Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin delivered a clear and unambiguous message about the future of the service during a high-profile keynote address, Sept. 16.
Boiled down, his message to an overflowing crowd of several thousand at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference was this: Tangible progress is occurring on the vast, but still young, effort to reshape the Air Force to confront China and effectively compete in an era of Great Power Competition.
Airmen, he said, "are moving out" to push reoptimization forward, understanding that adapting the Air Force to meet the demands of GPC must succeed. Competition in this era, which is focused primarily on China, demands organizational alignment, enterprise solutions, prioritization of mission over function, agility and adaptiveness, Allvin stated.
"This is not an intellectual exercise. We are moving out," Allvin said while detailing notable progress surrounding 19 reoptimization efforts in just six months. He opined the threat environment has been analyzed sufficiently and now is the time for change to occur.
The changes, he told the audience, fall into four broad categories - projecting power, generating readiness, developing people and developing capabilities.
Allvin highlighted one key element in his speech - activation of the provisional Integrated Capabilities Command (ICC). The provisional command will immediately begin leading Air Force modernization prioritization efforts across several key investment areas, while continuing to develop the framework for the permanent ICC, which is expected to reach final operational capability as a new Air Force Institutional Command in 2025.
"We have to integrate across different system centers," Allvin said. "We have to think with a systems focus, not a platform-centric focus."
The idea, he said, is that integration must be a focus from the earliest moments, "We must be building (holistically) from the beginning … not assembling everything at the end."
And like Department of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who spoke to the same audience less than an hour earlier and stressed similar themes, Allvin said there is no time to lose.
"The time is now and we have to get after it," Allvin said. China is aggressively expanding its military "to combat our way of war, changing the character of war with both speed and scale;" he later explained.
While some of the reoptimization changes and policies are new, some are reminiscent of the last time the service faced an existential threat during the Cold War.
Conducting large scale exercises is one example. Allvin spoke at length about the need - and benefits - of bringing large exercises back into regular rotation. "You have to do the thing to know if you can do the thing," Allvin said, explaining how large-scale exercises will identify strengths and weaknesses that must be understood in an era of Great Power Competition.
The Air Force is planning to stress its systems through a service-level exercise in fiscal year 2025 that will focus on speed, scale, Agile Combat Employment operations, sustainment and operational command and control.
This upcoming exercise will build on an exercise known as Bamboo Eagle, which Allvin attended earlier this year. With more than 3,000 service members from the joint force participating and over 20 units supporting, Bamboo Eagle afforded a combat-representative environment and employed more than 150 aircraft, enhancing interoperability and warfighting capabilities across a myriad of disaggregated locations.
As the service evolves to confront today's dynamic strategic environment, Allvin reminded the crowd that the Air Force has historically adapted at key inflection points to best compete in emerging security landscapes. He mentioned the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the United States and its downsized military was the leader of a "unipolar" world.
"That was what was appropriate for that environment," Allvin said. "That is what the country asked and that is what the Air Force delivered."
More change came in response to the 9/11 attacks and the 20-year Global War on Terror that followed.
The nation, and the U.S. Air Force, are now in a new and challenging "time of consequence" characterized by China's activities, as well as a smaller, but still considerable threat from Russia.
Amid the change and reshaping, Allvin said one fact remains true above all others.
"Make no mistake," he said. "If the United States Air Force is called upon to fight, we will fight, and we will win because we are the most dominant Air Force on the face of the Earth."
