Watch, Read: Spain Reveals Future of Deployable Combat Wings, ATFs & More

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain, the Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, sat down with AFA’s President & CEO Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.) for a Warfighters in Action event on June 18. Spain gave insights on the U.S. Air Force’s plans for the future of deployable combat wings, air task forces, flying hours, and more.

Watch the full event or read the transcript below.

Transcript

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Welcome to Warfighters in Action. I’m Burt Field, President & CEO of your Air & Space Forces Association. We’re here today with the Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Operations, General Adrian Spain. General Spain develops and implements policy on global ops, force management, training, readiness, and a host of other things. Basically, everything from flying hours to deployment rotations. Before we get started today, AFA’s Warfighters in Action is made possible by the generosity of our sponsors listed here on the screen. I want to thank each and every one of you for what you do to make this happen because without you, we could not do this great effort. Welcome, General Spain.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Thanks a lot, General Field, and it’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the opportunity and thanks to AFA for hosting this series of discussions in this time of consequences the chief talks about and the change that we’re going through. It’s important that we keep a dialogue going and keep folks informed. So I’m happy to be here today.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Absolutely. And we’re going to let you keep that dialogue going with a series of questions. And let’s start with this one. During the Warfare Symposium, you did a great job explaining the evolution of today’s deployment rotations from expeditionary air bases to Air Task Forces in the future, deployable combat wings. Last week when General Allvin was here, he discussed these efforts also. And he also mentioned some things about turning numbered air forces into institutional or component commands to free up other commands like ACC to focus on readiness or other issues. Now that’s a lot of change happening. That’s a lot of new terminology. Can you kind of walk us through this? So if Airman Field was out there wondering what’s going on, he can get a grip of these big changes?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

You bet. So to start, I think it’s important to always kind of come back to why we’re making the changes that we’re working on, and the driver behind it is the strategic environment that we’re in; the things that have changed from an adversary perspective and a threat perspective, certainly become more acute over the last five years or so. But trajectories that we’ve seen happening over time. The Air Force, as we go into the future and the initiatives that were announced at the AFA in February, really get us to a place where the attributes of the Air Force that we will have are optimized for the strategic environment that we’re in, that has two peered and near-peer adversaries, both nuclear-armed, one of which who’s been focused on American advantages for 25 years, and countering them, and one that can either match or outspend us in many ways.

And so that environment requires different attributes of the Air Force to be successful in it. And so the changes are really driven by what are the attributes that are going to make us successful in this environment. One of those attributes is enterprise decision-making. And so if we start at the top, you have the air staff and the secretary of the Air Force directing the air staff to implement policy and guidance, with the chief being the primary executor and the deputy chiefs of staff executing his vision, in this case. Currently, underneath the air staff we have MAJCOMs. What we’d like to get to are institutional commands that implement the policy and guidance on behalf of the air staff. In the current vision, and as we go through the processes that stand up different organizations, that’ll be four institutional commands that would live there and they would have kind of veto voting in their particular portfolio.

So Air Combat Command would effectively become the readiness advocate for the entire Air Force, not just the portfolio the Air Combat Command has now. Air Force Materiel Command for acquisitions and sustainment. Airmen Development Command running the entire professional education and operational education from accession to retirement. And then Integrated Capabilities Command would be the fourth Institutional Command who would really be implementing the force design that would start in the 5/7 and really start with the secretary and the chief’s guidance and then the design work that the 5/7 puts together. Below that, or I guess in today’s parlance, what we have as MAJCOMs would also, I guess below isn’t the right word, but alongside of the Institutional Commands would be your Service Component Commands. And so USAFE or AFEUR as a Service Component Command, the European Command, US-European Command, and the Africa Command would remain as a Service Component Command but would lose some of its requirements focus in the eight realm in particular. And some of those resources may go to Integrated Capabilities Command.

So all the rest of what we would describe now as major commands would be Service Component Commands and all have input and influence to the Institutional Commands, but the Institutional Commands would drive behavior while they, Service Component Commands, are responsive to their combatant commanders and executing those operations. Beneath both Institutional and Service Component Commands, you would still have numbered air forces. And what the chief was describing, particularly for Air Combat Command, is a set of responsibilities that may have to be pushed down to the numbered Air Force commander in order to manage the forces below the numbered air force in a way that’s different than today. So not so much focused on the administrative control of the wings that are below them, but operational control and certification and direction and guidance to those wings that exist below the numbered Air Force Commands.

And then of course inside of those wings we’re talking about units of action and redefining how we articulate capacity, capability, and risk within the unit of action and structure them similarly across the Air Force between combat wings, base commands and institutional wings in the test and training realm. And so from kind of top to bottom, that’s how that’ll look.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

So real quick follow up on that. So if I’m thinking about that, you have the Institutional Commands and then you have the Component Commands. So PACAF is a Component Command, USAFE would be a Component Command, and other like now 16th Air Force for example is the Component Command of cyber, so they’re functionally the equivalent now, functionally, right?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

That’s kind of how you’re seeing these kinds of things?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, there is a discussion about elevating 16th Air Force to a Service Component Command that would be called AFCYBER. So that’s work that’s ongoing, pre-decisional at this point. But the idea there would be that 16th Air Force, which is now reporting to Air Combat Command, even though it’s a component to CYBERCOM, would simply be pulled out as a Service Component Command, the CYBERCOM portion of that, the AFCYBER portion of that would be pulled out, and then we’d have to see what’s left from a 16th Air Force perspective and whether that still is a numbered air force underneath Air Combat Command or some other numbered air force.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

But AFCYBER would elevate to a Service Component Command as opposed to it being underneath Air Combat Command.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, great. So along these lines, you’re standing up the first of six Air Task Forces over the next year or so, and I think you’re starting with three, and that’s going to unfold over the time. What are you looking to learn from this initial effort with these initial Air Task Forces?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So the evolution that we’ve been on really since about the time that I was the commandant and you were the A3 back in 2013 or so, we were on this evolution to try to find more predictability and white space for our Air Force forces. The Expeditionary Air Base that we’re currently working through right now is this instance of getting ourselves out of hundreds, thousands of individual deployers, consolidating teams to build a coherent war-fighting entity that goes and deploys. The Expeditionary Air Base is started in October and will continue to Air Task Forces which is next, which is in implementation right now. So we’ve just recently gone through the strategic basing process. The first six of those locations have been announced, and the command teams are PCS-ing or PCA-ing to those places right now.

The secretary, when he approved this as a pathfinder, essentially, was aware that we needed to do some work to get ourselves to what will eventually be a combat wing. And so the Air Task Force, as we set it up, has the same building blocks as the Combat Wing will have. It is just aggregated from about four to five different locations as opposed to that one location. And so what we intend to do is to run them through a full AFFORGEN training cycle, deploy them starting in October ’25, and then observe and aggregate the lessons from their implementation in both the Pacific and in CENTCOM and apply those lessons toward the Combat Wing structure that we really want to get to going forward.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Well, that leads us into the next one. So we talked about combat wings in February and like to go through that again because sometimes repetition is good. So you have deployable combat wings, you have in-place combat wings, and then you have combat generation wings. Can you kind of show what’s different between those three types of wings?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, so the discussion about the combat wings has evolved a little bit. And what I mean by that is they’re all combat wings. Outside of institutional wings, they’re all combat wings. And the resourcing for each of these combat wings really drives whether it’s deployable, independently deployable, whether it has elements that are deployable, but it can’t independently sustain itself. Or it is intended to operate from home station, which drives a separate resourcing requirement. So our language about the combat wings is, “Hey, these are all combat wings.” We’d like there to be really two, we’d like there to be combat wings that are independently deployable, and combat wings that are intended to stay at home station and operate from there. But that’s not how we’re resourced today. We have the posture that we have, those resources that would make us independently deployable are not all at the right locations to consolidate and create a whole entity in all cases.

And so we have an interim step, which is a combat generation wing. And that is termed that way because it is not resourced to independently deploy. A combat generation wing would send forward force elements; aircraft and maintainers, or a command layer, the commander, command echelon A staff and deputy commanders, to lead a team if either one of those were necessary. A deployable combat wing has all three layers; it has a command echelon with an A staff that’s functional and has been trained to the joint war-fighting functions. It has a mission layer of some number, the idea is no more than about four mission force elements, and their associated maintenance and ACE capabilities. And then it has a sustainment layer, so what we call a combat air-based squadron, a CABS, that is able to independently sustain the combat wing and its constituent force elements once it gets downrange.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, so I’m getting my feet back on the ground with this kind of stuff. But most wings aren’t manned a hundred percent now. And wings, in general, that’s a big shift in our culture. We haven’t been deploying wings for many, many years, several decades. This sounds like lots of people. Is it lots of people? And where are they coming from? And how are you guys thinking your way through that part of the problem? Because obviously resourcing today is hard.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah. The detail on the resourcing, we’re working our way through right now. But as you mentioned, I think it’s important to remember that we did deploy as wings at one time.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

We did.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

We deployed as wings and we had basically garrison commanders, base commanders, that ran the base so that the wing could leave, which a constituent element of standing up combat wings is that they have a partner base commander that is supporting the supported Combat Wing commander. From a resourcing perspective, I think that the important thing for us, and one of the tasks that the secretary gave us when we started down this path was, as much as possible be resource-neutral. Now that isn’t always possible. At a macro level, I think the Air Force has most of the resources it needs to stand up at least requisite initial stages of the combat wings. They just aren’t all in the right places around the world. So there’ll have to be a discussion at some point about moving forces around to make whole some of these combat generation wings that could be deployable combat wings.

In terms of overall resourcing, I think the important thing for the service is, is the structure right? Do we have the detail right of what goes into a combat wing and what goes into a Base Command? To provide a level of service when the combat wing leaves that is still appropriate and relevant for the forces that are left behind and for the families and dependents that are left, and civilian population that’s left behind at a particular area. And working with communities to overcome some of those shortfalls. And what this does when we have the structure right and we build the detail out of what should be in a combat wing that can independently deploy, and what should be in a Base Command, then we’re going to go about the work of standing those up. And we’re going to see how many of those we can get to without really asking for much.

And we’re going to get to a point where we have to ask for some help, “Hey, I can get you this many combat wings that are independently deployable. I can get you five more if you allow me to move these forces around a little bit. If you can’t, here’s how many I’ve got.” And then we present those forces to the Secretary of Defense and he gets to use them however he wants. If we get some help there and we are allowed to move some forces around to stand up more independently deployable combat wings, at a certain point, we aren’t going to have enough resources in the Air Force and we’re going to say, “Okay, if you want us to build more independently deployable combat wings, I’m going to need some help.” Either in people or resources to more fully outfit the combat wings that exist.

And so what this allows us to do is to have a very consistent story over time that says, “This is what we’re building out for. This isn’t this year’s story because of the budget. This is the unit of action that the Air Force needs to be successful in this strategic environment. And I have this many, and with some movement and some approvals, I can get you this many more. And with some increase in resources, I can get you even more at that point.” And it becomes a very consistent narrative that lasts over time regardless of the external environment. As long as what we’re building is relevant for the environment we’re in against these adversaries.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

So just as I was listening to you talk, another thing came to mind. So if I’m a deployable Combat Wing commander or an in-place Combat Wing commander, either one, it sounds a lot like what we’ve been doing if I’m going to go be a wing commander in a deployed location or one back at home station. But do you see different educational or training requirements for these folks and working with an A staff that you have to bring into play, and where is that being developed? Is it down at Maxwell? Are they working these issues for you guys?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So we’re working on the training plan right now for… And we developed the training plan for Expeditionary Air Bases. We learned some things about where we had some shortfalls, particularly in the commander and command staff equities. And the Air Task Force is really going to help us with this. And so what we’re building now is the training plan for the Air Task Forces that includes the training plan for the commander and the command echelon and A staff. And that’s going to be our initial proving ground. And as we implement those Air Task Forces starting in the fall of next year, they’re going to have gone through a year of this training cycle, and we’re going to learn some lessons through that. So we’re going to be constantly talking with those commanders to ensure we’re pulling those lessons back in and that we are… I was just down at Maxwell yesterday talking to the inbound wing and group commanders and we had this exact discussion about, “Hey, what does the course need to change to be prepared for this?”

And it starts with, “All right, what are we training the Air Task Forces to do? And is that sufficient?” And now, based on that, what are our wing command or O-6 level of command courses need to have in them to fundamentally prepare them for the environment that they’re going into?

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Well, it sounds like you guys have a great vector ahead, so I’m rooting for you. Not that that matters to you, but-

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Of course it matters.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Shifting just a little bit, the 2024 budget plan calls for retiring about 250 aircraft and acquiring only 91. The Air Force is on track to go below 5,000 this year and 4,000 aircraft over the next five years. Now, I know that’s a total number, and each MDS or mission specific area, it’s different in each one of those, but how will that reduction, because it’s still a big number, affect the combat wings and the operational Air Force and your combat capability overall?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah. One of the things that we’re working really hard on, and we’re kind of at the end game to a degree on, is the availability of the force elements that we currently have. And so we have, I think, as a service, over time, we have taken the position, since about the 2010 timeframe, that we’re going to take the maximum amount of acceptable risk in current force structure and readiness, in order to get to the future faster, to bring advanced capabilities that are relevant in a high-end fight as quickly as we can. That aggregated risk over time is catching up with us, and this bathtub that we’re going into a little bit on the fighter force was planned, and so we knew that this was coming, it was deemed acceptable risk by the Air Force and we believe that it was still the right thing to do.

Now, I will say it’s still a pretty sizable fighter force, and it is one that I would say can still do all of the things some of the time, it can do some of the things all of the time, but it can’t do all of the things all of the time. And so we’re going to have to rationalize the utilization of some of these force elements in order to determine how much do I want to have that’s ready in case there’s a crisis or a conflict against a peer adversary. And our work to develop the force generation cycle paired with the unit of action and the combat wing, alongside this force element, the mission generation force elements, or fighter squadrons, effort that we’re in the middle of to try to free up some of the existing capacity to be presented to the joint force. All of this comes together to buy-down some of that risk of the force structure coming down while we’re trying to build back up with advanced forces.

One of the things I’ve learned coming back to the air staff or coming to the air staff for the first time is that it is much more predictable from a budgetary and timing perspective to divest things than it is to procure new things. And so despite best efforts to try to optimize the transitions, they can get out of sync. And so we are going to continue to live with some of that as we go forward. But I think the advances we’re making both in terms of the force generation cycle, the Air Task Force to combat wing transition, and making more of the forces that we have despite the reductions available for presentation to the joint force will help us get through all this.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, you mentioned risk a little bit and I want to ask you a question about that. Historically, well, at least over the last 20, 30 years, the ops tempo has dictated a lot of things. And it has inhibited really implementing new models with thought and precision. But the demand today, the ops tempo is not as high as it might’ve been 10, 15 years ago, but it’s still, the demand is high for Air Force capability. So as you look at this new model and you look at your new way of thinking about this, how is this helping you define readiness risk for mission, force or whatever?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, it’s an important question. And the Air Force has been on this journey for a long time. So I talked with a couple of previous A3s, and this discussion about wearing out the Air force and taking additional risk and current readiness is not a new one when viewed in light of the global requirements. And so there is an insatiable demand by the combatant commanders having just come from a combatant command. We’re consumers of readiness, there’s no doubt about that. And their charge is to buy-down risk in their theater. And so if there’s a force out there that can help them do that, they’re going to ask for it. And it’s the service’s job to think about the long-term risk.

What this discussion has allowed us to have, particularly in the AFFORGEN cycle for some of our stressed forces, is to really articulate future risk to the secretary in a way that is different than in the past, to force a choice and to be really agnostic about the outcome, “Hey, we have this number of force elements, here is what they’re currently doing. You can take one of these other force elements if you want, but here’s the cost of doing that in the future.” They’re supposed to go into a PACOM, for example. “If you take them now, they’re not going to be able to go do that. So which event do you want to support? Which crisis do you want to support? Which deterrence measure do you want to support?” Because it’s not free.

And I can more accurately and sufficiently articulate the future risk for the secretary now because of the things that have been done under previous A-3s to get us to a place where I can show you where all these force elements are, where they are within their AFFORGEN cycle, have they certified yet? Are they prepared? It’s not just a C rating discussion, it’s a fulsome conversation about true readiness and their development to be ready and what the cost is of pulling them out of that cycle either early or extending them if they’ve been in an available cycle. And we just haven’t been able to have it with that level of fidelity and specificity in the past.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

And you mentioned this certification process is helpful when you’re doing global force management and working with the COCOMs on their requirements. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, you bet. So the other services have a pretty elaborate certification process that has been in place for decades, for as long as I’ve been in the service. And the Air Force largely has relied on interest service certification, but it wasn’t really a demonstrable step to the joint staff that we are going through this certification process, and at this point I’m now certified. What the AFFORGEN cycle does for us is, it brings that into the preparedness cycle in their last phase before they’re available to be deployed. And so we certify them inside of the Air Force, and once they’re certified, then we present them to the joint forces available.

And that is another method and the appreciated factor in the move to this AFFORGEN cycle, because it does give us an ability to say, “Hey, well the risk here is that they aren’t certified, they haven’t gone through all this training as opposed to, in prior years, when we didn’t have that, it was, ‘Well, they just got back, they need to rebuild their readiness.’ Okay, well give them three months and then we’ll send them back in.” Without a certification process to kind of drive that, there isn’t really a sufficient leg to stand on when we say, “Hey, they’re not where they need to be, but you’re just accepting more risk.” Which, in the moment, may seem like reasonable risk at the time.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Oh, that’s good. Okay, let’s shift gears to flying hours. For years we saw a steady decline of flying hours, and the Air Force used some of that money to offset the growing cost of sustainment. But it seems like you’ve leveled off at about 1.1 million flying hours. Is that the right number? Is that where you’re going to stay for a while and are you thinking that you’re not going to have to dip into that for something else, to pay off something else, in the future?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, we’ve come to a pretty reasonable position here with respect to the flying hours. Instead of it being a bill-payer at the beginning of, or at the end of, every year, we’ve come to what we are calling a reasonably executable number at about 1.07, 1.06 million flying hours. Regardless of the cost, that’s what we’re going to ask for each year. And the accommodation here is that, and my goal is to break through that, because that is short of the true readiness requirement for the forces that we have and the operators that we have. But we haven’t executed over 1.1 million hours in a very long time. And so part of this is on us to actually go execute the hours. But the ask and the kind of position we’re in now is that we are going to stabilize at this number each year, and it’s my job to work with the MAJCOMs of today to execute above that number so that we can go ask for more flying hours because we’re able to actually execute them. Until we do, then this is the number we’re at for the next few years.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Are there any areas that you can identify specifically that are inhibiting growing the flying hour program? Is it sustainment, pilot numbers, just how we do business these days? Deployments?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yes, sir. It’s a little bit of all the above. I mean, supply being tied to flying hours in the past for organic weapon system sustainment is not helping, but we have a lot more contract support as well that isn’t affected by that. Certainly the balance of experience vs inexperience operators and squadrons hurts us in our ability to absorb. But it’s really about aircraft availability at the end of the day and mission-capable rates. And when we’ve taken risk, again going back to this idea that, hey, we’ve taken maximum acceptable risk and readiness and current force structure over time to try to get to the future, this is what that looks like. We don’t have the supply chain in place to keep the front lines as high as we’d like them to absorb into season over time. And so therefore, we kind of are where we are from a supply perspective.

Now, on top of that, you have unplanned events, so hailstorms, hurricanes, engines that don’t cooperate, a particular brake that was unanticipated as opposed to regular routine maintenance that you know you’re going to have to execute. What it tells us is that the ecosystem is fragile. And some of these, I won’t even call them black swans, but unplanned events that occur that take us off of the trajectory of a healthy ecosystem are not things that we’ve been able to weather sufficiently to break through that execution level from a flying-hour perspective.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Well, let me ask you a question on a different but related subject on readiness is just a discussion of the Joint Simulation Environment that you’re developing out at Nellis. I’m assuming that’s going to help with readiness, and are you seeing any benefit? Is it operational yet? Are we using it for tests, training?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, so the joint simulated environment, the first instance of that, is in Pax River and we’re partnering with the Navy on that environment. When I was the 53rd wing commander, that JSE was a glossy brochure, it was an idea and it was not real at all. It is a real thing now and we’re sending our F-35 weapon school students to the JSE in each class for them to use that simulated and synthetic environment to really get after their high-end tactics that, as good as the Nellis range is, and as robust as it is, a CHIP F-35 tactics still stresses the geographic confines as well as the threat environment in that space. And so our weapon school students who go out there, and our weapon school instructors, will tell you it’s the best training that they get for that week that they’re at Pax River.

We’re standing up the JSE Nellis this summer, and so we’re just about there. It’s starting with F-35 and then we’ll add F-22 to that. And the idea is to grow a kind of a mission rehearsal, TTP development, operational test environment at the hub of the Air Force where all that work occurs in the weapon school and in the 53rd wing for operational test, and inside of the Air Force Warfare Center in order to bring the community closer to the synthetic environment that’s relevant. The training within that, and the dream of the JSE, was really a government-owned environment that all of the other pieces of the environment, from a modeling perspective, had to plug into. We have a data structure that is consistent. We know the environment that we’re going to plug into and the fidelity of that environment, and you know the rules and the rule sets that are required to bring your system into that environment. And so we have that now and we have to build it out, and Nellis is the next step there.

It will certainly help from a TTP development, it’ll help from an OT operational test perspective. I have to say this, as the A-3, it’s my job to remind folks it can’t replace flying. It is a thing that allows us to stress our operators in a way that they can’t execute on our open air ranges, but they still need to go fly and they need to fly in tactical environments to simulate both the stressors and the fog and friction of weather or night, actual ground that you can hit, actual water that you can hit. And those elements of Airmanship and proficiency that you can only get while flying. So we have to find the right balance of high-end tactics that maybe we don’t want to show in open air environments, and that we can’t replicate for a reasonable cost, and flying in the weapon system to stress the hardware software on the weapon system in live-fly and to stress the human in that environment.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, exactly. So I’ll ask one more question on this. So if it stood up at Pax River, one person like me would assume, well, it should be easy just to transfer it over to Nellis. They buy the same kind of machines, put in the same kind of software, and it stand-up. What kind of problems are there to that argument that you’re seeing going forward?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

That’s a great argument, and it’s largely true, but you still have to have the structure underneath it, of the right humans to run that environment at Nellis Air Force Base. And so if I don’t have the right people to take the same exact architecture and run it day-to-day, then it’ll fall apart just like some of our other simulated systems have fallen apart at various locations around the world. And so we have to make sure we’ve got the structure right, and we have to budget for it. And so these are not… We’ve budgeted for the Nellis environment, we’ve budgeted for JPARCenvironment. What you’d like is, every kind of home station simulated environment has this ability to get to the high end. That may not be what you need for a brand new wingman on a day-to-day sortie to really stress their skill sets. But you’d like that to be the case, but it takes time to build that out.

One of the things with the JSE that we’ve talked with them a number of times is, if you threw a bunch of money at this, it’s not really going to go that much faster because we have to build the infrastructure, you have to build the networks. It still only moves at the speed of light. So if I’m trying to port back to Pax River and just plug into that repository, then everything that happens in that environment, if it’s at Nellis, has to travel 2,500 miles to be reactive to it, which is a delay of a second or two, maybe half a second. But that delay of a half a second when you have weapon school students that are operating at the highest level, matters. And as soon as we lose credibility and the replication in a synthetic environment, you lose the training audience, and we have to make sure that this is training and it’s as realistic as what we see in Pax River so that we can stress it and so that we can use it to the highest degree for both advanced training and operational tests.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

So when we’re talking about flying hours and we’re talking about training and readiness, a key part of that, the key part probably, is the pilot and the air crew. So can we talk a little about the ongoing pilot shortage? I realized that there’s not a lot of flying billets vacant, but there are some. But it really hits on the staff with your experience requirements across the Air Force and all these commands that were standing up, maybe even in A staffs that you’re going to send forward. So can you talk a little bit about what y’all are doing these days to work on that pilot shortage problem?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

You bet. I talked about brittleness in the flying hour program. The pilot shortage is in a similar boat. We’ve had lots of initiatives over time. This is not a new problem. 14 years ago, the pilot shortage was at about 800 and it’s grown to 1,800 or so, through lots of initiatives to try to solve this to include an air crew crisis task force that General Goldfein stood up, that implemented 10 initiatives to get after that specifically. Fortunately we did that, because it probably kept us from reducing even further faster. But what it didn’t do is overcome some other structural challenges that popped up at the same time. So we made some decisions in the mid-2010s to assess fewer people and to produce fewer pilots in those year groups. Some of those year groups are just coming up on their pilot training commitments right now. And despite the fact that we might have pretty decent retention, if the year group is too small, 45% of 500 is different than 45% of 800, and if we, historically, get 45% retained in a smaller year group, it’s going to mean less folks.

And so we have to work a little harder to try to talk to those folks who are up for an elongated commitment or a restructuring of their contract, if you will, and let them know we need them and we want them to stay and we value their service and we value their experience for the reasons that you talked about. We’ve done things like Air Mobility Fundamentals Simulation, which takes a lot of the mobility training into a simulated environment, which has an increase in pilot production. Correspondingly, we’ve seen a supplied issues in the T-6 kind of draw down our maximum number achievable in the T-6 from an undergraduate training perspective. We’ve got a helicopter-only path, which has increased the number of pilots in the helicopter track, again corresponding to decreases structurally in other places from a civilian simulator perspective. And so we’re working with Congress on initiatives to try to strengthen the civilian simulator instructor cadre, and we’re continuing to work on initiatives to bring on different paths to wings to take advantage of prior experience flying, not military flying, but accelerate them through the undergraduate training.

All of which have been kind of offset by COVID, T-6 supplied, J85 engines. And so we’ve seen kind of a flat structure. If we are what our record says we are, is about 1,300 plus or minus a hundred pilots per year. That’s about what we can do. Including all of the perturbances that can occur over that time. We’re working with AETC right now on some initiatives that I think have some real promise all pre-decisional, and we’re still in the analysis of them, but that have the ability to get us to that 1,500 number we’ve been talking about for a while by doing things a little bit differently and taking advantage of some best practices that are out there to get to flying skills, generic flying skills, and then focus on military flying skills and then quickly, based on some of the things that we’ve learned in our direct-to-FTU initiatives and the accelerated path to wings, that might allow us to go through some of these processes a little faster.

So we’re still working on that, but General Robinson down at AETC is working with us closely on it, and I think in the next year or two, we’ll see some real opportunity there.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Great. Well, General Spain, I’m out of questions, but you might not be out of answers yet. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you you’d like to share with us?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Oh, that’s a good… I didn’t talk much about the… I talked a little bit about force elements, and I just want to reiterate there, our mission generation force elements and the intent for the Air Force to find ways to present the existing forces in a bigger way to the joint force. And what I mean by that is, let’s say we have about a thousand combat-capable operational airplanes. Let’s say 60% of them are actually available for presentation. Some of the efforts that we’re working on would increase that percentage of available airplanes, of the operational ones that we have, to overcome some of the challenges that you mentioned. If we’re able to, the Chief’s UPL, Unfunded Prioritization List, that he submitted included about $600 million for an increase of about nine mission gen force elements in the fighter community. We used to equate the force element to a squadron, but what we’re really talking about are 12-ship force elements, historically.

In order to get to the deployable element, we’ve kind of rated the follow-on forces kit in order to make sure that the first 12 get out the door sufficiently. That 600 really restores the supply and the kits that are supposed to be on the shelf for deployment, and gets us healthy in that regard. Which again, creates an opportunity to present more forces to be available for the joint force. So we think, again, we’ve got some methods and some means to help overcome what we know is going to be a little bit of a bathtub through the end of the decade. And then we kind of get back right at the 2030, 2031 timeframe.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, great.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

That’s it.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Hey, well thanks very much. Really appreciate you coming out here and talking with us today. We’re going to open it up to the audience for questions. And I think we’re going to start with Greg Hadley from Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Greg Hadley:

Hey, General. Thanks for doing this. My question was on the Air Task Force locations that were selected. I was wondering, you mentioned you’re also going to be still drawing from other bases to form these Air Task Forces. Have you identified what bases and forces those will be? Will they be regional, kind of centered around them? And how often will those task forces be coming together during the AFFORGEN cycle to train as an entire unit?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, a lot of questions in there. So yeah, we got the locations for the command elements, many of those command elements that are PCS-ing in, so that’s 45 to 50 folks. And at many of those locations, they’ll have elements of the sustainment layer already at the base, and we’re going to carve out 160 or so folks from the existing structure that’s at the base to pair with the Air Task Force Command echelon and begin their training together. The commander and command team that’s getting in place right now, we’re working on the training plan to give to them, but they’re going to have to execute it. And so we’re going to work with them directly to ensure that the training plan we developed and what training opportunities they see kind of go hand-in-hand over the next year. So the support forces will come from up to two other locations.

The initial six months, so starting in October, those support forces will train as a team together under the direction of the commander. And then in April, all of the support forces will come together with the command echelon, and hopefully the mission element, to train as a big team for that six months as they get ready to go deploy. And so that’s when you’ll see your Red Flags and your Bamboo Eagles, your larger forces, Silver Flags, that get after some of these stressing elements of actual implementation of an entire Air Task Force. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question?

Greg Hadley:

Yeah.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Thanks.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Any other questions? Okay, over here. Just wait for the microphone. Just a second.

Andy Tennyson:

Good morning, sir. Thanks for being here. Andy Tennyson from Deloitte, currently working alongside your A-3 team and ACC on a lot of this transformation. But just curious, how do you envision the relationship between ACC as the Enterprise Readiness Command and readiness advocate and those dual-hatted force provider MAJCOMs that we think of today that also have a service component role; AMC, Global Strike, how do they all work together at IOC for ACC to represent the overall Air Force readiness? And how do you see that kind of evolving or maturing as we get to an FOC construct?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the initial instance of this is that there’ll be elements within those Service Component commands that will report to Air Combat Command to represent the weapon systems that were historically represented by Air Mobility Command, in this case, when they were the requirements advocate for mobility forces, they had an arm that worked that within AMC. As their requirements go to ICC and the readiness requirements now look to ACC, there’ll be a natural relationship across all the service components, so that ACC can represent readiness across the force, and advocate for them. The discussion will be Air Combat Command in discussion with Air Force Materiel Command and Integrated Capabilities Command and Airmen Development Command. Those four kind of horsemen will have a new relationship amongst them. And Readiness Command will be able to say, “Hey, from a readiness perspective, these mods that we want in accordance with the force design that ICC wants to do, we can accomplish, but I can’t go below this level in these forces because from a readiness perspective, I need to be able to present this number of forces to the combatant commands.”

And so that will be a dialogue and a negotiation. Each one of those service components will still, I predict, have a relationship with each one of the four institutional commands. And our senior mobility officer will still be in AFTRANS/AMC, and will still advocate for mobility forces through AFMC and Air Combat Command. But the vote will happen by looking across all of those forces in the Institutional Command. But we’ll still need the experts, and those staffs, will still need the expertise that may still reside at Scott in that example, but might be wearing Air Combat Command patches as an example. And it may involve into something else down the road, but we’ll certainly need that expertise in to enable the Air Combat Command commander to effectively fulfill that role as the readiness advocate across all forces, not just for the today’s traditional ACC forces. Thanks.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. And anybody? Another question over here, yeah.

Michael Marrow:

Hi, Michael Marrow with Breaking Defense. I wanted to ask a question about pilot training, specifically incorporating AI into that. Secretary Kendall obviously just had this flight in the F-16 Vista. It’s probably a little bit of time until pilots can dogfight maybe against an AI fighter jet, but I was just wondering your thoughts about incorporating AI more broadly into pilot training?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, when I think about AI in training, and flying training broadly, I think it’s probably from an actual execution perspective, going to be more value added in the flying training units. So your initial touch with the higher-end weapon system because… But where it will have applicability I think in the future is in monitoring and managing training over time. And so getting to a proficiency-based model as opposed to a stair-step or waterfall model of training where I have to do these seven things in a row in order to graduate to the next thing. Well, with AI and with an ecosystem that allows me to see academics, sims, flying training, and their proficiency across each of those to really tailor the training to the individual. So their progression isn’t based on which event they opted for, but how proficient they are at the tasks within those events. I think that’s where AI really has a chance to help us out quite a bit in the undergraduate training model.

In the graduate training, the initial training before they go to their ops units, I think you have an opportunity to infuse the synthetic environment, to do those same things, so that we can monitor proficiency and not just tasks in the FTUs, but also to infuse our models with a particular level of threat awareness and reaction that allows us to take advantage of the synthetics and say, “For a brand new person, I want the threat level to be at a low proficiency level.” And AI can help just generate that without us having to program every single digital entity to do something at 20 miles or 25 miles or 10 miles or turn around and go home, which takes time and is frankly inefficient. But when I can set a threat level and then the AI just tells the digital entities to do things because this is what a threat at that level would do, now I can really determine proficiency of the student in a way that might allow me to move faster through a program or, at a minimum, to tailor the program to that particular individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Another question here in front. Just a second.

Courtney Mabeus-Brown:

Hi, Courtney Mabeus-Brown, Air Force Times. Thanks for doing this. I wanted to ask, so moving to a more, the four horsemen as you just described them, what can the average Airman expect? How will this affect their daily lives? Will they feel this at all? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

I hope they do. And if we’re doing it right, they will. I’ll say, in the combat forces, this reality of getting ready for a high-end fight has been with us for decades. We watched the threat evolve when I was a lieutenant at Kadena. We made a dramatic shift to focusing on Russia to focusing on China when they got to a certain number of Su-27s, we were like, “Hey, that’s actually the threat.” And so we’ve been thinking about the high-end threat for a very long time. Our support forces though, unlike when we deployed as wings and we had base commands back in the Cold War, we’ve pulled apart their deployment experience to the degree that they really just started deploying as an individual and preparing as an individual and then teaming once they got into theater. So the major shift that they’re going to see is when you’re part of a combat wing, your focus, all the time, is combat wing mission.

And I don’t care if you’re a comm troop or a maintainer or a FSS food service technician, you’re going to be focused on, how do I do this in a combat environment and how do I do this when things are blowing up around me every day for this AFFORGEN cycle that I’m in as I get ready to be available? The closest corollary we have are our response wings, so your CRGs, your CRWs, that they’re about mission all the time, and the Airmen who are working in those groups and wings that are going to a contingency response are among the most motivated we have in our Air Force, because they see what they’re… There’s a reason why people enjoy going into a combat environment also because the results of your work you see every day, you’re preparing for this mission, you see the combat execution that’s happening from the place that you’re operating from. And your reward, even if it’s internal and intrinsic, is a job well done in support of this mission.

As opposed to, and for many of our combat support forces, a job well done equals a new stack of things that they have to do on their desk. And so the incentives are a little bit out of whack. And we want them to feel the same visceral sense of accomplishment as they do their functional roles in the context of this mission requirement, and prepare for this deployment that they’re going to go on and know that they’re a part of a team. The other thing that’s really great here is that, from an innovation perspective, right now, it’s really easy to see, “Hey,” I’ll use the Comm Squadron as an example, “Within a comm squadron, I can be very innovative in this space, in this communications and cyber functional space, but I’m probably not going to go help out the CE Squadron unless I’m asked. I’m probably not going to go help out the FSS unless I’m asked.”

In this new model where we have a combat air base squadron who all of those functions are together towards a common purpose, the span of my ability to assist and help without really being specifically directed or asked increases exponentially because I’m watching them do something that I can help them with. And I don’t need to be told to go help, I can just go help. And so I think they’re going to see this, and I think their response is going to be overwhelmingly positive, once we make this transition. And I think we’re going to learn a lot through the ATF, as we play this out over the next year.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Thanks for that. We have time for, I think, another question. Greg.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

That’s okay.

Greg Hadley:

Sorry to double-dip. But on the units of action, obviously deployable combat wings being the unit of action moving forward. General Allvin has said it’s going to take till this fall to kind of determine the mix of deployable combat wings and combat generation wings. But is the Air Force doing work to kind of define how many deployable combat wings they need to be a healthy force and to meet all the requirements? Is that something that’s under consideration?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

It is. So I’ll again go back to the combat wing portion of this, focusing on all the wings being combat wings and those that are independently deployable have certain attributes, but the number that we can generate and the number that we need is absolutely what we’re talking about right now. How many do we think we can actually generate with current resources and how many do we need not only to meet the current rotational requirements that we know we are going to have, or we’re likely to continue to have, plus have a margin to be able to respond to crisis that’s in, not necessarily in reserve, but that gives us some margin for combat-credible and capable units of action beyond just the rotational requirement.

And the other part I’d like to highlight here is that the reserve component is a huge part of this. And so we’re going to have international guard wings that will be deployable combat wings, combat wings that are independently deployable, probably with a little bit of help. There’s probably some things that don’t exist at each one of those guard bases that we might have to crowdsource a little bit. And in the reserve wings, the same. So we have, and in their case, it may be even that they have more resources or are more healthy in terms of resourcing to be independently deployable with some of the reserve wings. And so between the active guard and reserve forces, we think we’re going to be able to come up with a reasonable number of combat wings that are deployable to fill both the rotational requirement and to have some margin to build readiness and have a bench of forces that are ready to deploy if needed, if a crisis arises or if conflict arises.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

I think we have time for about one more question.

Tobias Naegele:

So actually I want to just begin with a quick follow to that. What do you think that number is? A few years ago, the Air Force said 386 squadrons was what the National Defense Strategy required. Will we have a number that says this is what the number of combat wings the strategy requires and this is the delta between what we have and what we need?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, the number that we’re shooting for right now is 24. We think 16 active duty and 8 reserve component. One that allows us to get the reserve component to a particular mob-to-dwell that is unique to their requirements and deploy within that structure sustainably over time. And we think that we can get to 16 on the active duty side. And we think that between our rotational requirements, and both an ability to build margin and what is available and to take some risk. If there’s a high-end crisis that gives you a six per six-month cycle, you have a bench in the certify phase that you might want to take some risk on, depending on what’s going on in the world and pull them forward. And so that would be, in the worst of cases, this is an existential fight that’s coming up and we’re willing to take that risk. You wouldn’t do that for day-to-day operations, but you do have them and they’re three-quarters of the way through their cycle and largely prepared to go other than most of the high-end training.

Tobias Naegele:

And then if you have defined those numbers and the wing as the unit of action, but you’re still really deploying kind of half squadrons as your typical rotation, does that change? Will you rotate larger numbers or will you still kind of deploy a piece of the wing as the sort of routine rotation in AFSAT, for example?

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Yeah, so what you’re pulling at is that these things can be severable, but what we’re going to present is the whole unit of action. And where we are going to need to train the command echelon is to be able to receive forces of any type, because it’s probably going to be rare that the mission element that you have at your base is exactly what the crisis demands. But I may need a command echelon and a sustainment echelon. A command layer and a sustainment layer. So they may go and the force elements may go either to a different place or not deploy at all because I need F-16s versus F-22s this time. And so we have to be able to be modular in that sense that the command layer must be able to receive forces that are not just the ones that they have trained with day-to-day, but are also force elements that know they may plug into a command layer that isn’t their own, but they still have the requisite training and skill sets to command and control those forces in a deployed environment.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Well, thanks. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. General Spain, thanks so much for joining us today.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Thanks for having me.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

We’re going to look forward to continuing conversations like this with you at our Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September. For those here and those watching, registration is open for that event now. You can scan the QR Code on your screen or go to AFA.org and search for the events to register. Thanks again.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain:

Thank you.