was an enormous planning enterprise connecting the force across continents. For over 38 consecutive days, our tanker plan produced zero missed rendezvous.
Endurance also requires information. More than 4,000 dynamic targets had to be found, identified, validated and engaged. Remotely piloted aircraft, airborne ISR platforms, cyber operators, space professionals, and countless others, turned enormous amounts of data into intelligence commanders could use. Suit is a first lieutenant with a family tradition of excellence. Both of his grandfathers served in the army. I’m sure they wanted a better life for their kids, which is why his parents chose the Air Force. Today, Suit flies the MQ-9 and carries his family tradition forward. He also scored a perfect 100 on his physical assessment this year, so apparently excellence runs in the family. MQ-9s flown by pilots like Suit supplied critical ISR and kinetic strike capabilities, launching them from bases within range of enemy fires. Suit planned and launched an MQ-9 combat sortie during an active attack. While missiles hit the airfield, Suit taxied out and got his reaper airborne. He handed off control to another crew, then switched to the ground control station to recover a different MQ-9.
His crew destroyed a priority target and then turned their sensors back toward their own airfield to inspect the runway for damage and determine whether operations could continue. The same sensors that were just used to find the enemy were now helping their fellow Airmen determine whether they still had a runway to fight from. By the end of the campaign, Suit logged 100 combat hours, delivered 80 hours of ISR and supervised up to four combat missions at a time. The MQ-9 was a workhorse for combatant commanders during Epic Fury. It provided real-time intelligence, struck 860 targets, and gave our forces the edge while denying the enemy freedom of movement. Airmen like Suit made sure this asset stayed in the fight and maximized its impact. The MQ-9 success demonstrates the need for a capable follow-on aircraft that achieves the same effects with greater survivability, adaptability, and at a lower cost.
Secretary Meink spoke earlier about Massed Modular Aircraft. MMA is designed to deliver the results our combat commanders need. That’s how we stay ahead by moving quickly, investing in new tech, and delivering to our war fighters what they need to win. Technology improved how we quickly find targets and generate combat effects, but it wasn’t the decisive advantage, our Airmen were. They recognized what mattered, adapted when conditions changed, and acted with initiative. Suit’s MQ-9 depended on far more than the aircraft. We need resilient installations, sufficient weapons and fuel, connectivity, and adaptable systems, but resilience alone is not enough. We must connect these capabilities so success in one part of the force creates advantage across the whole.
That brings us to our third imperative, integrated to win. Fighters, bombers, tankers, ISR platforms, cyber, space, and rescue forces became more effective when we integrate them across time, distance and domain. The integration doesn’t happen on its own, it takes Airmen who can see the entire fight and bring those pieces together when the pressure is highest. Peaches is an air battle manager from Texas. She knew exactly what that demanded. Peaches grew up hearing stories from family members who also served. She wanted to continue the family tradition and was commissioned in 2013. During Epic Fury, she found herself in the middle of a story of her own her family will be telling for generations. Peaches led 134 joint and coalition operators responsible for command and control across a complex battle space. Her team supported operations involving more than 1,000 one-way attack drones and 1,200 enemy ballistic missile threats. Those numbers are difficult to comprehend, but for Peaches, command and control was not a collection of symbols moving across a screen. Every symbol represented something real, an aircraft, a threat, a crew, an Airman.
It was during this time, two of those Airmen became isolated inside of Iran. What followed became one of the defining moments of the operation. Over 50 hours, Peaches was one of the many who coordinated the combat search and rescue effort, leading her team to integrate 176 aircraft, fighters, bombers, tankers, intelligence platforms, and Air Force special operations command forces converged on one objective, bringing those Americans home. Think about the complexity of that problem, aircraft operating at different speeds, altitudes, fuel states, with different sensors, weapons, and responsibilities, while an adversary was actively trying to stop them. Maintenance teams generated additional fighters. Tanker crews extended the range and endurance of the force. Intelligence professionals tracked the threats. AFSOC Airmen brought specialized capabilities, need to reach out to our isolated teammates and get them out. Every one of those Airmen was doing something different, yet all were contributing to the same mission.
The Dude44 rescue demonstrates why integration matters. To someone outside of our profession committing that much combat power to recover two people might appear extraordinary. To an Airman, the reason is simple. We make a promise to one another in our Airmen’s creed, I will never leave an Airman behind. If you are isolated, injured, or trapped behind enemy lines, we are coming to get you.
The courage and performance displayed during that mission was so impressive that 10 Airmen received battlefield promotions. I had the distinct honor of promoting six of those heroes, ranging from staff sergeant to chief master sergeant, during a recent trip. Everyone understood that their success depended on someone else doing their job. That is how our air and space forces fight. Operation Epic Fury was not the story of one airplane, one weapon, or one career field. It was Garrett getting an F-15 airborne while rounds were inbound. It was Shanea and Nolan defending hundreds of their fellow Airmen and showing us why point defense must become an enduring capability. It was Collin answering a midnight telephone call to build the weapons our bombers needed to decimate the enemy. It was Rocket and a tanker crew working together to keep his bomber in the fight. It was Peter returning to the flight line after an enemy attack destroyed his living quarters. It was Suit using an MQ-9 to help commanders understand what was happening while his own airfield was being attacked. And it was peaches synchronizing aircraft to bring two Americans back from behind enemy lines.
Around them were 10,000 more. The Airmen supporting and executing these missions came from different hometowns and entered the Air Force for various reasons. They wear their own badges and perform their unique missions. Those stories bring us back to the three imperatives for our Air Force, ready to fight, built to endure, and integrated to win. Epic Fury showed us what those words demand. We need trained Airmen and capable units ready before the crisis begins. We need weapons, fuel, infrastructure, logistics, and connectivity to sustain combat power under attack. And we need to embrace AI and connect our capabilities across platforms, career fields, services, and allies so we can make decisions and generate effects faster than the adversary. As our nation marks its 250th birthday, we are reminded that every generation has been asked to defend something greater than itself. The uniforms have changed and technology has advanced, but the qualities we ask of those who step forward have endured: courage, ingenuity, discipline, and a willingness to put the mission first.
Our Airmen carry that legacy forward. They turn airplanes into combat power, information into decisions, logistics into endurance, and technology into advantage. They bring those capabilities together when the stakes are highest and the outcome matters most. I am incredibly proud to serve alongside you. Together, we will keep our Air Force ready to deter aggression, defend our nation, and when called upon, fight and win. Thank you. Fight’s on.