Air Force chief: US must transform military amid increasing threats

The United States must transform its military to counter an increasing strategic threat from China — especially its moves to dominate outer space and its nuclear-weapon buildup, the head of the Air Force said during an event this week in Tucson.

China is emerging as a third world superpower after a military buildup that began in the 1990s and has accelerated in recent years, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Wednesday at a meeting of the Tucson Committee on Foreign Relations.

Kendall, whose 50-year military career has included senior roles at the Pentagon and at defense contractors, said that after returning to the Defense Department as deputy undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics in 2010, he was alarmed by the intelligence he saw on China.

“I looked at the intelligence on what the Chinese military was doing, what systems they were requiring, and it became very obvious to me that they had embarked on a program to deny the United States the ability to project power in the Western Pacific,” said Kendall, who was named Secretary of the Air Force in July 2021.

Kendall traced the roots of the Chinese military buildup to the Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. and its allies crushed Iraq’s forces with with the help of technology including precision-guided munitions, stealth aircraft and networked systems.

“No one was paying more attention than China — they realized they had to change,” he told about 100 attendees at the council’s event at the Tucson Country Club.

As China’s economy grew and more resources became available, Chinese military planners set about building weapons aimed at countering America’s ability to project its power, including long-range missiles and anti-satellite weapons.

“They observed that our way of projecting power was dependent upon a relatively small number or high-value aircraft carriers, forward air bases, satellites, and logistics and control nodes, and if they could successfully attack those, they could generally be very, very harmful,” Kendall said.

To counter China’s moves, the U.S. must modernize not only its weaponry, but its operational approach to warfare, Kendall said, adding that many of the nation’s legacy defense systems date back to the Cold War.

“The way we fight would not be hard for Dwight Eisenhower to understand — we still field the same types of the things the same type of way, in general,” he said.

As a result, the U.S. is falling behind peer adversaries like China, which is investing heavily in new technologies on the ground and in space.

The answer, Kendall said, is the so-called “Third Offset Strategy” — a concept developed during the Obama Administration in 2014 to use innovation and technology to counter advances made by top adversaries to win a war, or deter one.

Previous Cold War offset strategies include the development of a nuclear deterrence force in the 1950s and the development of advanced intelligence platforms, improved precision-guided weapons, stealth technology and space-based military communications and navigation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kendall said he worked on the Third Offset strategy as defense undersecretary before leaving the Pentagon in 2017, and a next-generation warfare strategy is needed now more than ever.

“We understood that things like the ability to act from further away, the ability to provide more quality at lower costs, were part of the equation, but we didn’t really find a way to operationalize that,” he said.

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Now, Kendall said he is working to finish the job at the Air Force amid new peer threats.

A good example, he said, is the U.S. Space Force, which was established in 2019 to manage and operate the space-based assets including military satellites, satellite launches and the Global Positioning Satellite system.

Kendall, who spoke earlier in the day at a Space Foundation’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, before flying to the evening event in Tucson, said he is focused on modernizing the Space Force and the nation’s military space assets, citing Chinese advances and the decades-long history of scientific space exploration by NASA.

“My short description is, we’re a nation that had a Merchant Marine and we woke up one day and decided we needed a Navy,” he said. “We need a Space Force because space is now a very contested environment.”

To further Air Force modernization efforts, Kendall and other senior officials have developed a list of “operational imperatives” needed to succeed.

At the top of the list is a “Space Order of Battle” — which includes developing resilient satellite fleets and technologies to defeat adversaries’ military space capabilities.

“It is defining the future of battles the United States will have in space, to jump away from the things we’ve traditionally depended on, which are very big, expensive satellites in small numbers, and get to things that are much more survivable,” such as constellations of much smaller satellites, Kendall said.

Among the other operational imperatives, Kendall highlighted the Next Generation Air Dominance program, which envisions a family of systems including a manned aircraft platform and unmanned aircraft, controlled by the manned platform or the F-35.

Kendall said the fifth-generation F-35 is the best fighter in the world and will remain so for years to come.

“It’s not just about the airplane, we’ve got to have other capabilities as well,” he said. “We’ve got to get to the next generation, we can’t be complacent.”

Other Air Force operating imperatives include improvements in air-base resiliency, moving-target engagement, global strike capabilities, advanced battle-management systems and combat readiness.

China’s aggression toward Taiwan and its buildup of its nuclear forces are also major concerns, Kendall said.

Neither China nor the U.S. want to start a war, he said, but his main concern is a miscalculation could start a war.

“One side could misjudge the other and do something that triggers a conflict nobody really wants,” Kendall said.