Keynote Address

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Gen. Dan Caine:

Thanks. Thanks, I appreciate it.

I don’t know that my college professors would say I bring a whole lot of intellect to much, but it’s an incredible honor to be here. Thank you. I’m incredibly impressed also by the amount of people in this room, given that it’s so early on a Wednesday morning, after a big night at the Gaylord. So thanks for showing up, I definitely appreciate the value of caffeine, and all other associated products on mornings like this.

Mr. Secretary, Chief, Chief, somewhere around here, Mr. Undersecretary, former generals, Vice Chief, there he is right there, SEAC, members of the joint force, senior enlisted leaders, distinguished colleagues, many of which who poured a whole lot into me during my journey of life and leadership. Thank you industry teammates, and of course members of the media in the back. But most importantly, our Airmen and Guardians, thank you for being here, traveling from all over the world to come spend time together, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here. It’s humbling for me.

It’s also humbling for me to think about 25 years ago, just this week, as we marked 25 years since September 11th, 2001. A quarter of a century later, we all still remember the 184 American lives lost at the Pentagon, thousands lost in New York City, and the 40 heroes of Flight 93. I know you’ll hear from General Sasseville and Heather Penney later on but I, for one, think of them often. And the bravery that it took, knowing full well what was going on on the ground, for them to move forward, assault forward, and begin to fight back. It’s extraordinary. I remember the first responders who ran towards danger, who ran upstairs, the families who continue to carry their memories forward and a nation that always refuses to break. That day shaped the careers of so many of us in the room right now, whether it steeled our resolve for those of us that were in the service at that time, or inspired the many in this room to go join our joint force, to reaffirm our commitment to protect and defend our great nation.

For 25 years, our joint force has fought a particular kind of war. We operated largely in a counterinsurgency paradigm, one in which we possessed decisive advantages in the air, in the electromatic spectrum, logistics, and force protection. We lived in a CAST Act, where freedom of maneuver was assured. That experienced shaped a generation of war fighters and produced a lot of hard-earned expertise, but it also focused much of our forces on missions conducted from positions of relative advantage.

Today, my brothers and sisters, we must be clear-eyed about the environment ahead. Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rear areas, or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment. Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now. So the joint force is prepared to fight, endure, and win in global contested environments from the seabed to cislunar space.

The demands right now on our joint force are not theoretical. We have enduring national security imperatives to defend our homeland, secure our borders, and protect US interests throughout our own hemisphere, while also facing persistent kinetic operations in the Middle East, sustained competitions in the Pacific and nearly a five-year war in Europe. Whether it’s the Golden Dome priorities guaranteeing unimpeded military and commercial access from the Arctic to the Antarctic, America’s joint force must be ready. And taken together, these challenges defy simple, historic solutions.

You and I are living and leading in complex and dynamic times. I often say that Tom Clancy on his most inspired day could not have come up with the situation that we are living and leading in right now. And the challenges are not isolated from one another. Our adversaries may be geographically distributed and dispersed, but they’re increasingly connected. They share technology, intelligence, weapons, and economic support. They’re studying our battlefields of the past and our battlefields currently, and they’re adapting quickly, and seeking new ways to challenge our advantages.

That is why readiness cannot begin after a crisis starts. Our military, our joint force, each and every one of you and your families, are America’s ultimate insurance policy. And as painful as it is, you got to buy insurance before the event happens. We must continue to invest rapidly across a range of military capabilities before a crisis exposes the cost of that delay. And the character of war is changing, and time is of the essence. While the fundamental nature of war will always remain the same, a clash of human wills, the character of war, how we fight, the speed at which we fight, is changing really, really fast. As I said before, today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space, and I highlight the announcements this week by the CSO, through cyberspace and across the information environment. Information moves so fast that leader decision times has compressed from weeks down to days, down to seconds. In the future fight, advantage will go to the side who can see first, who can understand first, decide first, and act first, and along the way be a learning organization.

And no factor is accelerating change as fast as artificial intelligence and advancing cyber capabilities. AI is here now and it’s already changing the way military see, sense, decide, and act. And across the joint force, we’re putting AI to work every single day to move faster, to make better decisions through active adaptation, on every single battlefield by leaders in your joint force.

And I’ll share a story about what I mean. On June 8th of this year, after a US Army Apache AH-64 went down near the coast of Oman, US CENTCOM launched a rapid responsive joint search and rescue effort to recover the crew. That response drew on the totality of the joint force, and ultimately was required to use enabled unmanned vessels to participate in the rescue of downed US service members for the first time ever. That capacity did not appear overnight. It came from the men and women of Task Force 59, CENTCOM’s forward-leaning, unmanned, joint maritime unit, who spent the last several years testing, integrating and operationalizing unmanned systems and AI in one of the most demanding and kinetic environments on earth right now.

What helped make this possible was not a bunch of general officers and flag officers. What made this possible was a bunch of entrepreneurial sailors and members of the joint force, on watch floors at piers, managing networks of unmanned systems across thousands of miles of water, and using AI to turn massive amounts of data into a crisp, clear, perfect maritime picture that allowed us to go grab those two soldiers in the water.

The second example I want to share points in the other direction, not how quickly we are using these tools, but how quickly these tools are changing the threat. In Ukraine, we see first person drones, first person view drones, operating in heavily contested EMI environments, some now using AI enabled computer vision to continue to drive towards targets, even when there’s no GPS or the links are cut. That gives small units affordable precision, and shows how quickly software and autonomy are changing what is possible at the tactical edge.

And the results are stark. In certain locations on the front line of troops right now, the life expectancy of a new Russian recruit arriving on the front lines is as little as 20 to 30 minutes. Think about that. This is what happens when low cost precision is fielded fast, adapted quickly, and scaled across the battlefield. The price of lethal exchange is decreasing day over day. One wonders what the future of close air support looks like, but I am comforted by the fact that each and every one of you are in this room thinking about that.

Taken together, these examples from the Straits of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine, show how quickly technology is changing the character of war. And this means our joint force needs to do two things at one time. First, we need to prepare the joint force to win in this kind of conflict. We have to assume, from now on, that our formations will be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum, and tracked in real time. And we have to transition the joint force to be prepared to fight and win our future wars by generating and delivering lethality at scale with an agile, optimized, high-low mix of combat capabilities, to give the young members of the 2.8 million member all-volunteer joint force, the tools that they need before they need them.

Simply stated, the joint force needs the following from each and every one of you, whether you’re an Airman or a Guardian. Our United States Air Force must generate combat power, mobility, and strike, and be prepared to fight and win while under multi-domain attack. We must continue to ensure that the United States of America can strike anywhere on the globe at the time and place of our choosing, and sustain that force. Our United States Space Force must provide unrivaled space superiority, and sustain the associated networks, domain awareness, data advantage that the joint force needs, to win in space both now and in the future. And I know each and every one of you, and your families, work tirelessly every day to deliver. And we need you.

Let me shift now to something that’s very important to myself and the joint chiefs that are here with me. Because in the end, our joint force’s ability to deliver on these challenges comes down to one thing, American leadership. And we all have critical roles to play right now. From the senior leaders in this room, our job is to remove the barriers in front of you, accept smart risk, and give you the tools, the young Airmen and Guardians, to give you the tools that you need to go get after it. To have your backs, and enable you to do the jobs that you need to do.

I’m really talking right now to the O-3s and below in this room, your enlisted equivalents, and your civilian counterparts. What I’m about to say is really directed at the younger leaders in the room right now. I need your help. I need your leadership. In the next conflict, you will lead and make decisions in the environment that I just described. To do that, you’re going to need to master three things. Context, adaptation while in contact with an enemy, and of course leadership.

On context, your operating environment. In today’s world, tactical actions do not stay tactical for very long. You need to understand your operating environment much more than the chiefs and I did when we were younger. You need to understand how a decision in air space and cyberspace fits into the larger joint force picture. And you need to be curious, not just on what’s happening right now, but why this is happening at the speed of the fight that you’re going to be in.

Second, I need you to be adaptive leaders. The fight will not wait for perfect requirements, perfect processes or perfect information. You must always be able to recognize when the old way is no longer sufficient, get close to the problem, and help build a better solution. That doesn’t mean I need everybody in the room or out on the internet to be a code writer. I don’t. Certainly need some of you to be able to do that, by the way. But what I need you to be able to do is to connect the Airmen and Guardians closest to the problem with the tools, the trust and the freedom to solve it.

I’ll give you a recent personal example. Often, most days when I walk in the White House to advise the president, I need to understand the full and complete information environment. I need to know what the president or other world leaders are saying, what they’re thinking, what’s going on in the markets, what’s going on with the militaries around the world, and what’s gaining traction. When I stepped into my role as the chairman, I quickly realized I could not see these things. The information environment was complex and always changing, and I spent hours reading and trying to understand an ever-changing environment, and we needed to change something. That matters because the president is the ultimate consumer of information. And if I was not current on what he was seeing or thinking, then I was behind in my role in representing the joint chiefs, that was not acceptable.

A young entrepreneurial sailor on my team, we call him Wald Comma G, saw that gap. It’s a pretty cool call sign. I mean, some of us have Thor, or Apollo, or Leonidas. He’s got Wald Comma G. He saw this gap. I did not have to tell him what to do. I did not have to tell him how to do it. He just did it. He got close to the problem. He started to evaluate options. In the end, he figured out on his own how to build code, and he created a common operating picture that I use literally every single day to see, sense, and understand what’s happening in the environment around us.

This is what we need out of all of you. The real lesson is not the use of breakthrough technologies, it’s the ability to adapt and innovate in contact. It’s the importance of getting the right teammates close to the problem. And one of the things we do well as Americans is adapt in contact, something our adversaries will always struggle to do. What America does best, what our joint force does best is we handle multiple simultaneous contingencies. We innovate on the X, we work through the problems, we focused on what’s essential, and we deliver the outcomes for the joint force.

This leads me to the third and final thing I need from you all, and that is joint leadership. On May 22nd, 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, the Army published Field Service Regulation 100-5. Chapter Three is about leadership, and most people think General George C. Marshall, the then Chief of Staff of the Army, wrote it himself. And we’ll get this published and posted on our website.

The document, that chapter in particular, is filled with insights into what those leaders were thinking at that historic time. Right at the beginning of that chapter, it reminds us that humans are the fundamental instrument in war. Other instruments may change, but that remains relatively constant over time, and it holds true to this day. The technology that we fight with will change, networks will change, software code will change, OFPs will change, but the need for trusted, capable, lethal leaders will not. We can field better sensors, we can field better networks, we can bring autonomy and we will, to the joint force,. But none of it will matter without leaders who can build trust, make decisions under fire at speed, and move forward and fight through combat related pressure.

And here’s what this looks like in real world. On Monday, I had the incredible privilege of being at RAF Lakenheath, and I heard from the joint force. One of the briefers was a recently graduated 05 maintenance squadron commander, call sign Grind, and he had the honor of commanding in combat. He told me the story of his young Airmen with pride in his voice, of what they did on the flight lines forward, during multiple days of combat operations. He shared the incredible stories of not the O’s, the officers, but the enlisted team, the NCOs out on the ramp launching jets while the airfield was under attack, day after day after day. They recognized immediately that if they were going to keep the pace and tempo required to generate combat effectiveness, the old way of doing things was not going to work anymore. So they adapted on their own, taking risk into account. They retrained their teammates, got all the approvals that you got to get to do these kinds of things, but in the end, delivered.

No one told these folks to do this, they just did it. And this is the strength of America’s joint force. We are going to face ever increasingly complex threats, but we’ve got non-commissioned officers in the Air Force, in the Space Force, and in the joint force who will recognize the problem, adapt quickly, and turn solutions into actions. And to the enlisted members in the audience here and then online, you must know from the SEAC and I, and from the joint chiefs, that we all view you as the greatest component of our military force. You are the envy of the world. Your ability to lead in contact with an enemy and figure it out is extraordinary. You solve hard problems every single day, and I could not be more grateful for what you and your families do every day.

This is why the teammates to the left and right of you matter more than anything. In our profession of arms, no one succeeds alone. Guard and scale those relationships, and your job is to take new capabilities and make them lethal and useful in the fight. Tell your leaders what is working, and tell them what is not working, and keep the joint force relevant. And be builders. Build capability, build leaders every single day.

Never forget that in the conflicts and contact that we’ll have with enemies in our future, speed, surprise, and violence of action will always be key to the joint force success, but we owe it to the force to make sure that we remove constraints from each and every one of you, and our people need to be freed up to do that. And in this room right now, we have founders, funders and fighters. We have tech pioneers, the engineers, defense industry leaders who build capability and capacity. And as I said as I started, most importantly, the members of the United States Air Force and Space Force, we must cooperate more together to move at the speed of relevance. We cannot expect industry to invest in capacity, manufacturing, or top talent when we’re moving requirements around, but we have to be able to adapt more quickly. That means sharing risk across government and industry. It means moving faster on both sides, and we must always focus on outcomes and not activity.

So where do we go from here, my brothers and sisters? To the junior leaders and young innovators in the room, your mission is clear. Get after it. Understand the context, understand the technology, and lead with boldness. Do not wait for someone to hand you a permission slip to solve a problem. To our industry partners, your charge is just as vital. Move faster, deliver outcomes that can survive first contact with an enemy, deliver quality weapons, deliver them on time, with shorter lead times and lower costs.

And I realize we all need capital to do this, and that means senior leaders in Washington across the entirety of the United States government, also need to deliver. We owe this to the all-volunteer force. We must move together, because the window to build the force that we need is closing. We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time.

As I close after talking far too long, I hope that we can all remember right now, as we sit here at nine o’clock in the morning in Washington DC, that as we’re lucky enough to sit here right now, an American Airman is airborne in a jet, in a defensive counter-air CAP overseas. A Guardian is watching over that Airman right now, to make sure that that Airman is safe and secure. A deck crew is launching jets off the front end of a carrier at night, and the Marines are out there doing what they do, along with the Coast Guard and the Army. Each and every one of them, each and every one of the members of the joint force are out there at the edge of freedom right now, so we can be here. And they’re counting on us to deliver.

I ask us all also, right now, to remember our fallen from that day 25 years ago, and especially their families. And every fallen teammate in the days that followed. We must move now. So I’ll leave you with two simple questions in closing, as we charge each other to deliver for the joint force. If not now, then when? And if not the leaders in this room, then who?

Thank you very much for having me. Stay frosty, and now let’s get back to work.