Winning Tomorrow with a New Force Design
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. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Thank you, everybody, and welcome back. We thought long and hard about who we were going to invite up here after lunch. And these three gentlemen have promised to keep you at the very edge of your seat with every one of their answers, and we’re going to hold them to that. Yesterday, I think the Chief of Staff, the Chief of Space Operations, did a great job outlining the important warfighting discussions that we will have in the coming days. We face a rapidly evolving threat environment, and the way we wage war is changing. As General Allvin laid out, “We need more Air Force and we need it now.” Yet, recapitalization of our force has slowed for over three decades as multiple administrations slashed the Air Force funding to pay for counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continued to evolve.
Today, China’s aircraft fleet is the newest, largest, and most ready in its history. Their satellites have increased over 670%. From less than 110 years ago to over 1,000 today. Last year the PRC released videos of an ostensibly sixth-generation aircraft. We must rebuild our military, reestablish deterrence, be ready to deter or defeat enemies when called upon. And that is what we’re going to talk about today. Our panelists task was shaping that future Air Force, so it can do all of the task required. Please welcome Lieutenant General Dave Harris, Deputy Chief of Staff Air Force Futures. Major General Joseph Kunkel. (In case you didn’t know his name was Joseph.) Joseph Kunkel, Director of Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming. And Brigadier General Ryan Keeney, Director of Concepts and Strategy. And we’re going to start right off with General Harris. General Harris, we’ve heard General Allvin say, “Our defense needs more Air Force.” How are you all planning to meet that challenge, because that seems to fall right in your lap?
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
First, thanks Burt. Thanks for having me here today, appreciate it, and for everybody out there, appreciate the time to be able to talk to you a little bit about this topic. First off, more Air Force, and what does it mean? If I had to put a bottom line on this, it means options for the president. When we started down this road, I want to say four or five years ago with Force Design and actually trying to put one together, what we did is we bend it and we bend it with, there will be a NORAD NORTHCOM component, there’s a STRATCOM component and there’s a power projection component to this. So putting it all together and you look at what the forces we have today, and what you have to parse out for the homeland defense for the strategic deterrence mission, how much does that really give you to power project?
Because power projection is a key part of our homeland defense as well, as you know. All of that said, I would tell you that the way that we look at more Air Force and the way that we look at more options is we’re going to be the first ones on the front door. And if we’re there ready to respond, we got to be able to do more than just kick the door down. We have to be able to be able to deliver decisive power, meet objectives, but yet still defend the homeland and still maintain that part of deterrence that we hadn’t thought about before, both nuclear and conventional.
The other part is I’m going to go back to a little bit of my background and give a little bit of maybe a non-traditional approach to what does it mean for more Air Force. I think our Airmen today are ready. I know they’re ready. And if called upon to go to a crisis they’ll respond and they’ll respond well. Our job is to be able to look into the future and to see what tools they need to be successful in the future to do the same. Reference your comment on the videos, what’s out there, what are the threats that we’re up against, and how do we give the right tools and the right equipment to the Airmen to be successful? And again, going back to the SOCOM piece, I still believe that humans are more important than hardware. And if you get these applications as capability into the hands of our airmen early, they’ll be able to modify it, they’ll be able to reorganize it, they’ll be able to tweak the capability and then again, organize, train and equip it appropriately.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
I think there’s, I’d like to add on to that, there’s also this, the Air Force provides policy options for our decision makers that frankly aren’t offered elsewhere, right? It’s really easy and we’ve been used as that tool over and over and over again for all of our careers, because we provide frankly options to the president that are acceptable, palpable, provide a reasonable deterrent to our adversaries. So, I think as you look at the way we’ve been used, what we’ve done for the last 30 years, but also in the future and what we expect, I think we become that tool of choice and we continue to be that tool of choice.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
And to be able to use that tool of choice, we need more of it. And it’s not just in capacity alone, its capabilities. When you look at the changing warfare and the changing character of warfare, where we’re going and the things that we built for yesterday may not be all of the things we need for tomorrow. And that’s what we take a look at.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Great. General Keeney, General Allvin also said that the Force Design document is intended to be a framework and it identifies key attributes for how the Air Force is going to operate in new ways, kind of like we just talked about. Can you discuss what’s changed over the past 20 or 30 years and what has changed in the way you think about the future so that we can look at how we are going to operate in those new environments as the joint force in the future?
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
Yeah, thanks, General Field, that’s a good question. Over the past 35 years, I think what we’ve seen is that a dominant air and space force is the absolute key to maintaining our enduring missions of homeland defense, nuclear deterrence, and conventional deterrence really through power projection. We’ve done it over and over. We deploy to a forward basis for power projection gain and maintain air security and then run these, high tempo, lethal parallel combat ops and just absolutely crush our enemies. You saw it in Desert Storm, coast of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan. You see it across the spectrum there. There are some limitations to this approach though. You have to have that access and basing overseas. You have to have the time and the forces to get your logistics in place, and then you need to be able to defend those forward air bases.
There’s a changing character war that’s going on right now. It’s been moving slowly for a time, but we’re seeing it, the pace of it really pick up. And we’re seeing our adversaries, most especially China, taking advantage of this changing character of war. Some of the things we are seeing is the absolute dominance of the space domain to be able to sense, provide communication and targeting. We’re seeing the rise of autonomy and AI systems to run missions and also provide decision support to our warfighters. And then the increasing range of long-range weapons, not only air-to-air and surface-to-air, but air-to-surface as well. And what that’s doing is that’s pushing our adversary long-range strike complex out where it’s threatening this American way of war that we’ve had for the past 35 years.
The good news is that change in character war also privileges the very things that the U.S. Air Force and Space Force brings. You heard it from the chief yesterday, speed, agility, responsiveness, and most of all lethality. These are things that are our core competences. And so, to take advantage of that changing character or war, we’re changing how we fight through our Air Force warfighting concept and joint warfighting concepts and the what, where, and who we fight with through our Air Force, Force Design and joint Force Designs.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Okay. And we’re going to get a little bit more into that as we move into the panel, right?
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
Yes, sir.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Okay. General Kunkel, sadly we have aircraft flying today that I flew in the 1980s. The newest aircraft, our two newest aircraft, the F-22 entered operations about 20 years ago in 2005 and the F-35 almost a decade ago. So, as you look at the Air Force that we’re just describing here, in the future, how do you decide plan war game model, think about it so that you know how we’re going to modernize? How we’re going to replace these old aircraft? How are we going to build the new fleets with the right capabilities in the right numbers that are delivered at the right time?
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
There’s a lot in that question.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Yes, sir.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
All right, so let me-
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
It’s an easy one.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
… just start with another story. I was talking to a mentor of mine. He was my first weapons officer in the 494th Fighter Squadron back in 1996. And he was having a conversation at the Air Force Academy just last week. And the cadets were talking to him about this F-15 that he flew back in 1991-ish. And they’re still flying that same airplane, so that’s 34 years ago. And he reflected on, well, what if in 1990 when he graduated from the Air Force Academy, he was having a conversation with someone about the airplanes that were 34 years before that. And we would’ve been talking about P-51s. And if you can imagine having a discussion about flying P-51s, F-86, F-100s, et cetera. In 1990, that would have been unimaginable. But here we are 30 years later and we’re still flying the same airplanes.
And let there be no doubt, I mean the Force Design, the last Force Design we had, which was frankly in the Reagan years, created war winning strategies and war winning capabilities. And we have been privileged to be able to take those concepts, those capabilities, in the battle time after time over the last 30 years. And we have kicked our adversaries’ butts with it. We have, it’s been really, really good. And what a privilege of flying this time. But I think as you look towards the future, we’re looking at an Air Force that frankly needs to be retooled for a future environment. And when we started this Force Design journey several years ago, we were mainly looking at it from the perspective of, “Hey, what does the force need to look like?” And it was pretty damn good. So, maybe we just look at the mixes between long range stuff and short range stuff and highly exquisite versus low end and we just adjust those knobs.
What we found was those things, just playing with what we already have and doing more of the same wasn’t really working. Because it wasn’t taken into account the strategic environment and how the adversary had changed, and how the adversary was impacting our operations.
So, the new approach we took did just that. It’s like, “Hey, let’s take a look at how the adversaries’ impact on operations, not only in the air, but also where we generate combat power from on the ground.” And so, when you take this approach of, “Hey, let’s take a look at the entirety of how the adversary impacts you,” and then start talking about capability attributes. It results in different war-winning capabilities. And the interesting thing is when we take those capabilities into our war gaming analysis, we’re finding really, really interesting results. For the first time in a long time it’s like, wow, we are doing extremely well. And so, when I look out and see the future airmen, we’re building that force that they’re going to be able to take in a battle for the next 30 years. It’s going to be war-winning, I’m excited about it.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
I’ll add on a little bit, and that is, so if you take a look at first off, there was a little bit of a Force Design. You alluded a little bit to Force Design. It’s not structure. And the reason why is because you want to start with to do what? So we start with General Keeney’s section and we do the assessments, and these could be U.S. China, U.S. Russia, U.S. North Korea, whatever it is. And wherever we see gaps in those, the first thing we ask ourselves is, “Do we care about that gap?”And if we do, what do we have to do? What do we have to deal with closing that gap? It could be that we already have a current capability. It could be that I have to take an existing capability and modify it, and then there’s other cases where I need something completely different to be able to address that threat. So the completely different part, this is where I’m going to look back maybe a little bit to what’s going on in current day and take a few pages out of USAFE’s playbook on this one.
And there’s a lot of things that they’re seeing right now that are low end, low cost that are having high impact to the adversary that are out there. And then vice versa. So, those things aren’t off the table as far as what our future Air Force looks like. But then there’s other things like the modernization of China and some of the platforms that you’ll see, all the videos and demos and the things like that. Those are things that we need to look at and go, “Do I need something brand new to be able to take care of that? And if so, to do what?” I think the Force Design actually gives us a great framework of figuring out what do we care about it, what do I want to do about it? And then from there, come up with options on structure about how to deal with it.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
So you’re going to see a Force Design that looks the same in some ways, but in other ways it’s going to look fundamentally different.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Can you elaborate on some of the Wargaming as we were discussing this yesterday about some of the assumptions, how you guys approached that with the different adversaries and the capabilities on the blue side?
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
What we start with going into a wargame is we start with a hypothesis, a concept. Here’s how we think we are going to fight in the future. Here’s what we think the adversary will have. And here’s in the realm of the possible from places like this where we talk to industry, here’s what we think we can have in this time, epic. And then John Kunkel’s team sets up the environment from which we fight, and we go in there and we play this wargame. And each wargame we learn something, we get an insight into some area. Some things work, some things don’t, and then we tweak it and we go back. And I’m trying to think, we’ve done, gosh, five, six wargames in the past eight months. We’re iterating and we’re trying to get this loop faster so that we’re learning faster so that we can get that capability out to the warfighter faster.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
I think one of the questions we need to ask ourselves and maybe people are asking us is, “Well, how do you have confidence in your results? What are the assumptions behind your wargames?” And like many people in the audience maybe, there’s a bit of skepticism in wargames, because sometimes it turns into, well, he said it was going to turn out this way and he said it was going to turn out another way. How do you adjudicate it? Well, we’ve gotten really good at the adjudication and we’re really good at the assumptions that we’ve put into the wargames. I think we’ve dialed in, I don’t think, I know we’ve dialed in red. We brought in the experts on what red looks like and what we can expect from adversaries in the future. We looked at the defense planning scenarios, we looked at the JACOFA, we looked at OSD Red Team, we brought them onto the team.
We brought in experts from NASIC, we brought in experts from the Air Force A2. We brought in experts from other government agencies to understand the threat and to make sure that we were playing the threat right. And then on the blue side, there could be a tendency to just play this as the Air Force capabilities. And just look at Air Force capabilities. Well, if you do that, you don’t get the magic that makes the U.S. Military magical. And that is the joint force and the joint integration. In every single one of these war games. We’ve brought in our joint partners, we’ve brought in the army, the Navy, the Marines, the Space Force, and every single one of them to see how their capabilities play. We’ve also brought in our coalition ally partners as well. And the Aussies and the Brits have been right with us on all of these as well as other partners. And so I’m really confident in the results that we’re getting out of the wargames, and I think we can take some of those decisions.
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
And just so we’re not accused of only grading our own homework here, we take the same concept and we go play that in Navy global or the Army game. So we take the same things that we’re doing and we use those to iterate as well. And we’re seeing similar results out of those.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, I’m not sure how many people saw the earlier panel, but can you keep elaborating just a little bit in this vein about kinetic versus non-kinetic effects, and how we play the non-kinetic piece of this? Because I think that can be really important when you’re talking about disrupting kill chains in whatever.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
Absolutely. When I started, I took the handoff from General Hinote when he was doing this, and it was really based on future capabilities. But the thing we were stuck on was, how do you model cyber? How do you know when a window opens, when a window closes, how do you know if it’s having the right effect? And then from there, even on the EW side of the house and what are you really trying to engage with it? What is your end state onto this? So we wrestled with that and we farmed this out to industry. We brought it into other government agencies. We even tried to do it internally to ourselves with some of the modeling-based simulation environment work that we’ve done. And what we came up to is probably an answer that wasn’t fully satisfying, but one that at least gave us in order to do what answer.
And that is, “Hey, if you’re looking at long-range kill chains and if we have them, you have to suspect that the adversary has them. And then if they do, how is that built? And then what things do we need to do about it?” So, from a capability point of view, we know what the capabilities should do or what it’s meant to do, and then we partner with industry to try to get after it. But that was version 0.5 on how we did it. So, I’ll turn it over to Solo and to Trax to go from there about how we matured those concepts on the non-kinetic side and how we phased them in.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
But I probably won’t go more into how do we model and simulate it, but we understand how the adversary impacts us. And we also understand how our non-kinetics are impacting the adversary. And part of this, their superiority problem that we talked about this morning. There’s a large part of it that is non-kinetics and we can have an impact on the adversary in new and novel ways through non-kinetics.
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
And there’s not just one portion of non-kinetics and there’s not just one answer. As you heard General Wilsbach talk, it’s a layered approach. And we also both give ourselves credit and then take it away. So, we’re testing how fragile is our concept. If our non-kinetics work less well than we think they would, are we still able to achieve what we need? If they work better, usually it’s great. So, we’re trying to expand the scope from just non-kinetics, thumbs up or thumbs down.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Great. I mean, we can just continue down this just a little bit. As you guys looked at your concept, you’ve come out and said there’s kind of a short, medium, long, for lack of a better way to say it. Can you talk about those different areas that you guys are looking at, capabilities that are required, whether it’s close in, farther out, or kind of in a sanctuary area?
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
So I’ll start Ryan and pass it to you. So at least on the time horizon, there’s an effort that has to go from today to 2027, and how effective are we today? And you could pretty much look at 2027. It’s the force we have today. And then from that, the work that Solo and the rest of his team have done in Force Design as well as the concepts and strategy piece, they look at the next time epic out. In other words, what are the things that would turn the dial in the right direction? How much of it do we need? And then how well did it play out? And this goes back into the modeling piece of this. This goes back into what problem are you solving? I contend there’s a little bit of a different approach that we need to take. And we picked up some of it from other war games we’ve been to and then other think tanks.
But if you start with maybe a deterrent mindset. A deterrent mindset is what are the things that we need to do that we do today both nuclear and conventional that actually maintain a, we’re not in conflict today, we’re not at war today. So how do we continue to keep that going? So those are some things that are must-dos or that we keep on the table. But if you look at the two time epics that I’ve just given you. Today to 2027 and the Davidson window 2027 to 2032, and beyond those two types of things, you can actually start seeing the difference in the threat and then the difference in the things about what scares China, what scares Russia, what scares the adversary, what keeps them up at night, to be able to start layering that into the different investments that we would want to make and why.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
There’s the time aspect of it. And I think there’s also the different capability attributes and sets. Based on the adversary and how we can generate combat power from places where there’s a really, really high ground threat density. And generate combat power into places where there’s a high air threat density. And the mission fabric that we’ve developed is this three types of capability sets. Where we’ve got some asymmetric capabilities that are really, really in close and can put a hurt on the adversary from the first minute of the fight and can really deny, delay, disrupt an adversary in new ways that we haven’t done before as an Air Force. But I want to get back to that in a second about, “Hey, is that really air power?” All right, so remind me about asking that question.
Then I think there’s a second set of capabilities that is the long range stuff. And I know there’s some folks in the room that are like, “Well, hey, maybe we just go to an all long range Air Force. Wouldn’t it be great if we were just all long range and we had all the networks built and we could just sit back in Topeka, Kansas and you press a red button and the war gets fought and nobody gets hurt and it’s just fantastic. It’s just all from long range okay. Well there’s a degree of that. There’s a degree of long range kill chains. There’s a degree of the sensing that’s from over the horizon and the ability to complete non-organic kill chains where you’re sensing from different platforms than what are actually releasing a weapon to complete long range kill chains. So, that’s a portion of it.
And then there’s this mass, the long range stuff is probably pretty exquisite and expensive. You need to get yourself to a point where you can apply dominating mass, the core of our Air Force. And that largely resides in a lot of our direct attack capabilities and munitions. So what we’ve found is when you weave these three different, what we’re calling mission areas and capabilities within those mission areas together, that’s where some real synergy takes place. And that’s where we found the magic. We’ve been accused of also, hey, these asymmetric things, you’re trying to change the Air Force into the AFSOC trying to make AFSOC great again. Well, I will tell you that that’s not the case. Other folks have said, Hey, well that’s not really air power.
And I would suggest that when the joint force thinks about the Air Force, they don’t say, “Hey, yeah, the Air Force controls the air domain, but they only do it with fighters and bombers and those types of things.” They don’t really specify what it is. So there’s going to be some asymmetric capabilities that we develop that are certainly air power. They’re going to be new, they’re going to be different, they’re going to look like something you haven’t seen before from the U.S. Air Force, but they’re certainly air power.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
So when you look at that and you put all those capabilities together, whether it’s something that’s already inside the high-density threat or something that’s outside, you talked about the short, mid and long-term. What’s interesting about that and having seen this evolution over time is that there’s some things that are pretty low TRL. But with just a few dollars you can get them to high TRL because they’re not complicated. It’s not complex, it just requires a dedicated investment into it. There’s some things that are about mid-range TRL, but we’re waiting for that technology to mature. So there is a balance on what capabilities we want, what TRL they’re at, and what deliberate decisions that we’re trying to make to advance technologies either in the short, mid and long-term game to feed into this. And to say it out loud, I mean, air superiority still matters. How we do it will be different. Reach global power still matters. How we do it in what environment and what conditions will change over time with the changing character of war.
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
And I’ll say we’re in the third wave of how we provide air power. World War II was mass. We sent formations of B-17s over and our CEP was in measured in miles, not in tens of feet. With the Paveway we went to precision. The issue is our adversaries have significant capabilities in ways that we haven’t seen in the last 35 years. We need to combine those two. And what precise mass unlocks for, the way we get there is through capabilities that are cheaper, they’re mass-produced that are affordable, that we can get to a lot more of them, rather than the precision that we’ve had for the last 35 years.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
But it still requires exquisite with it. I still contend there is the high-low mix of, you still need some of the exquisite and then you still need a lot of the war-winning mass as well. It’s the combination of those together that really create the effect.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Okay, I’m going to ask you the hard one, General Harris. Previously in discussing Force Design we’ve said, “It’s going to be fiscally informed but not fiscally constrained.” What does that mean exactly in this context when we’re talking about new stuff, whether it’s a high-low mix, whether it’s exquisite or cheap? And how does that budget going to impact the Force Design over time? And then that was the original question that I still want an answer to. But then we have to throw on top of that the fact that each service needs to now offer up an 8% cut when people like AFA or the Mitchell Institute have been campaigning for, “We need more, not less money to do all these things you’re trying to do.”
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
So I’ll start with the 8%, and that’s going to be hard. That’s going to be a difficult pill to swallow for every service that’s out there. And I think once you see what’s brought up in the 8% and what gets offered up, that is a significant point. It doesn’t sound significant, just 8%, but when you turn that into real dollars and real value and you see some of the, where we’ve been over the past 10 years or 15 years with the Air Force. These are real war-winning capabilities that we have to think hard about. I can’t imagine that if you want the Air Force to do all the things that you say it needs to do today, that the entire 8% there is taken and eaten whole. There has to be things that we still maintain. I said it before, it’s the homeland defense, it’s strategic deterrents.
And even take a look at in CENTCOM right now with Israel, when I think of Homeland Defense and I get a visual image of Israel and the Iron Dome piece of that. They still do strikes in Syria. They still do strikes elsewhere. That’s part of the Homeland Defense piece of this. There is a power projection piece. It is associated with Homeland Defense and then there has to be a deterrent. And that deterrent is what comes next. So all three of those still play together. And the 8%, it’s going to be a big hit to the Air Force if they keep all of this for all the services. So, the other part is being fiscally informed or fiscally constrained. If you take year by year budgets and you take the top line of what we get, and the only thing that I’m allowed to plan to is whatever it is that we have a top line budget and then make trades within those, I’m never going to be able to tell you, “Hey, here’s what it takes to win.”
So the fiscally informed piece is, yes, I know what the top line is, but I’m here to tell you if you’re going to ask the Air Force to do the things that it needs to do for the nation, here’s the Air Force that I need. So the fiscally informed piece means that I need to be able to have a rationale and a logic to go back and fight for the resources, the additional capacity and capabilities that I need to be able to get after it. And when I need it. It is the homeland defense strategic deterrence and power projection because they’re all uniquely linked.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Can I add on to that? I said it this morning, I’ll say it again. Fiscal constraints don’t define what it takes to win. And we know what it takes to win. And we didn’t go into this Force Design and said, “Hey, what it takes to win at this funding level is X. And what it takes to win at a different funding level is Y.” It’s like we know what it takes to win and the risk that America takes is the fiscally informed portion of it. And with our Force Design, we now finally have a methodology where we can accurately define what the risk is for not funding. So, we can tell what the war is going to look like based on a certain level of funding through the coherent narrative of the Force Design. And it just comes down to what type of risk does America want? Do they want to take risk in their ability to execute our policy? Do they want to take risk in America’s sons and daughters? Do you want to take risk in winning or losing? Those are all questions we need to answer.
And the Force Design certainly wasn’t fiscally constrained, but it was informed to the point of we can understand what risk we take at different funding levels, and we can clearly articulate that to decision makers.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
If there’s one thing that I think that I would probably foot stomp on the risk piece of this is, I’m not sure how many really understand what an acceptable level of risk. When we say it’s high, medium, low, significant, what that means and what we’re putting our aviators into when we say that, “Go ahead and take that ALR high or ALR significant, I’m okay with that. And those are the things that we want to bring back into this fiscally informed discussion of, are you sure that this is the path you want to go down and this is the position you want to put our Air Force in?
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
One key part to the Force Design too is that it allows us to tell a multi-year story with intermediate design points along the way. So you’re not telling a year-by-year story that changes with whatever the top line budget you get. You may be under one year, you may be above one year, but if the average is us getting to where our Force Design says that we need to be, then that’s great. Prior, we have swapped very rapidly. We’ve kind of hit the stops on what our priorities were, and that doesn’t go over well across the river.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Well, that leads into the next question, and I was going to ask you this. How do you guys look at that? So you have these answers, you have these concepts, you’re turning them into reality, but it’s going to take some time. So how do you build that plan that you think is going to survive for five or 10 years? Who are you partnering with? Who are you talking to? Who are your supporters? How do you guys look at that to make sure that it goes to fruition? That’s for you, General Keeney.
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
So as, we’re testing out these concepts and we say, “Yes, we think this is a war-winning design, which is where we’re at. We’ve got General Kunkel’s team writing into the Force Design, and then there’s hooks into the budget process through the whole strategy design PPBE process. Where rather than just checking we are we against, does this project work for the National Defense Strategy, does it also align with the Force Design? Because year by year we know what incremental steps we need to make so that five, 10 years from now we have that war-winning capability that General Kunkel talked about.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
Hey, let me just jump in real quick. It’s one of the reasons why within the Force Design paper, we actually took a lot of the things about national defense strategy out and put changing character of war in. We know that over time NDSs could change and priorities could change, and threats could change. But if you’re tracking the changing character of war, I think that’s what makes it relevant to get the hooks back into the programming side on the POM to plan and then making that argument back up to OSD CAPE and getting all the services aligned together. A lot of these joint efforts we’re doing with joint counter C5ISRT or joint Long-Range Kill Chains, the fact that all the services now are coming together and we’re having a little bit more of a common sight picture on what the threat and what the problem is and the solutions to them, I think that’s also giving us more traction inside the building for it as well.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Yeah. So how do you win the Pentagon Wars? How do you and Pentagon Wars are about how do we get the money to fund the Air Force that our nation deserves and that our airmen are privileged to operate? You have to have a coherent narrative, and that coherent narrative has got to be backed up by solid analysis. And then you’ve got to share that coherent narrative. And that’s what we’re in the middle of. We’ve built the narrative, we’ve done the analysis, we know where it works, we know where it fails, we know how to mitigate those failures. And then we’re taking this story on the road. And we’ve taken that story on the road to the third floor so that folks in OSD and the joint staff understand it. We’ve taken that story to our joint partners, and I will tell you that the joint partners see themselves in our Force Design.
I go to my navy compatriots, I won’t name them by name, but they’re like, yep, this is exactly us. These are the problems that we see and this is a viable way to solve them. And then we go over to the hill. And we’ve been knocking down the doors of the four defense committees on the Force Design. And the comments we’re getting back are, “Wow, the Air Force has a coherent war fighting narrative. If you lead this POM, like Pentagon War, with a series of programs and POM decisions and budget cuts and spreadsheets, you’re never going to win. If you lead with a coherent war fighting story backed up with solid analysis, that’s when you win. That’s when you see the real TOA transfer happening. That’s when you see us getting to the Air Force we need.”
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
I’ll add one more piece to that, and that is there’s one other constituent that you left out, which is critical. So Sharpest sword from the hottest fire, probably the best critics that we’ve had to be able to see ourselves or find flaws in the plan have been the MAJCOMs. When you present this to CENTCOM, when you present this to EUCOM or INDOPACOM and their view and how do you balance this out and what are we missing in all of this? It becomes collaborative and it becomes iterative in nature. And making sure that we have those inputs and then rerun some of the war gaming and making sure that we have the right Force Design onto this. It doesn’t mean that we capture all of the inputs because again, it’s one budget funds one Air Force to be able to do a variety of things. But when all of them come together and you can now speak with one voice, that becomes the powerful point to me, Trax.
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
And one other constituency is our coalition allies and partners. We’ve rolled this Force Design out to a majority of them. We’ve invited them into our wargames. We’ve war gamed it with them. What we’re finding is that collectively we’re way more lethal than just the Force Design. And this collective lethality has something to it. There are things that our allies do better than us as a U.S. Air Force. And what we need to do is bring those capabilities together and that’s the next thing that we’re working on.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Let’s say everybody’s spectacularly successful, we lay out the plan, we’re turning the concepts into reality. We’re contracted out for this kind of equipment, whether it’s kinetic or non-kinetic, these things here, it’s all going. And five or seven years from now you go, “Oh, we got to make a little 10 degrees left or 10 degrees right? Change.” How do you see this adapting as we move forward while we’re building it up?
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
Yeah, sir, I’m happy to start. But we hear the chief, it’s like the constant drum beat that’s always in the back of my head every single day. And it’s solve for agility, solve for agility, solve for agility. And part of the magic of the Force Design instead of solving for force structure right away, we instead said, “Hey, the Force Design is a set of attributes of capabilities and it’s a set of missions, and those missions are performed by things that have attributes.” So, we went attributes-focused. And what that attributes-focused Force Design does for you is it allows you to flex, it allows you to flip. I would suggest that there are areas in the Force Design where you’re going to see big programs. Like the long-range stuff is largely exquisite things. B-21, JASSM, or RASM, long range kill webs, those types of things. Those are probably going to be bigger programs, and they’re going to be less, they’ll be agile, but they’ll be less so.
On the other end of that spectrum is the asymmetric things. And I think when you start talking about offsets and what the next offset is, this innovation pipeline with asymmetric capabilities is an area where we can be really, really agile, and that’s where we need help.
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
So the only other piece I would add to this is, so what are those cues that are going to give us down the road that, “Hey, we need to make an adjustment.” And I think one of the early cues is going to be the joint partners, the joint force partners, and how they’re seeing this unfold. When we gave the very first draft of the Force Design, the value proposition that this thing had was one, where do we see ourselves in a certain time epic? What’s the geopolitics? What’s going on in the world? But the other part of that is a common understanding of the threat and making sure that that’s laid out. Because before we all had different views of what the threat could do, what it couldn’t do, where we could operate, where we couldn’t operate. And bringing a community of interest together and making sure it was threat informed was the first step to a successful Force Design.
And then from there it was about, “Okay, to do what?” I think when you start looking at the joint partners that are out there and working with the joint staff and their warfighting concepts and their war design, the warfighting designs that they have. They took the Marine Corps Force Design and they took the Air Force Force Design, two very different Force Designs, by the way, one a little bit more biased into structure, another one more biased into a framework and a concept of where we want to go and how to make choices for what we need to the future. I think ours is just a little bit more forward-looking and projecting to see what those milestones in that next ridge line looks like, to see that we can actually make some deviations earlier, rather than have them spring upon us later.
It’s not to say that something might sneak up and next thing, you know, we weren’t tracking something that was an adversary capability that caught us off guard. But the ability to be able to pivot to that. I mean, our Air Force has been doing that POM cycle after POM cycle, so I’m pretty confident in that part. The part that we’re trying to exercise here is how do you get that long-range look at it.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Well, we’re almost out of time. General Harris, do you want to wrap up anything that we didn’t talk about real quick, or any final closing thoughts for the group?
Lt. Gen. Dave Harris:
So yes, thanks. I appreciate it, Burt. The one thing that I would say is. For everybody that’s here in the audience, again, I’m going to go back to the first thing I said, and that is really what gives me hope is when I go out there and I travel around all the different bases and I see what our Airmen do day in and day out. And the hard work that they put into them, the innovation that they have, the fact that they’re able to get after it every day. And sometimes when you just talk to an F-15 pilot, he’s like, “Man, if I could just get my right MFD to work, that would be the best thing in the world. And if you can just give me a few more flying hours put back towards this.” The intense warfighting attitude that they have, and that warrior ethos that they have is amazing to me, and it stands out in spades.
Again, this is where I go back to humans are more important than hardware. My job and our job with the rest of the team up here is to make sure that they’re getting the right capabilities in the future. And I think where we’re headed right now with the Force Design, where we’re headed with force structure, we’re onto something.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
If there’s a second lieutenant in here that would like to trade places with me, I’ll do it right now.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Don’t do it.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel:
I’ll tell you that I’m excited about the Air Force’s future. We are on the right track. We’re building the right capabilities. We are going to put dominating capabilities in the hands of our warfighters. And I guarantee you, 30 years from now when there’s another group of folks like this sitting on this stage, they’re going to be, “Man, those guys in 2025. They were really thinking.” I know that’s a stretch, “But they were really thinking and they gave us the war-winning capabilities that we use to dominate our adversaries for 30 years.” So excited about the future.
Brig. Gen. Ryan Keeney:
Yeah, and like I said at the beginning, the future privileges, the things we bring, speed, agility, confidence, lethality, and that’s what our Force Design is designed for.
Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):
Well, thanks very much, y’all. Let’s give them all a big round of applause.