‘Huge change’ afoot? Air Force apparently weighing major command structure revamp

UPDATED 12/13/2023 at 3:35pm ET with new comments from Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein.

WASHINGTON and ORLANDO — A senior Space Force official is backtracking this afternoon after he appeared to reveal a dramatic change coming to the Air Force’s major command (MAJCOM) structure: namely, that the Air Force was getting “rid” of the current set up.

Hours after he made that assertion at the Space Force Association’s inaugural Spacepower conference, Space Force Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein addressed assembled press to slam on the brakes.

“I made some comments as if they were concrete. … I overspoke. They are not concrete,” he said. “The message I meant to leave with the audience and to leave with you is the fact that under great power competition, the Secretary is looking at how to optimize that of the entire Department of the Air Force for great power competition. That includes looking at our organizational structure as well as our processes.

“Right now, nothing is sacred. We’re looking at everything, but I made it sound like decisions have been made. There have been no decisions made in this realm. The Secretary has not even been briefed on this yet. It will be several months until that happens,” he said. “So I apologize for that.”

Guetlein’s new comments fall in line with those from an Air Force spokesperson who told Breaking Defense in a statement that Department of the Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s reoptimization effort “is ongoing as the teams supporting the initiative continue to generate and carefully refine a list of notional solutions.”

“Once decisions related to the reoptimization effort have been made, the Secretary of the Air Force will share them,” the spokesperson added.

In Guetlein’s original comments, he told the audience, “We’re going to transform the entire Department of the Air Force organization to prepare for great power competition within the next quarter. This [is] how transformative it’s going to be. The Air Force is going to get rid of the MAJCOM [major command] structure. … Think about how fundamental that is to the way we fight today and the way we’ve always thought about the Air Force. And we’re going to step away from what we know as the current MAJCOM construction, that’s going to be a huge change.”

Guetlein — the nominee to be Space Force’s next vice chief and one of the few officers still caught up in Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville confirmation hold — didn’t say how the Air Force supposedly would replace the MAJCOM structure, which organizes Air Force missions by either function or geography. For example, the MAJCOM Air Mobility Command supports missions like cargo transport and air refueling around the globe, but Pacific Air Forces is a MAJCOM focused on the Indo-Pacific. The Space Force also has a similar command structure, but it’s much smaller and not clear if the Department of the Air Force, which encompasses the Air Force and Space Force, is weighing a similar change for the space-focused service.

The reoptimization effort was announced by Kendall in September as part of his long-running push to head off burgeoning Chinese military capabilities. When the idea was unveiled, Kendall said the department-wide revamp would conclude its review by early next year and proceed directly into an implementation phase. 

According to Aviation Week, Kendall is considering 10 to 20 changes that will be revealed around February and subsequently implemented over the following two years.