Gen. David W. Allvin’s Uplifting Message: ‘One Air Force’

AFA Chair of the Board, Brig. Gen. Bernie Skoch, USAF (Ret.):

Our next guest believes we’re living in a time of consequence, a seminal moment in time that will one day be studied and remembered, just as when Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, AFA’s founding president, stood on the deck of the USS Hornet in 1942 alongside 16 B-25s and a brave cadre of airmen, Chief of Staff General David Allvin said, “This is our time of consequence. What we do, the decisions we make, the actions we take, the airmen we lead, and the way we do it will define the next seminal event.” Like Secretary Frank Kendall, General Allvin is instilling a sense of urgency in the airmen he leads because we are one Air Force and must be prepared to make hard decisions and then have the courage and conviction to follow through. Please welcome to the stage the 23rd Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General David Allvin.

Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin:

Well, good morning. Good morning. Thank you to Bernie, and thank you to everybody at AFA for putting on what is going to be I know a tremendous, tremendous symposium. Seven months ago I stood on a stage similar to this, as the Secretary mentioned, in Denver. And we rolled out these decisions we were making to re-optimize for great power competition, and your United States Air Force has been moving out since then.

And in the process we discovered sort of a theme that emerged. It’s this theme about One Air Force. In order to re-optimize for great power competition, we need to integrate into One Air Force that can be agile as an entire force, that can move at the speed and scale of technology and the pace of the threat. And so, we’ve been doing a lot of that. And I’ve also heard, “Well, wait a minute, we’re making a lot of change. Are we moving too fast? Are we doing too many things at once?”

I like echo the Secretary, we’re not moving too fast. Are we moving fast enough? Will we break our Air Force? Well, let me tell you, our Air Force has a history of adapting to the environment. So, I’d like to spend a couple minutes today talking about how we got to where we are and the consequences that has had, but also the fact that we have adapted to the environment that we’re expected to, in the time we’re expected to. This is a legacy of an Air Force that is agile and adaptive and produces what the nation requires.

If we think about the time of the Cold War, we had a threat that was fairly well-defined, we understood what the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact could do, and what we needed to do as part of NATO to be able to support that, and as part of the Air Force to support our Joint Force in that endeavor and we did that. We aligned and optimized the way we projected power and generated readiness and developed our airmen and developed our capabilities, appropriate for the threat. We projected power from mature installations, sometimes forward to mature installations, sometimes in our strategic bomber force directly.

We would deploy to known places and be ready to fight immediately, to integrate with NATO and the Joint Force against the Warsaw Pact, and with our nuclear portfolio, our nuclear mission, we generated that combat, or projected that combat power from in place, and we’re still doing that today. But that was aligned to the threat, and to ensure that we knew how to project that power, and could do it with confidence, we did large-scale exercises. We did things like return of forces to Germany to ensure we can have confidence that we could pick up from that one location, forward deploy to the next location, and employ combat power as part of NATO, giving confidence to ourself and our allies and giving pause to our adversaries.

That was how we generated readiness, and we did it over and over again. In a similar manner we developed our airmen to understand the threat, to understand how the Soviet Union and how the adversary was going to respond, what their capabilities were, what their… In the air and across the board, how they would fight, and we would develop our own tactics, techniques and procedures and our airmen were aligned, focused, laser-focused, on the threat.

In capabilities we did the same thing. When the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact decided they were going to go for inventory, they were going to go for mass, we went a different way. We developed our capabilities with the threat in mind and said we’re going to focus on things like stealth and precision, and have our quality overcome their quantity. And that’s what we did over and over again. That was the environment for which the Air Force was optimized, and it was right for the time, it was what the Joint Force needed. And then something amazing happened.

Speaker (via video): Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall.

Within the blink of an eye of human history, the wall came down, the Soviet Union ended, and we found ourselves in a new environment where we had to have a new conception of what national security was. We were in this unipolar moment, this aberration in history, where the United States was dominant in every domain, and so we had to adapt our Air Force to that.

How do you reconceive how you support a Joint Force in a unipolar moment? The Air Force needed to adapt and we did. Now, in the way that we projected power, at the beginning of this unipolar moment, we basically had the Cold War Air Force, and so we projected power much like we did in the Cold War. We went from fixed bases, but we didn’t have the fixed bases to go to in Desert Storm. So what did we do? We built them.

We owned the shock clock. We decided when the war was going to start, so we built them, and we showed that Cold War Air Force that we had developed was pretty darn good. But as this unipolar moment evolved, we went through the nineties, the nation had asked different things of its Air Force. Not so much the whole Air Force, but to deploy in smaller pieces to the Middle East, to enforce no-fly zones, to do coercive air power, a rapid global mobility feat was doing what a sole superpower would do, spreading hope. But this was a bit and piece of our Air Force, not an enemy that we would coalesce against our readiness for a major peer competitor. It was about regional fights, regional conflicts, and we did that. We developed our people accordingly as well. We did not have necessarily a galvanizing pacing threat, so we continued in our core functions. We advanced in our functional expertise and prowess, and we did that understanding what it was to be in a digital age, leverage the synthetic environment.

We got better at our trade craft in our functional and technical ways, and that’s how we developed our people. When it came to developing capabilities, there’s one word, less. We went from the Cold War down to the threat went away, so the money went away, and so we had fewer programs, and even the programs that were designed to dominate within the Cold War that survived, they survived in diminished capacity. Original design of 130 BTUs turned into 21. The mighty F-22, designed to be the follow-on air superiority platform envisioned for about 750, turned out to be about 189. Much smaller, but that was appropriate for the environment. That’s what the nation asked, and that’s what the Air Force delivered.

And in the process of that, this Air Force, because the environment demanded it, became a little bit more diffuse, it became a little bit more functionally oriented, and that was okay. Because that was what the environment asked for and then something else happened.

Speaker (via video): There that is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning-

Speaker (via video): That a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don’t know anything more than that. We don’t know if it was a commercial aircraft. We have no idea how many were on board or what the extent of it.

Speaker (via video): Oh, my goodness, there’s another one.

Speaker (via video): It seems to be on purpose.

Speaker (via video): Oh, my goodness, now you-

Speaker (via video): Is that a plane?

Speaker (via video): Now it’s obvious, I think.

Speaker (via video): We whispered into his right ear, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”

“America is under attack.” But this wasn’t an attack that we had envisioned, we hadn’t been aligned to, we hadn’t been optimized for. This was an attack from asymmetric power showing you could in a cost-effective way, fundamentally change the way of life for Americans and around the world, and the Air Force needed to adapt.

And so we did adapt, in all of these areas. We adapted to project power in a way that didn’t require all the Force, but required all of us to move forward to support operations for part of our Air Force into the Middle East. So, we crowdsourced the fight, because we knew this was going to be a sustained operation. So, we would move from across our Force, not uniquely from one base or another base, but we wanted to preserve the base and be able to support the fight, because the Joint Force didn’t need the air campaigns we had in times past. The Joint Force wanted on-call close air support. They wanted unblinking ISR. They wanted the ability for us to be able to return casualties from the battlefield and increase the likelihood of survival, all the while preserving our superiority.

And we did that, and our airmen were spectacular. Our readiness required the same. Not massive forces doing large-scale exercises, but understanding as the airmen came into the force, they needed to understand how to deploy, how to get into the expeditionary environment. Getting there wasn’t an issue, it wasn’t contested. Air superiority was not contested, but it was this idea that the counter-violence, extremist fight was not a 20-year fight. Sometimes it was a one-year fight done 20 times over. And so, we needed to have the op tempo management, and that’s how we generated our readiness to be able to sustain the tempo.

So, once again, in developing our airmen, there wasn’t a large threat that galvanized us to train in a way of using large formations and making sure we had a single enemy on which to focus. We had to focus on individual skills, because we were also asked to round out the Joint Force, develop our cultural competency, understand how to fly and fight with different partners. Small pieces of our Air Force to fill in the gaps.

And in developing capabilities we continued on. We continued to modernize our force, but we modernized our force in doing a better version of the core functions that we had done before, appropriate to the fight, in command and control, in ISR. We even advanced all of our air superiority fighters in the other, we advanced those but not with the coalescing force design that had behind it the idea of a pacing challenge, of a threat that could challenge us across our Air Force, and that’s how we developed our capabilities. That was the Air Force that the Joint Force and the nation had asked for. So, this diffuse Air Force, and some sort of more functionally aligned Air Force during this period became even more so.

And then the next seminal event happened. Except it didn’t. There has not been a seminal event that has shaken the nation, that has shaken the world the way those previous two have. If you squint, you can see with the Russian invasion of Ukraine that, yes, there are still ambitious powers out there ready to violate the sovereignty of other nations. You can see in the background, but it’s not the galvanizing event that wakes up the entire society and says we are in a different world. But ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake, we all need to recognize we are in a different world. We are in great power competition.

We are in an environment that not only has great power competition in the background, but has some unique characteristics that when we move forward and re-optimize our Air Force, we have to understand what those characteristics are. And those characteristics include the rapid advancement of the capabilities and the capacities of our potential adversaries.

The PRC is building capability and capacity at scale and faster than we had ever imagined. They’re doing it in all domains, and they’re doing it, as our secretary said, with a unique purpose in mind, it’s to be able to combat our way of war. Specifically, to be able to impede our ability to project power and support our allies and partners in the region, and project power through the Pacific.

They’re doing it through different means. Inventories of missiles, ballistic and cruise missiles, in what might be a more cost-effective manner, putting us on the wrong side of the cost curve. The changing character of war is also seeing speed and scale, much like we saw in the Iranian attack on Israel. That salvo of missiles, in a mass we perhaps hadn’t seen before, is a harbinger of things to come that we have to be able to command and control and target at speed and scale. That is a characteristic of the current environment.

Another one is space. Ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t understand it, we can’t win if we do not have space. The Joint Force cannot win if we do not have space superiority. That has become evident. And the elevation of cyber is similar. But the one thing that seizes me is not change, but it’s the pace of change. We’ve always adapted to change. We’ve leveraged technological change in this country, but the speed at which it is approaching us should make us reevaluate some of our value propositions. Is built to last as important as built to adapt? Is the primacy and the capability of a platform as important as the system? Is the ability to predict the future as important as the ability to be able to adapt and respond and solve for agility, to make sure when the next disruptive technology happens that we are able to respond to it faster than the adversary?

These are the characteristics of this environment. So, with the great power competition in the background and our Air Force, this is why we are re-optimizing. Let me stop right here and say one thing. Make no mistake, if our United States Air Force is called upon to fight, we will fight and we will win, because we remain the most dominant force on the face of the planet.

Question is at what cost? And what cost on the backs of our airmen? On the capabilities that we have, on the structure that we have? At what cost? If we’re misshapen, that’s something we can do something about. And as we lean into the future, are we positioned to have the system, the structure, the processes to be competitive over time? Our airmen deserve better. Our Joint Force deserves better. Our nation deserves better, and we’re doing better.

This is the background behind this re-optimization for great power competition, and this is the energy that keeps us moving. So, as we mentioned seven months ago we talked about some changes, we got to talk about some decisions. Your Air Force has been impressive in the way that your airmen have been moving out.

So, in the area of projecting power, we’ve accomplished a few things, but we’ve started with the fight and moved backwards. So, we’re understanding what those mission generation force elements are, is it six ship, is it 12 ship, what are the supporting requirements there? We’re starting at the right spot, how we intend to fight, and then moving backwards to ensure we have the organization and the training and the readiness to support that.

We also understand that we are going to expect our wing commanders and our wings to do something different. Not to go from a permissive environment to a fairly permissive environment, and execute the air tasking order. We are going to expect our wings to do more of the joint war fighting functions, to include the movement, the maneuver, understanding the information, the protection to be able to take that formation and go to these hubs and spokes and [inaudible 00:15:53] combat employment, and not just launch the [inaudible 00:15:55] but be able to survive, and be able to sustain that combat power under attack.

These are the new things we’re going to require of our wings, so that is why we are dissolving the operations, the maintenance group, and elevating them up to the wing staff, and leaving the tactical expertise at the squadron level, but having the wings be better able to operate at the operational level of war.

This is not academic. We just finalized the command selection list. So in summer of 2025 you will have 60 of your wings, or 40% of the United States Air Force, which will be under this construct, and we will continue to move down that ramp, because we’re moving forward on that. This is not an intellectual exercise. We are moving out.

In the A6 separation from A2, understanding the complexity and the difference in each of those missions, we’re moving out with changing the manpower positions, nominating the proper leadership, and that should be done by the spring. So, in the next FAA we should be able to announce that the A6 is imminent to be stood up.

Let me talk a second about AFSOUTH, about the elevation of service component commands. I was privileged to officiate the change of command of AFSOUTH last week, and the idea here is this is a global competition. We should have one way that the Air force presents forces structurally to the combatant commands, and because the adversary doesn’t respect the lines that we draw on the map for the different combatant commands, we need to ensure that our service component commands in this global competition are talking to each other on the same level. So, we have elevated AFSOUTH. We plan to do the same imminently with Afcent, AFNORTH and AFCYBER, to ensure that at that level we’re all talking about this great power competition and how we integrate across the globe.

Finally, the units of action. This will be one of the most complex things that we do, but it’ll be one of the most consequential and I could not be more proud of how the team is moving out on this. These deployable combat wings, we can’t snap our fingers and make it. These deployable combat wings require that we have the people in one fence line, other than one command ready to train and go. We don’t have those airmen right now in those right positions, but we’re getting there.

As we do that, as we develop these deployable combat wings, we are going to have nine of them stand up by 2025, and four of those deployable combat wings ready to commit by 2026. This is total force, ladies and gentlemen. We have the Air Force Reserve Command programming to ensure that they have the capability to generate one of these, and the International Guard is doing similar.

There’s complex tasks, but airmen are flat moving out. And in-between time we have these things called Air Task Forces, which are serving as the bridge. While we don’t have the airmen in the right spot, we have selected and co-located leadership together to train with some of the support that they will be going and deploying with, moving from the crowdsourcing towards a more integrated under one wing, and those Air Task Forces are sorting some things out.

But rather than listen to me yak, why don’t you hear from the professionals who are making it happen?

Col Brett Cassidy (via video): My team’s been given a really unique opportunity to stand up one of the first Air Task Forces, and our objective is really to carry the Air Force forward into the future unit of action.

Col Scott Mills (via video): And our role at the installation is number one to make that our number one, to make sure that the stand-up of the ATF becomes the primary focus for the installation at Davis Mountain, not just the 355th Wing. We’re doing that with the stand-up of the 11th CABS as well. So, the only time in the Air Force we’ve got both an ATF and a CAB standing up at the same installation.

Our job is to also make sure we’re aiming at the future at the ’28 one, where we’ll deploy as a global combat wing and we’ll have both an installation wing, or an air base wing, stand up at Davis Mountain. Creating that environment where we can make that level of organizational change, that’s what he and I are here to do, to knock down any barriers that stand in the way, and to work together every step to make sure that we are operating not only to create that unit of action, but to keep focused on our five-meter, 10-meter and even 20-meter goals.

Col Brett Cassidy (via video): The fact that we have two teams here on the same base working together towards the same objectives that CSAF and Headquarters Air Force have laid out is just an awesome opportunity to synchronize and collaborate, and every day we get to watch airmen working together at the staff level all the way down to the tactical level, and as we build up the cabs, we’ll see it at the individual level to drive forward towards the common objectives the Air Force wants to get done.

Col Scott Mills (via video): It’s a unique opportunity to sprint a little bit, to know that we’re going to make mistakes, to empower our airmen to make those mistakes, and know that even when we do make a misstep, or we’ve just found a simple that’s not how we want to do it, and we’ll go the other way. And we’ve got the room and the run, we’ve empowered our airmen to make those decisions and get things done, and that’s what we’re aiming at the end of the day.

Col Brett Cassidy (via video): That excites me. I’m ecstatic to be a part of this and see airmen recognizing that they have this opportunity and diving into it headfirst. And any airman who spent the last decade or two saying, “Man, there’s a better way to do this. We could come together and get after some things if I just had the chance.” Well, that’s now. Yeah, this is it. Grab hold of this opportunity and sprint forward.

Col Scott Mills (via video): That’s right

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your secret weapon. It’s our airmen, it’s our engaged leadership working together. Colonel Cassidy understanding how this Air Task Force is going to work, because he knows he’s a pathfinder that is going to solve some problems and find some problems that we’re going to fix and make this better.

Colonel Mills understanding he needs to enable that Air Task Force Commander to be successful, but he’s looking down the road, he’s looking down the road at ’28. He’s not going to be the wing commander in ’28, although every wing commander, which is they could command that long, but he’s looking forward to understand what an air base wing and deployable combat wing are going to operate together like. This is how we solve. This energetic leadership is also infectious and it works its way throughout the team.

1st Lt Lauren Hazlett (via video): I got an email saying, “Congratulations, you’ve been selected for the Air Task Force.” And I had no idea what it was, I was super bummed that I was losing this other job, but as soon as I got here, as soon as we had that first meeting with Colonel Cassidy, he gave us a rundown of what we’re going to be doing, I was so excited. Working back with the Pacific, and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere. We’re spending 18 months getting to know each other, getting to know ourselves, where we fit into the team, and learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses so that we’re really well performing, even before we get out the door, so that we can get into [inaudible 00:22:00] and hit the ground running there.

We’re not spending time getting to know each other, working out all the kinks, we’ve already done that for 18 months before. I’ve really enjoyed getting to really understand the mission, because everyone’s learning together. We’re all on the same page because we’re building from the ground up, and that’s a very unique opportunity that I’ve really gotten to enjoy. 11th Air Task Force, first of the first.

Come on, how can you not be excited about that? Lieutenant Hazlett, by the way… This is the team that’s making it happen. By the way, she’s a 2022 graduate of the Air Force Academy with a minor in Mandarin Chinese. You think she understands and wants to get after this? This is how we’re going to make it happen. One Air force, one power projection capability to meet the threat. And in order to generate the readiness to support that, we need to change the way that we are doing that as well, and we talked about this in the spring.

We are already transitioning to these combat readiness inspections, looking at mission effectiveness over just unit effectiveness. Those combat readiness inspections will be initial operational capability by 2025, but we’ve already executed 11 of those in a beta test way, and in [inaudible 00:23:04] 2024 we’re going to have another 14. And in 2025 there’ll be 40 of these inspections.

We’re also optimizing our assessments. Rather than assessing task accomplishment or just the readiness of equipment, we are using and leveraging technology tools to be able to do analytics, to do more predictive of what do we need that will produce a greater likelihood of readiness in the future? And we’re leveraging those analytical tools as well.

But you know what? You got to do the thing to see if you can do the thing. And so, this is our movement to large scale exercises, and we have our first large scale exercise next summer. But we can’t wait till next summer and think about it and talk about it, we’re leveraging the exercises that we have, we’ve been tasking our airmen in the squadrons to figure out how to bolt on and make it effective. And I’ll tell you one of the most impressive ones has been this most recent Bamboo Eagle, which is our building into large-scale exercises.

Lt Col Mike Power (via video): Specifically with the shift to great power competition, the 505th Combat Training Squadron is delivering across two key exercises. One is the Warfare Center’s Bamboo Eagle exercise, and that series is providing a full live virtual constructive operational environment within which airmen from the operational level to the tactical level can exercise command procedures, in order to meet the pacing challenge.

The other key change in exercises that we’re doing is the great power competition exercise for speed and scale that was called out explicitly as a task for the entire Air Force to be able to deliver combat capability on the scope and scale that we need against pure adversaries in the future.

Lt Col Benjamin Orsua (via video): The efforts we took was to try to the max extent possible replicate the environment that they would potentially be deploying into. So, a team put a lot of hard work to figure out the airfields that would represent part of the world that we would potentially deploy into, and so an opportunity for those airmen to see that construct right before they actually deploy out there. And the unique thing about Bamboo Eagle is just the scope of it, right? Bringing in a much larger strategic influence, everything from AOC, top echelon leadership replication, all the way down to an airman level behavior out on a flight line.

Capt Alex “Gizmo” Gordon (via video): Bamboo Eagle definitely feels a lot more like we’re preparing for something close at hand. We’re preparing for something very tangible and very real. We face plenty of challenges throughout Bamboo Eagle, both from a logistics standpoint, from a tactical admin standpoint, in terms of just launching jets and tankers into the air, getting them where they needed to go and maintaining the ability to both see and speak to them throughout the entirety of the [inaudible 00:25:47] has been a small enough challenge. And then you bring in the actual scenario injects and the enemy, and all the tactics that come with that. So it’s definitely been a challenging environment, but a good learning environment. Doing a mission that feels worthwhile and feels challenging has been really cool.

I cannot imagine trying to go into an actual combatant zone without a training at this level of an exercise for our crews.

Gizmo says, “I cannot imagine entering into a combat environment without the training of this scale.” Or hoping that she and the other airmen won’t have to, because when they’re there they get it, and they’re helping us advance even faster.

I was at Bamboo Eagle and it was infectious to me. It was so impressive how the airmen were changing their conception of what it means to deploy. That’s a cultural change that has to happen. It happens through that exposure, and this generating readiness is helping us do that on a larger scale. We have to develop our people in the same way. And in that view we have to not only manage our talent differently and make sure we have the right talent, but we also need to develop our force, again, aligned against the threat, understanding the threat.

And in the workforce development piece, even before we did the re-optimization, we started down this technical track for officers to understand that there should be a more innovative way to manage our talent, for some of these perishable and highly technical skill sets that we need.

Developing a technical track, we currently have a cohort of 21 of those on the officer side. Obviously on the enlistment side, I’ll talk about the warrant officers in a second, so we pause that. But we’re making sure we can use 21st century ways of managing talent and getting after the threat.

I want to spend a couple of seconds on Airman Development Command, because as we started that we knew there were areas within force development we needed to work on, but it didn’t really strike me the scope and the scale of what needed to be done, and how rapidly it has been done by the folks on the staff in Air Education and Training Command. This idea that when we do these other pieces, when we understand how we’re going to project power, or learn things from exercises that need to change our training, or need to change the way that we are developing our force, we need to do that at speed and scale as well.

And when you do that in an environment where we have some of it in one command, and some of it spread out to the other major commands, it doesn’t happen at scale and speed. That does not happen. And so the portfolio that has been undertaken to develop this thing called Airman Development Command has been very critical. To have one commander accountable for the whole force to develop against the pacing threat, and against the new ways that we need to be doing things is absolutely critical.

AETC wasn’t always AETC, it was Air Training Command, and then when we changed and put Air University into it, it became Education and Training. So, we changed the name because we changed the mission. I’ll tell you right now, in this instantiation that command is not just doing education and training. They are now pulling in force development to make sure we can move forward as an agile force.

Finally, one of the more popular things on this warrant officer program for cyber and IT specialists, understanding the perishability of the skill and the demand to stay on the cutting edge. That’s what drove the initiative for the warrant officers. We had 430 fantastic candidates. We selected 88 of them, and 30 of them are going to start class in two weeks. We started this seven months ago. We’ve done the curriculum, we’re starting class in two weeks. We’re moving out. I’m not sure if they’re excited about it or not, but I’ve heard that they might be.

MSgt Dennis Cracraft (via video): It’s absolutely amazing that we get to experience this and be the first cyber warrant officers for the Air Force. I am absolutely thrilled. I was so excited when I found out. I was more excited to go home and tell my family. That was a great feeling.

So, not only am I in the first big wave, big batch of warrant officers, but I get to go to the first class. To me I could never have imagined this. It’s still mind-blowing and surreal. I think I’ll kick in when I actually get there and start going through WOTS. We talk about this in our warrant officer Teams channel, and it’s kind of like we’re all so baffled that we are going to be the pioneers, the trailblazers of the cyber warrant officer curriculum.

MSgt Tajh Smith (via video): To actually hear that you’ve been selected and get the news, I’m like, “You’ve got to be joking.” I had worked myself up for the disappointment, if anything, but to actually hear that, get that phone call from my commander was definitely mind-blowing for sure.

TSgt Alexander Childs (via video): The next person I called was my family, my mom and dad. I don’t actually think I’ve heard my dad shout so loudly at an accomplishment that I’ve had.

Send me first. I want to be first. Let me lean into this. Our airmen are ready to do it. Our airmen are ready to do it.

In the developed capabilities realm, again, we’re making progress across a lot of fronts, and I have to give great credit to General Richardson and his team in AFMC who are doing a lot of this. Understanding that there were stovepipe pieces of the way that we do our equip and sustain, and pushing the realignment of a lot of the program executive officers, which I understand will be completed in the next 30 to 60 days of that realignment. Also, elevating these system centers to show that we have to integrate across the different programs. The elevation of the Nuclear System Center, appropriate, taking two different ICBM directors, putting them together for one to be one directorate. Have them led by a two star, that was done in August. We’ve completed that.

We’re elevating these other systems centers, the Information Dominance System Center, understanding through the C3 battle management and others, we have to think systems focused, not the platform focused. And I will tell you one of the more important things is the Integrated Development Office, because that’s one of our insurance policies.

As the secretary talked about, it was somewhat of a pickup game with the operational imperatives, but we found the right recipe, and some of that recipe is being repeated and institutionalized, and this Integrated Development Office will be the one that not only looks at the demand signals and requirements coming from each of the program offices and ensuring that they are integrated and coordinated from enterprise solution, but they’ll be doing some oversight of the initial prototyping of the experimentation of the early systems engineering, to making sure that we’re building an Air Force from the beginning as One Air Force, not assembling at the end and trying to work the integration issues.

This is key, and it’s key because the relationship with the Integrated Capabilities Command, which is another major structure that’s being stood up, and we are doing it as fast as we dare, because this is something we absolutely have to get right, but we know we have to get right fast. And so, putting those together to make sure the operators from all of the different functional areas are coming together, imagining the future, and number one for Integrated Capabilities Command, we have to remain competitive into the future in the way that we design our capabilities, design our force, evaluate our operational concepts. And as we do that, we need to make sure that it’s technically feasible, that we have a demand signal to put to the Integrated Development Office.

So, we’re moving out. The Integrated Capabilities Command will not be ready today, but the secretary and I have authorized the standup of a provisional command to be commanded by Major General Mark Bull Mitchell to start now, because the time is now and we have to get after it.

Col Elizabeth Brienza (via video): To stay ahead of the pace of technological change and our threats, we need to do better than just representing functional views. We do that really well, and we have some fantastic experts who are doing that now as they consider modernization for our platforms. But now what we need to do is move together the functional view with the mission threat view, so we can focus not just on what’s best for individual platforms, but what will come together to achieve specific mission outcomes.

The significance of standing up the provisional command is that we can begin this work immediately. There’s an urgency here. We cannot wait to create this new ecosystem of integration. We have to start developing a clearer demand signal for industry today.

What’s really exciting is how energized the MAJCOMs are to see ICC become a reality. We’re moving out. They’re participating in our workshops. They are hands-on building what this command will be in the future, and that’s really exciting to see. When ICCP activates, it’s going to begin a journey of transformational change in how we execute this capability development. And it’s going to start by bringing those experts from within the major commands, and the Headquarters Air Force, together in an integrated environment

Integrated from the start, integrated together, thinking about a force design with a threat in mind, to stay ahead of the threat into the future.

Ladies and gentlemen, I tell you, I could go on for a long time. If there was such thing as a filibuster here at AFA, I could manage that, because I could talk to you about this for the rest of the day. But the fundamental thing is we are taking the Air Force, that was the Air Force, the environment needed in the past, and transitioning it to the Air Force that the environment needs now and into the future.

Because as I’ve said before, I don’t know exactly what that future is, but there will be challenges ahead. There will be dark skies ahead, there will be trouble ahead, and if we don’t plan for how we’re going to navigate through that, the storm will come upon us and we won’t be prepared.

In this our time of consequence, it’s up to us to have the courage and the boldness to take these actions, and I believe that these actions will result in what our airmen need, which is One Air Force, and what the Joint Force demands, which is One Air Force, what the nation demands, which is One Air Force, to meet the challenge and ensure we can continue to fly, fight and win, and deliver air power anytime, anywhere. Thank you.