Next-Generation Air Superiority: How Are We Going to Fight?
March 4, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Well, good morning everybody, and I hope you had plenty of time for breakfast and so all of you should be awake for this. I’d like to welcome you all to our panel on Next-Generation Air Superiority. Now, I don’t think I have to spend a lot of time telling this audience that achieving and maintaining air superiority as well as space superiority, as we heard so eloquently from General Saltzman yesterday, are prerequisites for success in modern warfare. Now our adversaries know this and that’s why they’re working so hard to undermine all of our associated capabilities in both air and space superiority. From next-generation fighters to advanced networks, our adversaries are making the necessary investments to deny our ability to achieve air superiority in the future. At the same time, our Air Force faces many challenges. You’ve heard us say many times before we’re the oldest and smallest and the least ready we’ve ever been. These downward trends come at a time when the demands placed on our Airmen and Guardians are growing each and every day.
Now there comes a point where you all simply can’t do more with less. We need to rebuild our Air Force to meet the demands of the world that exists, not the one that we wish, that demands making the necessary investments to secure tomorrow’s air and space superiority capabilities and capacity. To discuss these realities, I’m honored to be joined by three key air power leaders. First we’re really happy to have with us General Ken Wilsbach, Commander of Air Combat Command. Next is Lieutenant General Dale White, military Deputy Office Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Technology and Logistics. We also have with us Major General Joe Kunkel, Director of Force Design and Integration and Wargaming.
So with that, let’s jump right in. The first question is one I have for all of you to set the stage. So weigh in on this one. And that’s, why is air superiority still an essential imperative? If you had five minutes with a congressperson, what would you say? General Wilsbach.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
Thanks General Deptula, appreciate you having us and thanks for bringing up this really important topic. And with only five minutes, the things that you brought up as a tenet of air power is air superiority. And I’ll contend that we should start talking about air superiority together with space superiority as a combo because you’re likely not going to be able to achieve air superiority in the modern sense without space superiority as well. So I’ve been talking about air and space superiority for the last several months because they’re so integrally… They’re linked. They’re linked.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Combined.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
They’re combined, they’re very much linked. And so that’s the first aspect that I’d like to point out. The next thing is the entire joint force counts on air superiority. So anything else you want to do in the battle space, if you don’t have air superiority, it becomes much more difficult if not impossible.
So if we want to collect intelligence, if we want to do casualty evacuation, if we want to drop some bombs, if you want to sail some ships around or if you want to have some ground maneuver, if you don’t have air and space superiority, you’ll not be able to or you’ll have a very difficult time achieving any of those other objectives. And so there’s been some talk in the public about the age of air superiority is over and I categorically reject that and maintain that. It’s the first building block of any other military operation that you need to establish that if you want to achieve objectives.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good. I think your average congressperson to understand that. General White.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah, no. So I’ll double down on what General Wilsbach said. It is a discussion about air and space superiority. And frankly, I think that too often we run right into the discussion of kit, right? We run right into the discussion of what platform I need, what things? But the reality is the discussion is simply this. The joint community expects us to provide air superiority to have the simple things that we know are required to win the fight. Access, freedom of maneuver, deterrence, all of those things that are required, especially if you have to fight from the inside, number one. And number two, the optionality that’s required that we are responsible to provide to the President of the United States. And I think you start having that conversation and what air and space superiority bring to that fight and exactly how we prosecute it. That’s the discussion you want to have. And then you can start talking about the kit that’s required to do that. And so we really have to focus on really the basic fundamentals of what air superiority has been. And if history tells us anything, number one, you can’t win without it. And number two, if recent history tells us anything, if you don’t have it, it’s going to end up in stalemate.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah. And General Kunkel, before I turn for you, I just want to underline what you just said in the context of doctrine and actual experience, not somebody writing an article who wants to make a name for themselves and make something up not based on reality. Okay, General Kunkel.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
So I think this is fundamental to the Air Force and I think every Airman should be able to explain this. And to put it bluntly, air superiority changes the character of the fight, any fight. And I think sometimes, like you said, General White, sometimes we get lost in the messaging and sometimes we start saying, “Yeah, we need air superiority.” And we ring the air superiority bell, but then we start tying it to kill ratios and OCA and DCA and jargon. What we need to do is we need to communicate in very simple visible terms about how air superiority changes the character of the fight.
And in my mind when I had this discussion, and I think it’s appropriate for all Airmen as I talk about it in past, present, and future. And there’s examples in the past, there’s examples in the present, there’s examples in the future. In the past, General Deptula, Desert Storm is a clear example of what you can do when you have air superiority and how it fundamentally changed that fight, the highway of death on the road from Kuwait to Basra, where in a single night we killed between two and 3,000 enemy vehicles because we had air superiority. Iraq didn’t have it. Look what happened to them. I mean we annihilated them. It fundamentally changed the character that war. Present. If you take a look at what’s going on in Ukraine right now, I mean it’s a stalemate. If one side had air superiority, that fight would’ve ended in three days. It would’ve been over. The bloodshed would’ve been over. The fight would’ve been much quicker. There would’ve been less expenditure of resources.
Now and then I also go into the future, and General Wilsbach, like you said, there’s some people who are saying, “Hey, the age of very superiority is over.” I fundamentally disagree. And many of, we put a pause on NGAD and we put a pause on NGAD to reflect and we did a study on it. And in that study we asked ourselves some hard questions. We said, “Hey, is air superiority dead?” “What does air superiority look like in the future?” “Does the joint force need air superiority?” And what we found is not only in the past, not only in the present but in the future, air superiority matters. The results of this study, well bluntly, what this study told us is we tried a whole bunch of different options and there is no more viable option than NGAD to achieve air superiority in this highly contested environment. But we also found that if we want to be with our joint partners, which we do, we’ve got to achieve air superiority. So past, present, future, it changes the character to fight.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
I do think one thing I want to pile on what you said, Solo, from a force design perspective, and he and I and General Wilsbach are all tied at the hip and how we work and address this. Is that I don’t think there’s any argument that can be made about the need for air superiority. I think the discussion has and will continue to be is how one achieves it. And I don’t think Air Force is sticking its head in the sand and saying there’s only one way to do it. We’re being very open-minded about what different opportunities there are, what different capabilities we might explore and things of that nature. So again, the debate isn’t about whether we need it. I think everybody agrees. History tells us and current times tells us we have to have it. The question is how do we achieve it and how do we think differently about achieving it?
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, I’ll pile on that and make a plug for offensive counter-air because unfortunately some folks, neophytes, only associate air superiority with air-to-air combat. And that’s not true. It’s taking away and denying the adversary the ability to conduct an effective defense. And you can do that many, many different ways other than simply air-to-air. And that’s coming from a 34-year F-15C dude. So there you go. But thanks for the segue too, General Kunkel because this one’s for General Wilsbach and it speaks to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East because they do serve as test beds, if you will for what’s going on in modern warfare. But it’s crucial as you alluded to draw the right lessons from these conflicts. So what key air power observations are you making out of the conflicts that are currently ongoing with respect to air superiority?
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
So let’s compare and contrast two conflicts. One, Ukraine and Russia, which Solo pointed out what’s going on there. Neither side achieving air superiority and you end up with a stalemate. And I think that that’s the big takeaway. If you don’t achieve air superiority, especially if neither side attains air superiority, you’re going to have a stalemate. So well put. The other conflict to look at is with Israel and Hamas and one side has air superiority and can defend its space. So you talked about not just an air-to-air but they’re using surface-to-air to be able to dominate the airspace. And so that air superiority that they’ve established then allows them to be able to create objectives and then achieve those objectives because they have freedom of maneuver across that entire battle space, not only inside of Israel but beyond that. And so that should be our takeaway. We can look and see the differences between those two conflicts. And one is they have achieved air superiority in basically multiple domains and they’re creating the effects on the battle space to achieve their overall national objectives.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good. Now a bit of a follow-up. General Allvin yesterday mentioned it, Mitchell Institute has highlighted it and continue to highlight and that is how should the Air Force train to maintain its air superiority skills and maintain them in top shape? Can you give us some thoughts on that?
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
You want me to go on that one as well?
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, please.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
So I think there’s probably three or four things that we should be concentrating on. And the first one is just one that I think we all ought to acknowledge and work together to achieve. And that is the most important thing we do is fly and fix airplanes. And we’ve been challenged with the fixing part of it lately, which then translates to the number of sorties that we can fly. But one of the aspects of what we do as reps and sets. And so if we can sustain our aircraft to the point where we can fly them frequently and we get our crews reps and sets, they become proficient at what they do. So flying and fixing airplanes is one aspect of that, of just getting enough time in the air to be proficient at your craft.
The other aspect of that is what you do when you do get airborne. And so we have this construct of level one through four or level 100 through 400 training. Day-to-day training all the way up to very large exercises like red flags and bamboo eagles, and being able to work your way through those building block approaches in exercises so that you improve your readiness across the spectrum of those missions that we could be called to do. I think simulators have an absolute important play in all of this because there’s many things that either we choose not to or cannot do in live fly that the simulators allow us to practice in training. And so the simulators are very important here.
And then just one last aspect that we often don’t think about but we should give it some high consideration is contracted adversary air. And the reason I say that is because for the contracted adversary air, or even for the homegrown adversary air that we have with the aggressors in T-38, they’re much less expensive than say generating F-35s or F-twenty-twos to play red air. And some will say, “Well you need the fifth gen to simulate red fifth gen.” Yes you do. But in lieu of saying the entire red force today with say 12 F-22s or F-35s, that cost to generate that on a day-to-day basis is very high. You can supplement with homegrown or contracted adversary air and then you can use your sorties for the fifth gen on blue side. And so those are some things that I think about that will help us to improve our readiness, create deterrent. And if called, we’ll be ready.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah. I want to double down on a couple of things. I love the way General Wilsbach started this. The whole fly and fixed piece. It’s abundantly clear, we have to get into the details of each of our platforms and what it takes to maintain and sustain them at a rate that we can do exactly what was just described. We’ve got to get the reps and sets done. And so I think that with General Richardson at AFMC and each of the MAJCOM commanders and with the chief’s leadership, we’re going down that path. We’re digging in. I’m watching the emails that General Wilsbach has been sending recently asking, digging more into the questions, which is exactly what we want. We need to find root cause, we need to get after it and we need to understand how we not only fix them, but how we make sure we resource it so that we have part support ability and things of that nature. And so we’re doing a lot of introspective work in that area.
The second piece he mentioned, and I don’t want to gloss over this, because I think it’s so critically important, I’m going to use a little bit of a vignette here. I won’t go into too much detail. But a couple of years ago I got to be part of the planning for Bamboo Eagles, some of the work and my team was out there working with all the folks out at Nellis. And there’s this idea that one of the things we need to practice as well is being able to allow the captains and the majors to think outside the box. And the questions they were asking were things that we would normally say, well no, you can’t do that because, or No, that’s not the way we do it. In this particular case, it was me and it was Case Cunningham at the time. And I looked at him and said, “Well, why not?” And allowing them to actually exercise something and think outside of the box and just see how it would work in real time. We need to exercise more of that. And that’s what Bamboo Eagle represents. We’re going to have to continue to fund and resource those types of opportunities because that truly does reflect a level of readiness and I don’t think we’ve practiced enough.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
I may add just one point onto that, and that’s how are we going to generate readiness in the future? And we’re making this transition from a platform-centric Air Force to a system centric air force. And as kill chains get longer and longer, and we look at non-organic kill chains and what it takes to complete those, we need to think about how we train to that whole system. A lot of that’s going to be hard to do in live fly and we’ll have to transition to the simulator for that. But that how do you train the whole thing where you’re getting cues from different domains, it adds a level of complexity that we haven’t gotten to yet.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah, and I think my favorite story, right, everybody knows it when they didn’t want use the northern bomb site, whether they do they had an Airman go to the idle hobby shop and build the two-cent bomb site, right? It’s that kind of thought process, exercising those opportunities.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
But those bomber pilots were flying once a day. So it goes back to resources General Allvin said it yesterday, we’ve showed it in a recent report back in Desert Storm timeframe, 1991, your average fighter pilot was flying over 22 hours a month. Today is flying less than 10. If you’re going to go out and be a golf pro and win all those tournaments, you’ve got folks who are not just going to go play golf once a week because if you do, you ain’t going to win the tournament. Yet, that’s kind of the situation we find ourselves in today. So we need to increase resources in that regard.
And that’s part of why your Air and Space Force Association and Mitchell Institute exist to advocate for those resources. All right. General Kunkel, you’re famous for being right in the center of the Air Force’s future force design. And obviously that comes at a time when the service is navigating tight fiscal constraints. While China just introduced two new prototypes of advanced stealth aircraft, how are these two realities, fiscal constraints along with growing threat considerations affecting your future force design?
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Yeah, let me be very blunt. Fiscal constraints do not change what it takes to win. Fiscal constraints don’t change what it takes to win. So we didn’t go out and design an air force that said, “Hey, we can win at this funny level.” We can win in this way and at this funny level, we can win in this way. That didn’t happen. We know what it takes to win. It takes all of the air force. It takes air superiority. And if America wants to make those investments to win, then we’ll do so. If America doesn’t want to make those investments, then we’ll take more risk. And I’m not so foolish to think that this is a black and white decision on win versus loss. There’s a degree of risk involved, but if we fund more Air Force, we decrease operational risk, we decrease the risk of our policymakers. It is true that our adversaries are moving quickly. They are. That’s integrated into the force design. It’s got to be. That’s why when you see the force design, what we’ve done is we’ve taken a hard look at how the adversary impacts us and we’ve designed to that. So that’s how you see that in the force design. But I’ll double down on. What it takes to win is not driven by fiscal choices. Fiscal choices should be driven by what it takes to win.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
No, that’s very good. And again, these are some of the points that we’ve been trying to make for quite a while, and that is the strategy resource mismatch debate. We just released a position paper last week on this. I’d encourage everyone in the audience to read it. We made the case for a significant plus up in the Air Force and Space Force annual budgets. And so my follow-on question to you, do you see a little bit of encouragement in some of the Congressional budget blueprints that if passed by Congress could increase the overall top line by 100, 150 billion?
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Yeah, I do. I look at the reconciliation, which is what you’re talking about, and we’re looking at 25, we’re looking at potentially not having a budget in 25 and then we’re looking at potentially going into 26 with a continuing resolution as well. The reconciliation is going to be just part of what gives us opportunities to start new programs. It’ll help us out with this. I think all of us have been in the discussions about reconciliation and I think the Air Force is going to do extremely well in those discussions. I think you’ll see the Air Force on top.
I think that also goes into this, the 8% budget cut. We’re not doing an 8% budget cut because we’re going to cut the military. We’re doing an 8% budget cut because we realize there’s got to be a shift in TOA between organizations, between services. So I think we’re also going to do well when you take a look at the 8% budget cut and then how it’s reallocated among the services. Air Force provides easy policy options for decision makers. We always will. More Air Force makes sense now more than ever.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Great.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah, I think one of the key things there is what you just said and very well stated, I think we have to recognize that lethality is through the lens of the beholder that someone’s going to get to define what that looks like. And it’s that balance between fiscal resourcing and operational risk. And so I think that we have to continue to communicate the imperative that is air superiority and making sure as we get into these conversations about what resourcing should look like, we need to make sure we communicate exactly what the Air Force delivers to the joint force. And sometimes, again, the caution I give is sometimes we get really wrapped up in the kit and individual programs and in reality it’s really what does it mean to have more air force? What does it give the joint force? We need to stay focused on that narrative.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
Go ahead, Cruiser. I’m bringing it back to the beginning of your question, because the premise was the revelation that China disclosed some six generation capability and those six generation aircraft we believe are for air superiority, which is the whole point of this panel. And to Dale and Solo’s point. We have some choices to make as we observe what China has produced and we can presume we know what that’s for for air superiority, what are we going to do about it? And I don’t believe that nothing is an option.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good. Now let’s shift the conversation just a little bit. I’d share with you as a warfighter, I didn’t want just-in-time delivery, I wanted mountains of munitions stockpiled so we didn’t have to worry about whether we were going to run out or not. Now, General White, how is the Air Force acquisition enterprise working with industry to increase our weapons production capacity or when will the programmers start to accumulate more munitions in peacetime knowing that we’re probably not going to get back to the industrial capacity that we used to have?
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah, so let me start by saying exactly how you started the conversation. The just-in-time in a highly contested fight with a peer rival does not work. Period. We have to get to a place where we are at a fight-tonight posture, and the only way to do that is to be able to build a base of foundational capability. And so first and foremost, I think everybody wants to start with the business relationship. I don’t think we start there. I think we start with the force design, and that force design will inform us of a couple of things. What does the mix look like? High, low, and then that’s going to define exactly how we engage with industry and what we think our priorities are. Secondarily, we have to rethink how we acquire munitions. And what I mean by that is we need to understand that the future is one of open architecture. We have to be able to have munitions that have an open architecture that we can continuously build at a rate and scale that we have not seen before. Technology is our friend on the production side, we just have not really pursued it at probably the level we need to.
The next thing is, and I was having a conversation with a few of the CEOs the other day, is we really need to look at what it means and how we set up some of our acquisition contracts and making sure we put industry in a position that they can scale at rate, especially when you think about things that it’s not just about building that foundation but it’s also about reconstitution. And then I think we have to get after the basics. And this is where I think it’s really important, that open architecture piece, the digital engineering aspects of what we can do with weapons, understanding the mix of weapons we need.
Sometimes, I know Solo and I have conversations about low-cost weapons and what they bring to the fight and how they might impact the force design and what capabilities they bring. And then I think realistically like everything else, we need to make sure we have a firm grasp on things like rare earth minerals, microprocessors, things of that nature so that we can make sure we have everything we need. The reality is our supply chain is somewhat fragile and has been post-COVID. We have to reinforce that.
And I think the last piece is, and I have this conversation a lot from a weapons perspective, we have got to really get a firm grasp on what our priorities are. And I’m not talking about just as an air force, as a joint force because what’s really going to happen is when you think about the number of providers we have, we start running into each other and we’re all using that same supply chain. I think as a nation we need to make sure we have the right priorities so that we have that foundational stockpile that we need when the balloon goes up. And so a lot of focus in that area. Bob Lyons, our PEO for munitions down at Eglin, he is laser focused on this. And so we will continue to pursue that and we understand, hey, the end game is not just in time, it’s fight tonight.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
General White. Let me add on to that and just provide an operational perspective on this. We have wargamed a lot and we’ve gone through these fights and what this highly contested fight looks like. And we also see what happens when you run out of weapons. When you run out of weapons, it turns into a meat grinder very quickly and the side that runs out of weapons Loses very fast. So we need to have the stockpiles, but we also need to be able to build weapons at the rate that we are expending them. And I think you get to that, to some of the conversations we’ve had about this high-low mix.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
I think it’s worthy of expanding on this high-low mix just a bit because we’ve spent a lot of our time in the public talking about these very exquisite weapons that are unbelievably expensive. And we need some of those, but we don’t need to spend all of our money on those most expensive because we can have the lower cost, the low end if you will, that perhaps can cause the adversary to run themselves out of weapons. And it’s this mix, I think, that’s the art of what we need to do as we go forward into the future of yes, we’re going to need some exquisite, but we’re going to need a mass as well. And those low-cost weapons that we can mass and maybe cause them to run themselves out of weapons are the part that will be the art for what we need to decide on as we go into the future.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
And I do think, and I know many of folks in the room have met with some of the new potential suppliers and vendors on the low-cost end of things, and I think it does provide an opportunity for us to fill out that middle tier prime industrial base. And you’re going to get some non-traditionals, you’ll get companies that you wouldn’t normally deal with and you’ll also have the traditionals that you have in there. And so you want to talk about capacity. It’s also the capacity of the industrial base and not getting tied to just one or two companies, but getting into a place where especially on the low-end side, the barrier to entry is much lower and being able to leverage that as a strategic capacity as well.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Yeah, less competition mindset, more complimentary mindset.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Now many people, and we alluded to this earlier, think about air superiority from a kinetic standpoint, missiles, bombs, guns. However, non-kinetic means are increasingly vital. We all recognize that. And that’s why the arrival of the EA-37B is so welcome.
So Solo, how are wargamers working to better account for non-lethal capabilities in modeling simulation and war fighting gaming?
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Yeah. I would go back and step above the war gaming to the what do we need to do? And what we’re really talking about is how do you drive down the threat? How do you drive down the impact of the threat in our air operations and how do you drive down the threat and its impact to how we generate combat from the ground? And non-kinetics are vitally important to that. And also non-kinetics expose more of the adversary kill chain. And when you look at particularly these long-range kill chains that all of us are developing and China’s developing, those long-range kill chains have many attack surfaces that we can attack. Some of some of them you can attack kinetically. A lot of those attack surfaces you can really get at with non-kinetics. And that’s where we’re focusing. How do you provide those and how do you model those in modeling a simulation, that’s something we are still working on. I know that in the joint simulation environment that we’re working on physics-based models that get ourselves, to these interactions between non-kinetics, but that’s something that still needs work. But the bottom line is, but the non-kinetics exposed and attack our adversary in different ways, enabling joint force maneuver and getting to the point of this conversation, getting us to a point where we actually can’t achieve it as priority.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
And I think Solo and I have had this conversation, this is one that is near and dear to my heart because I do believe it’s going to be so instrumental in the fight. And we have to get away from this theoretical capability that is real-time reprogramming and getting to something that is truly an operational reality and not only just for our own force, the technology is there to do this, we need to go all in and lean into the capability. And then we also need to expand that to international partners and think about interoperability and how that fits inside the whole non-kinetic construct. And I know we’ve done a lot of work with ACC the 350th and other folks. That’s really the path to the future. And General Wilsbach know this as well as anybody, it’s truly about setting the conditions in many cases.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
I find that we act like non-kinetic effects are new and they’re really not. I mean, we’ve been doing non-kinetic effects for probably a century. During World War II, there was information operations that were taking place and certainly we used jamming and there was chaff and there was deceptive events that were occurring in Vietnam. We were decoying SAMs to be able to put iron on Saigon and so on and so forth. And as time goes on, it gets more complicated. Obviously there’s effects in space, there’s an effects in the atmosphere, there’s effects in cyber. And what the idea now is to stack those effects so that they’re combined with the kinetic events that are occurring so that you can achieve your objectives. And the fact is that if you don’t include these non-kinetic effects, oftentimes the kinetic alone is not good enough to achieve your objectives. And we’ve got folks going through weapons school and we incorporate these non-kinetic effects into our simulators and in all of our exercises so that it becomes muscle memory and it becomes the way that we go to war is we stack effects. Some are kinetic, some are non-kinetic, some are deceptive, but that’s the way that we are training so that we will be ready to take the fight to any potential enemies.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good. Now General Wilsbach and everyone recalls what happened in October of last year when Israel conducted an extraordinarily effective strike with US-made F-35s that penetrated into the heart of Iran. And just didn’t bypass those advanced surface-to-air missile systems provided by the Russians, but killed them along with many other targets that they wanted to take out. And then they came back a thousand miles with no losses. There weren’t any drones that can do that. And at Mitchell and AFA were huge fans of both manned and unmanned aircraft, but it’s not an issue of either or, it’s both. Can you speak a bit to the continued value of employing piloted aircraft as a part of our family of systems?
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:
Well, first of all, I agree with you. I think it’s both. We obviously use quite a bit of uncrewed platforms to do our business in the we’re we heard the chief talking yesterday about the advent of CCAs beginning flying. Very soon we stood up the unit at Creech to accept those jets and we will start flying them very soon. We’ve been doing quite a bit of simulator work with incorporating manned and unmanned teaming, and we believe that there’s some value to that as we go into the future. But to your point, in the 2025, we don’t have the artificial intelligence that we can pluck pilots out of aircraft and plunk AI in them to the degree that the AI can replace a human brain. Someday we will have that, I trust, but right now we don’t. And so it does require this manned and unmanned teaming as we go forward. Again, in the future, maybe not, and it would be great not to put humans at risk in the battle space, but for right now, the human brain is the best intelligence that we have.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah. And I think this is a consequential time as well. I think General Wilsbach said it best. It’s transitory. I mean, we’re in this place where we are improving the artificial intelligence aspects, the human machine teaming, all those areas are growth areas, but we have to iterate to the outcome and I think that’s we’re the path that we’re on. And so I think clearly the average citizen, the average person can see that we’re going to be in a place where we’re going to have these capabilities using autonomous systems and so forth. And I would remind everyone, I mean we still don’t have self-driving cars, we still don’t have commercial airliners that just fly completely without a human in the loop. We are still reliant. And so as we walk down this warfighting path, we’re going to have to iterate to the outcome and it’s going to take some time. But I think this Air Force and I… Well, I don’t think I know this Air force is up to the task. I think CCA is going to put us on that path with some of the things we’re doing there. And I think that we will grow as well with the experimental ops unit and how we use this capability as a function of time.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
I might just add one more perspective on that, and I think there’s this American way of war that we don’t generally discuss. And that American way of war is like always advancing, always putting the knife on the throat of the enemy, always having options. And all fights collapse. From the history of war, fights always collapse and eventually you end up fixing bayonets. I think the same is going to be true with this future fight. And you’re going to want to be in a position where there is someone that can continue to take the fight to the enemy when the autonomy breaks down, when the links break down, I think you want someone there that can continue to put the knife on enemy’s throat, and I don’t see us fully stepping away from manned aircraft ever.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Okay. Hello, real quick. We’re running out of time, but budget pressures have obviously caused a decline in air force capacity. The problem is that threats are headed in the other direction. We’re seeing growing threats in every AOR. This extends to air superiority. So how’s the force design helping advocate for these capacity demands to make sure we’re buying the right numbers, quantity of aircraft.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
So yeah, I think there’s a capacity and a capability and we’ll make sure we have the right capacity and we’re advocating for the right capacity. Frankly, there’s a numbers game that I think we know. I think you’ll also see the force design advocating for the right capabilities. As was said previously, the joint force doesn’t dictate that air superiority is done by F-22’s and AMRAAM’s, although that’s really fun. There’s other ways in which we can achieve air superiority and the force design is going to talk through that as well. I’ll give other folks an opportunity to.
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah, no, I’ll double down on that. And I think also when you think from that perspective, the capacity piece also comes to what General Wilsbach started with, it’s the readiness capacity is also generated with readiness. And when you look at the age of our fighters, I mean, you’re talking on average 28, 29 years old. One thing I never forget is the airplane gets a vote. And so to be able to generate that level of capacity and readiness is going to be critically important. And so we’re going to have to be very selective about how and when and what we buy. And it’s going to be a combination of that transitory path that we’re on of capabilities. But I agree right now for the foreseeable future, it’s that balance between both manned and unmanned and making sure we can meet the needs of the joint force.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Okay. General White real quick. People often think we’re turning to autonomy to drive down cost. Whether that plays out or not is still an open question, but I think at mass, a more important question. We’re looking at autonomy because the technology affords unique mission advantages. Could you talk a bit about the benefits of autonomy as they apply to collaborative combat aircraft?
Lt. Gen. Dale White:
Yeah. It allows for greater optionality from a lethality perspective. First and foremost, you can do things. There’s optionality with respect to risk. There’s optionality with respect to survivability. All of those things become real. I think the other part is we pride ourselves with our Airmen being the smartest Airmen in the world. And the reality is, this is where the threat is taking us because our adversaries are doing very similar things. We can’t sit back and just watch. And so I will tell you as General Kelly who was ACC commander said at AFA a couple of years ago, from an autonomy perspective and an AI perspective, we need to put this capability in the hands of our captains and let them run with it. And I think we need to exercise those options. It’s going to bring greater capability to the force. We just need to let it inculcate our force and let it do it in a natural sense and we’ll step our way there. But it brings incredible capability in the sense of just that optionality and survivability, because you have decision space you didn’t have before.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Okay. We’ve hit the end of our TOT. Before I let you all go, I’d encourage all of you to visit your AFA Mitchell Institute booth, which is way down at the end, pass the entrance to the technology exposition and pick up some of those papers that are out there on any topic you’re interested in, but highlight some of the stuff we’ve seen. So please join me in thanking our panelists and have a great air and space power kind of day.