Conceding that his future as secretary is connected to the outcome of November's election, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall used a high-profile keynote address Sept. 16 to highlight achievements modernizing and reshaping the Air Force and Space Force while also emphasizing unfinished work and the urgency driving it.
"What I'm not doing today is a farewell address," Kendall emphasized out of the gate, while noting that an election is fast approaching, and he serves at the pleasure of the president.
"My hope is that I will have the opportunity to continue to serve, but if not, you can be certain that I will be working as hard as I can for as long as I can to prepare the Department of the Air Force for a conflict that is not inevitable, but may be becoming more likely over time," he said, repeating a line he has repeatedly voiced since becoming the Department's highest ranking civilian leader. Kendall's remarks came during a keynote at the annual conference sponsored by the Air and Space Forces Association.
With that context, Kendall spoke at length on his now familiar priorities and analysis for how the Department is pushing forward to properly position itself to meet modern-day adversaries such as the People's Republic of China.
"China continues to push boundaries of acceptable behavior with aggressive actions directed toward its neighbors," he said, again repeating a familiar refrain.
"I have instructed our briefers to stop referring to the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army as a 'future', or 'emerging', or 'potential' threat. … It is a serious threat today," he said.
Kendall focused attention on China's ambitions and advances. That government, he said, "continues to invest heavily in capabilities, organizations and operational concepts designed specifically to defeat the ability of the United States and its allies to project power in the Western Pacific."
That effort extends into space where China is boosting its "space order of battle" as well as its "counter air capability," its prowess in cyber operations and increasing the size of its nuclear forces.
"We can expect all these trends to continue," he said.
Threats remain in the Middle East, he said, as well as from Russia.
Despite being mired in its invasion of Ukraine, Kendall offered a warning and a dose of optimism: "Regardless of when, if, or how this war ends, Russia is likely to remain an acute threat," he said. "But while Russia will be weakened from years of war, NATO will be even more resilient."
To show what that means in real life, Kendall noted a recent agreement with Norway "to share the costs of integrating the Norwegian joint strike missile on the F-35. This will significantly enhance our maritime strike capability and that of our Norwegian, Canadian and Australian allies," he said, adding, "This is integrated by design in action."
Kendall spent the balance of his 35-minute speech on the ambitious efforts to dramatically reshape, retool and re-train the Air Force and Space Force to confront and, if necessary, prevail in today's environment.
Most prominently, he spoke about his signature initiatives - the seven Operational Imperatives and Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition.
Together those initiative are among the largest, most comprehensive shifts in a generation for how the services operate, train and posture themselves in defense of the country and its interests.
On all fronts Kendall said progress has been made but much more work lies ahead.
On "space order of battle," one of Kendall's main focuses, "we have started work on several distributed and resilient constellations to replace our vulnerable existing systems and to acquire new capabilities needed for great power conflict."
Also in space, "We have received Quick Start authority to field additional low-cost GPS satellites to increase the resilience of the GPS system and have initiated that program. In the counterspace area, we are making good progress with a range of systems that at this point are still classified."
There has been progress on updating command and control, battle management systems to meet the need of today's threats.
"The Air Force and Space Force's modernized C3BM systems are taking shape, and early components have achieved initial operational capability," he said. "Maj. Gen. (Luke) Cropsey and his team spearheading this effort have been in place for roughly two years now, and their impact is becoming more visible, for both Air Force and Space Force advanced battle management."
Progress on the next generation long-range bomber, the B-21 Raider, "continues to make good progress in the flight test program."
Other important, new platforms are also progressing. "The overall family of systems, comprising Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCAs, the NGAD platform, and other associated programs, is moving forward aggressively," he said.
"We are going full speed ahead on the first increment of CCAs."
Kendall conceded that the ambitious NGAD program, which is focusing on designing and building state-of-the-art 6th generation "family of aircraft," is being reviewed and reconfigured to meet technological and budget constraints.
"If we are ever going to make a change in the NGAD platform's requirements, now is the time to do so, before the next major contractual commitment of resources and the commitment to proceed to production," he said.
He also made clear the desire to push forward with the program's central goal. "One thing I would like to make very clear," Kendall said. "We are not walking away from the core United States Air Force function of providing air superiority."
He mentioned continued work and differing levels of success in developing a new generation of tanker, updating base defense to cope with the "full range of threats, cruise, ballistic and hypersonic."
Similar progress can be measure on the far-reaching effort announced in February to "Reoptimize for Great Power Competition," which is known by the short-hand, GPC.
"The short version of our progress on the 24 (GPC) decisions that we announced is that all of the actions required are well underway. A few are slightly late to the original schedule, but overall progress is excellent, and nothing is far enough off track to cause major concern," Kendall said.
Even with the progress, Kendall laid down a blunt and clear warning to anyone thinking of slowing future progress because of "territorial" concerns.
"We don't have time for petty parochial interests or arguments about turf," he said.
He also repeated a warning to Congress that he has made often in past years. "The subject that I worry about the most, the adequacy of our resources," he said, making that statement amid uncertainty if Congress would be able to agree on a temporary budget to keep the federal government operating beyond the September 30 end of the fiscal year.
Kendall praised the White House and Congress for the support to date but was direct about the needs going forward. "As I look out at our needs going forward, it is clear to me that more resources will be required," he said.
Despite all the change, challenges and new thinking, Kendall noted that one constant remains.
"I would be remiss indeed if I didn't spend a few minutes talking about our most critical asset, our people. You are simply awesome. You make me grateful to be part of this team every day," he said.
"My promise to you is that whatever time I have left in public service, that I will spend it working as hard as I can to get the Department of the Air Force the resources it needs to successfully deter, and if needed achieve victory," Kendall said.
