AFA 2024 — The Air Force’s overall plan to reorganize under the heading of “reoptimization” for great power competition is inching forward, with officials using this week’s Air and Space Forces Association to make the case for why stark organizational changes are needed.
The reoptimization should, as Air Education and Training Command (AETC) chief Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson put it, emphasize “mission over function,” breaking down longstanding stovepipes that separate warfighters — and the associated training, wargaming and experimentation — with acquisition.
At a panel today, Robinson told a story about a visit by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to AETC in November 2022. At one point during the visit, Kendall “looked over at me in the conversation, [and asked] ‘How are we going to train on the CCAs?’ And my answer back was, Mr. Secretary, what is a CCA?”
The visit would have taken place before the Collaborative Combat Aircraft concept came to dominate public discussion as the future of American airpower, but Robinson acknowledged the nervous laughs from the crowd as the right reaction. At the time, Robinson said, CCA was more of an acquisition issue and not yet something for which airmen seemed to need to be trained — the kind of assumption the reoptimization hopes to dispel.
“We’ve got to be holistically integrated in that way, thinking about the entire mission setting,” Robinson said, adding that the CCA program has now done a much better job of integration across the service.
One key effort under the Air Force’s reoptimization drive is the creation of a new Integrated Capabilities Command (ICC), which officials have said will assume the role of crafting the service’s requirements. A related Integrated Capabilities Office, opened by the Air Force in July, will largely advise senior leaders on acquisitions with a specific focus on Kendall’s operational imperatives.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin intended to stand the office up this year, and made a step toward that goal during the conference here. The service has now opened a “provisional” ICC with a staff of about 100 people working from their current locations, Allvin said Monday, and aims to eventually bring on about 800. The provisional command will be led by Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum, though the full ICC is expected to be led by a three-star general.
“We have to have the full manning documents understood. Have do the full strategic basing process, full congressional notification, full nomination of the leadership, which is, if it’s going to be a three star, has to be nominated, confirmed. So all of that will happen,” Allvin told reporters. “I would like to have it done, the full one, within calendar year 2025.”
Lt. Gens. David Harris and Dale White, who have key roles in standing up ICC, both emphasized a sense of “urgency” to stand the office up and get work underway.
Industry, operators and acquisition form a “trinity” that will be needed to keep the Air Force up to speed to counter potential threats in the future, Harris said, with the new organization mixing experimentation, acquisitions and warfighting.
“I think those that believe this is just a paperwork exercise or org chart exercise, I think you’re going to see something very different. Warfighter integration means something” real, added White.
Any great power conflict, said White, is “going to be a technologically based war. And capability development is clearly a warfighting function. We have to embrace that. We have to operate that way, and we have to organize that way.”
Michael Marrow contributed to this report.
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