Ebbing Air National Guard Base will become the latest U.S.-based site dedicated to training foreign pilots across the global F-35 Joint Strike Fighter enterprise, which now encompasses more than 3,500 jets in 18 countries.

The new hub will allow more instructor pilots from the U.S. — the largest member of the F-35 coalition at more than 2,400 jets — to share their expertise with a rotating cast of nations who have less operational experience with one of the world’s most advanced fighters or lack the resources to host a multinational school of their own.

Learning from the U.S. can make the international coalition sharper in combat, Col. David Skalicky, who oversees the project as commander of the 33rd Fighter Wing at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, told Air Force Times. Military officials argue that familiarity can prove crucial if the countries must go to war together.

“This is really about increasing the capability and capacity of our allies and partners,” he said.

Poland is slated to arrive as the first foreign F-35 user on campus in September, followed by Finland, Germany, Switzerland and Singapore in the years ahead.

They’ll learn from the new 85th Fighter Group and 57th Fighter Squadron, expected to open at Ebbing July 2, an Air Force spokesperson said.

F-35 pilots from Italy, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands already train at Arizona’s Luke Air Force Base; Belgium is slated to begin lessons there as well. But Luke lacks the resources and room to welcome students from more than a dozen other countries, spurring the international coalition to look for another site where foreign pilots can learn from the Americans.

The U.S. Air Force tapped Ebbing to host the foreign training mission in March 2023 after a fierce, yearslong lobbying effort by Michigan’s congressional delegation to bring the jets to Selfridge ANGB north of Detroit.

Typically, foreign militaries learn from U.S. pilots at bases that are already operating the same aircraft. Not so for Ebbing, at which F-35 training will become the only on-site flying mission.

The base will build new F-35 pilots from scratch, with students who have already qualified to fly fighters but are getting their first taste of the fifth-generation plane itself, Skalicky said.

As many as 36 jets will arrive on base, including 24 F-35s. Ebbing will also host up to 12 F-16s as part of a Singaporean training unit that is transferring from Luke, said Col. Adam Rice, an Air Education and Training Command official tasked with coordinating the project’s progress.

The Air Force expects about four pilots will graduate from Ebbing in 2025 before growing to about three dozen graduates each year through the end of the decade, Rice said.

Trainees will start their seven-month Joint Strike Fighter journey at Eglin — the Air Force’s closest active duty F-35 site — where they’ll be exposed to the F-35′s controls and tactics in classroom lessons and simulated sorties. The program will be split between Eglin and Ebbing until the new location finishes building a simulator facility of its own.

In Florida, they’ll jump from virtual takeoffs and landings to one-on-one aerial dogfights and multi-jet offensives, Skalicky said.

“We usually progress from that point into surface attack [and] suppression of enemy air defense, as well as some higher mission sets like offensive counter-air, escorting strikers … or being part of a strike package,” he said.

After about three months, students will trek more than 700 miles to Ebbing for the second half of the course, when they’ll take to the skies to practice what they’ve learned.

Rice said the project is working to expand the existing training airspace at Ebbing. The site may bring in low-cost threat emitters, or hardware that replicates surface-to-air missile systems so pilots can learn to evade enemy air defenses.

Air Education and Training Command boss Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson “has promised ‘first-class’ training, not ‘world-class’ training, at Ebbing,” Rice said. “It won’t be a training space like Nellis, for instance, but it will be good-quality training for the [foreign military sales] customers.”

Some who graduate will head back to their home countries, where they’ll join their first F-35 units. Others will return to Eglin for further training to become instructor pilots in order to build their own domestic training pipelines, Skalicky said.

To transform the Air National Guard base of about 1,000 troops and civilian employees and an MQ-9 drone wing into a top-tier training range for high-tech fighters, the Air Force is embarking on a $850 million project that is expected to finish by the end of 2028.

Because the clock is ticking for troops to arrive at Ebbing, the Air Force plans to first host classes in an array of trailers and tension-fabric shelters on base. Those temporary facilities will tide over the training enterprise for a few years as the service renovates existing spaces like maintenance shops, while building Joint Strike Fighter-specific facilities for simulators and storage.

Singapore, whose forces will be permanently stationed at Ebbing, is bringing the F-35B, the vertical takeoff-and-landing version of the jet also flown by the U.S. Marine Corps. Because the Air Force’s variant doesn’t have the same capability, the service has to find other instructor pilots to help the Singaporeans, and ensure the flightline is reinforced with special concrete that can withstand the jet’s forces, Rice said.

In September, airmen from Eglin will hold a training exercise at Ebbing to wring out any issues at the site before foreign countries begin arriving later that month, Skalicky said.

But there’s still plenty of work ahead for the complicated project, which requires Air Force officials to weave the wants and needs of multiple countries into a cohesive training ground while navigating erratic congressional funding and a volatile construction market.

“Post-COVID, we’ve had challenges with supply and demand, construction, laborers, you name it. We’re still experiencing that across the enterprise,” said Col. George Nichols, deputy director of facility engineering at the Air Force Civil Engineer Center.

“[I’ve] been doing this for 23 years, and this is one of the most complex beddowns that we’ve done,” he said.

If enacted, the allotment would mark the most Joint Strike Fighters the Air Force has bought in a single year since 2021, when it procured 60. The service had included 48 F-35As in its fiscal 2024 budget request.

The FY24 defense appropriations bill would provide the Air Force more than $5.2 billion for F-35A procurement, an increase of nearly $361 million over the original budget request. The program increase of three additional F-35As would account for $277 million of that growth.

The purchase would still remain far below the minimum annual buy of 72 F-35s the service argued for years it needed to modernize its fighter fleet, while keeping up with the pace of older jets leaving the inventory. The Air Force plans to buy more than 1,700 F-35As, totaling nearly $250 billion, over the life of the program, according to FY25 budget documents.

Congress in FY24 also looks to give the Marine Corps and Navy funds for 16 short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing F-35Bs as well as 19 F-35Cs, which can take off and land from aircraft carriers.

F-35 fighters act as combat quarterbacks, conducting airstrikes as well as vacuuming up data on other nearby military assets and communications to share with the rest of the joint force. The program remains the Defense Department’s most expensive at more than $1.7 trillion to buy, operate and sustain.

Boosting spending on the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet is one piece of Congress’ agreement to put more than $40 billion toward militarywide aviation procurement in FY24 — $3 billion above the initial request, appropriators said in a legislative summary.

Congress would also approve the Air Force’s request to buy 24 F-15EX Eagle II fighters for $2.4 billion, seven MH-139 Grey Wolf patrol helicopters for $223 million and 15 KC-46A Pegasus refueling tankers for $2.8 billion.

The bill also offers an extra $840 million to purchase eight additional C-130J airlifters that would replace an older version flown by the Air National Guard; and $400 million to buy 10 HH-60W combat search and rescue helicopters, rebuffing the service’s plan to cease procurement.

And appropriators would provide $1.6 billion for procurement related to the Air Force’s B-21 Raider stealth bomber, about $55 million shy of its request because of a classified reduction. It’s unclear how many aircraft that might fund; the stealth bomber was approved to begin low-rate production last fall.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are pledging $2.3 billion to fully fund development of the F-35′s successor, known as the Next Generation Air Dominance program, and to further mature drone wingmen under the collaborative combat aircraft initiative.

Lawmakers on Friday were still scrambling to pass the FY24 defense budget ahead of a midnight deadline to fund the federal government or enter a shutdown.

The Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy will immediately start refreshing troops’ training and changing maintenance procedures as prerequisites for resuming normal operations, leaders from each of the services told reporters Wednesday.

But they acknowledged it will be months before the tiltrotor aircraft are fully back to flying real-world missions.

The Ospreys will receive no equipment modifications before they return to the air.

Marine Corps Col. Brian Taylor, the V-22 joint program manager, told reporters his office and the services “have high confidence that we understand what component failed and how it failed.” It’s still unclear why the part in question did not perform as intended.

Taylor and other service officials declined to say which component’s failure caused an Air Force Special Operations Command Osprey to crash into the sea during a training mission Nov. 29, killing all eight airmen aboard. They also declined to answer whether the aircraft would be restricted from flying under certain conditions or in certain areas due to the risk of a repeat problem.

The accident is still under investigation. The Air Force has shared its findings with the joint program office — which manages V-22 acquisition and maintenance for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — and the other services to better understand the material failure that led to the crash.

Because the wreckage of the Osprey sat under the Pacific Ocean for about a month before being recovered, the drive system is corroded such that engineers may never understand why the unnamed component failed, Taylor said. But investigators created a “fault tree” to map out potential causes, which are addressed in the services’ mitigation plan.

The main change will increase the frequency of an inspection that is already done on the aircraft — like upping the number of oil changes on a car, Taylor said. He said the change gives the component a greater “perimeter of safety” during operations.

Though Taylor repeatedly declined to offer information about the component, he said it is not the input quill assembly that attaches the Osprey’s engine to its proprotor gear box — the component that began wearing out early and caused a series of clutch malfunctions for Marine Corps and Air Force pilots in 2022. A portion of the Air Force and Marine Corps fleets were grounded in 2023 as those services studied how to mitigate the risk of so-called “hard clutch engagements” and when to replace worn-out parts.

NBC reported Feb. 19 the November crash may have involved “chipping,” where tiny pieces of metal wear off during use and can damage the engine. Taylor did not specify whether chipping played a role in the crash, but characterized it as a normal phenomenon for a mechanical system and said the V-22 has a sophisticated monitoring system that looks for small metal bits and alerts the pilot if any are detected.

Taylor made clear the November crash was unrelated to other previous V-22 mishaps.

“This is the first time that we’ve seen this particular component fail in this way, and so this is unprecedented” in the 750,000 flight hours amassed over the life of the V-22 program, he said.

Due to that long track record, Taylor said: “We are confident in the system.”

The ‘Gundam 22′ crash

The Nov. 29 accident was the deadliest Air Force mishap since 2018, and the fourth fatal Osprey crash in a two-year span. Twenty U.S. troops have died in Osprey incidents since March 2022.

The downed crew of “Gundam 22″ included Osprey pilots Maj. Jeff Hoernemann, Maj. Luke Unrath and Capt. Terry Brayman; medical personnel Maj. Eric Spendlove and Tech. Sgt. Zach Lavoy; flight engineers Staff Sgt. Jake Turnage and Senior Airman Kody Johnson; and airborne linguist Staff Sgt. Jake Galliher.

Six were stationed at Japan’s Yokota Air Base; two worked at Kadena Air Base. All were assigned to the Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Wing.

The weeks-long, multinational search effort successfully recovered the bodies of all but Spendlove.

The U.S. military now flies hundreds of V-22s, largely operated by the Marines. The tiltrotor aircraft is known for its towering nacelles that allow it to launch and land like a helicopter, and speed forward like a fixed-wing plane. Troops use the unique aircraft to slip in and out of areas without established runways, where fixed-wing planes may not be able to land with troops and supplies.

The Marine Corps owns nearly 350 Ospreys; the Air Force and Navy operate smaller fleets at around 50 and 30 aircraft, respectively.

Beyond the safety and accident investigation boards studying the most recent crash, Air Force Special Operations Command is also conducting a deep-dive into its CV-22 Osprey program to determine whether it provides adequate training, resources and other factors to ensure airmen’s safety.

The Government Accountability Office and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability have also launched their own probes into the V-22. On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the House oversight committee, said it had not yet received information from the military as it looks into the aircraft’s safety and performance.

“Serious concerns remain, such as accountability measures put in place to prevent crashes, a general lack of transparency, how maintenance and operational upkeep is prioritized, and how DOD assesses risks,” Comer said in a statement. “We will continue to rigorously investigate the DOD’s Osprey program to attain answers to our questions on behalf of American taxpayers and protect U.S. service members defending our nation.”

Marines prepare

As the biggest user of the V-22 platform by far, the Marine Corps has been most affected by the monthslong grounding. It relies on the Osprey to move people, supplies and weapons, and operates from ship decks and from ground bases.

Brig. Gen. Richard Joyce, the assistant deputy commandant for aviation, told reporters the Marine Corps has focused on keeping up troops’ proficiency on the Osprey since the grounding began in early December so the service could resume flights as quickly as possible.

“Our simulator utilization has been maximized to keep proficiency as much as possible in the virtual environment,” he said.

The service has gone as far as sending MV-22 pilots in Djibouti thousands of miles away to use simulators in Japan, and shipping MV-22 pilots who are deployed to the Middle East with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit back home to North Carolina for simulator training.

Now that the program office has cleared the aircraft to fly, the Corps’ most experienced pilots and aircrew will begin maintenance-check flights to get the Ospreys up in the air, then retrain on “core and basic skills,” Joyce said. Once those top personnel have brushed up on the fundamentals, they’ll pair with junior pilots and crew for additional basic training.

Joyce said it would take about a month for a squadron to get everyone back up to speed basic skills.

However, it will take more time for the personnel to retrain on more advanced skills and mission-specific tasks for combat assaults, transport flights and other missions.

The general said it would take until late spring or early summer to get back to pre-grounding readiness levels.

V-22 squadrons will go through more consumable parts, like filters, as they take on additional inspections and maintenance, he said. Those parts and training support will first go to deployed units, followed by squadrons with upcoming deployments, squadrons participating in key exercises or service-level training events, and eventually to test-and-evaluation units and those farthest from a future deployment.

The amphibious assault ship Boxer and the 15th MEU are set to deploy from California this spring, and Joyce said it’s not clear yet if they’ll be ready to bring the V-22 along. It’s one of the most pressing decisions related to resuming V-22 flight operations, he said.

Air Force’s ongoing studies

Airmen have done the work required to keep the Air Force’s Osprey fleet healthy during the three-month standdown, but “there’s only so much they can do with aircraft that are not flying,” Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind told reporters Wednesday.

He described a 12-week road map to getting the Ospreys back in the air that adds new maintenance requirements and allows experienced airmen to lead the way. The service will deviate from that plan as needed if work isn’t progressing on schedule.

Returning the aircraft to service begins with ground and simulator training that will include new safety controls and briefings, a review of aircraft maintenance records and refining squadron-level training plans to implement the new safety protocols, Bauernfeind said.

The Air Force did not elaborate on what new safety protocols will be introduced. AFSOC held an all-hands for Osprey crews Feb. 22-23 at Hurlburt Field, Florida, to explain the new safety protocols.

“We received very positive feedback that it was very beneficial to the crews,” Bauernfeind said.

The second phase will focus on returning air crews and maintainers to basic proficiency, initially targeted at senior aviators, instructors, evaluators and weapons officers. Simulator training has helped keep skills sharp during the standdown.

The phased approach gives the service time to absorb findings from the service’s initial safety investigation, an internal report meant to root out the cause of a mishap and prevent future occurrences. Bauernfeind received and accepted the findings of the safety board March 1.

He expects it will take the service more than three months to reach the level of proficiency it had on the Osprey before the Nov. 29 crash.

Bauernfeind said he’s confident in the service’s ability to safely resume Osprey operations before wrapping up two ongoing investigations. The Air Force has kept the families of the downed crew informed about the process, but has not told them the results of the recently completed safety investigation board.

“I have confidence that we know enough now to return to fly,” he said.

Navy’s path to at-sea missions

The Navy will take a similarly cautious approach to resuming its flights, putting only its most experienced personnel in the air first for basic flights in daytime-only conditions, Commander of Naval Air Forces Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever told reporters.

Those top personnel will then pair with junior sailors and eventually resume night operations and other, more complex training. The Navy will lastly resume training new pilots and aircrew at the fleet replacement squadrons.

But Cheever warned that returning to flight wasn’t the same as returning to mission: It may be several more months until the Navy sees its CMV-22Bs flying operational missions to haul cargo and people to aircraft carriers at sea.

Cheever said the Navy would avoid long, over-ocean flights until all personnel had built up sufficient proficiency. But when asked about any restrictions on the aircraft regarding duration of over-water flights, he deferred to NAVAIR. Taylor, from the V-22 program office under NAVAIR, declined to say whether there were or were not any operational limitations for the planes under the new return-to-flight plan.

Cheever highlighted the Navy’s flexibility and said all carriers at sea had fared well during the V-22 grounding. The Navy relied on its C-2A Greyhound, which is set to sundown in 2026 as it’s replaced by the CMV-22B, to resupply carriers at sea, including the Theodore Roosevelt deployed in the Indo-Pacific today.

He said the Navy also relied more heavily on its replenishment ship fleet and looked to load more goods onto carriers when they were in port.

But he noted the importance of getting the CMV-22 back to its mission, saying it can conduct medical evacuations and haul large F-35C engine components — unlike its aging predecessor.

The Space Force is the Pentagon’s hub for organizing, training and equipping the units that provide satellite communications to the joint force, track missile launches, catalog debris that could damage spacecraft, take images of troop movements and wildfires from orbit, and more.

But as the newest service has taken shape — pulling together soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and fresh recruits to form the military’s smallest branch — the growing importance of space in global security has highlighted the need for a flexible, collaborative workforce for the decades to come.

“I’m extremely proud of the Space Force and all the good that it has accomplished,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Feb. 13 at an Air and Space Forces Association conference in Colorado. “But as good as we are, as much as we’ve done, as far as we’ve come — it’s not enough.”

The service hit its congressionally authorized staffing goal — about 13,900 billets overall — for the first time in 2023.

As of Dec. 31, the Space Force employed around 4,400 officers, 4,600 enlisted guardians and 4,900 civilians. The service plans to expand to 14,526 members, including 9,400 in uniform, in fiscal 2024.

Each year, that number creeps closer to the 16,000 personnel the Pentagon estimated the Space Force would reach as it lobbied Congress to create a lean new service in 2019.

Katharine Kelley, the Space Force’s civilian personnel boss, predicts “steady-state growth” that allows the service to keep up with operational needs without stressing the training pipeline or setting unattainable recruiting goals.

“We’re realists about what we can actually produce,” she said in a Feb. 23 interview. “There are plenty of people that say to me, ‘Why don’t you just add 10,000 more people?’ … We’re not trying to grow for the sake of numbers. We’re trying to grow for the sake of the mission capability.”

The Space Force is preparing to welcome reservists to its ranks under a new model that will allow guardians to serve in a full- or part-time capacity without leaving active duty. That approach lets the Space Force avoid the bureaucracy of standing up a separate reserve component while ideally offering troops more flexibility than active military service typically provides.

The window for reservists in the other armed forces to apply to transfer into the Space Force will likely open this summer or fall, Kelley said.

In the meantime, service officials will continue hashing out the details of how that hybrid workforce will function: How would it affect military housing or health care? How would promotions work? What would it mean for unit staffing? And what back-end human resources software does that require?

“It’s not copy-and-pasting the reserve model and dropping it into the Space Force,” Kelley said. “It’s truly, how are you going to manage one composition that has a couple of different ways to serve?”

Further growth may require the Space Force to take a more active role in its own recruiting. The Air Force has so far handled guardian recruitment in an effort to minimize overlapping bureaucracy between the two services, which comprise the Department of the Air Force.

But Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna, the service’s top enlisted leader, said that could change.

“We don’t have Space Force recruiters right now,” he told Air Force Times in a Jan. 11 interview. “That’s probably something we have to do.”

Still, the Space Force’s accession numbers haven’t suffered from a lack of in-house recruiters.

More than 4,000 people sought to fill just 492 enlisted billets in fiscal year 2023, the service told Congress in January. It signed up all but three of the 259 officers it sought last year.

The Space Force plans to recruit nearly 700 new enlisted guardians and 321 new officers in fiscal year 2024.

Bentivegna plans to work on refining the Space Force’s recruiting strategy in 2024, to give potential enlistees a better understanding of the service’s mission and what their place in it could be. That might mean mounting an ad campaign targeted at those who future guardians might ask for advice on joining the military.

“What do they say? What do they know about us?” he said of recruits’ family and friends. “I want to … start owning that more as a service.”

Rethinking training

As the service continues to expand, leaders are reconsidering whether the foundation they’ve built can carry them into the future. That begins with an overhaul of the training pipeline.

The Space Force has already designed a service-specific curriculum for enlisted recruits inside the Air Force-run boot camp. Now it wants to shake up how guardians train for their first job in uniform, starting with the officer corps.

Rather than sending officers to technical school to learn about a narrow slice of military space, the Space Force will start them out with an introductory Officer Training Course that exposes troops to the basics of its three core operational fields — intelligence; cyber; and running the satellites, radars and other systems that comprise space operations.

Once the foundational course is done, guardians will pick the career field they like best and head to their first operational unit for on-the-job training, rather than spending more time in the classroom, Kelley said.

That means the Space Force will eventually stop sending guardians to some Air Force-run tech schools, like intel training at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas.

The service eventually plans to expand the same idea to the enlisted corps. It’s unclear how long the vision might take to implement.

Officials hope the idea will lead to a more intuitive workforce that better understands how the military space enterprise functions overall. Graduates will go on to staff units that increasingly look to blur the lines between operations, acquisition and sustainment of military space assets.

“It is very difficult to separate satellite operations, cyber operations and the intelligence that you need to understand to deal with the domain,” Saltzman said.

For example, he said, “a cyber operator will be far better at their job defending the network if they understand the satellite operations, and they understand the intelligence and the threat, and how to ask the right questions.”

The new ops floor

As the pace of operations mounts — fueled by wars in Europe and the Middle East, deterrence in the Pacific, the proliferation of satellites on orbit and burgeoning threats to the U.S. military space ecosystem — the Space Force is unsatisfied with the number of troops it has focused on the daily mission, Kelley said.

The service plans to bolster its shift work, hoping to ease burnout among operational teams, make better use of the troops it has and create more bandwidth in case of a surge.

The Space Force wants to grow the number of crews who staff ops floors around the clock from three to five or so, Kelley said, to give guardians more time to train when they aren’t handling the mission.

To build those rotational crews, the service aims to more cleanly divide guardians who handle administrative work from those who staff daily operations — allowing more operators to focus on the mission rather than distracting them with managerial tasks.

Those crews will form standard packages of combat squadrons the service offers the joint force for daily missions around the world, like the Navy’s carrier strike groups and the Air Force’s future expeditionary wings.

That comes as the Space Force continues to open service component units that work directly with combatant commands like U.S. Central Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to ensure precision-guided weapons can land on target, pass communications between troops, protect U.S. satellites from electronic attack and flag incoming rockets, among other tasks.

The tenor on ops floors is changing, too. Space leaders want guardians to see themselves not as button-pushers at desks, but as warriors in a fight that extends around the globe and into orbit.

In the past, “it was not about what happens if somebody actually tries to take out one of your satellites,” Kelley said. “What we’re focused on now is where to put that manpower and those resources to really flesh out the operational warfighter capabilities.”

The service expects to lean more heavily on enlisted guardians to run daily operations, while officers handle more of the joint force planning to which space is key. Bentivegna noted the Space Force plans to open a retraining program this year to more easily balance its noncommissioned officer corps and others across specialties.

Space Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. David Miller told reporters on a Feb. 27 call that the service is “in a good place” in terms of the staff needed to handle daily tasks, though it’s “in no way … overmanned.” He declined to say in which fields the Space Force is spread thinnest.

But he acknowledged that as the mission set grows, so will the need for staff in expanding areas like missile warning and tracking. That’s especially driven by the Pentagon’s plans to put hundreds of disposable satellites on orbit to become more resilient in case of attack.

It’s time for the service to take a hard look at how many people it needs in each of those roles, and figure out how to promote and pay them fairly, Chief Bentivegna said.

“Am I happy with the structure? No,” he said.

Bentivegna said he’d like to see all guardians who are fully qualified be promoted, up to the first noncommissioned officer rank of sergeant (E-5) — when troops start vying for a smaller number of leadership positions.

“I don’t want to have commanders make a decision that, ‘Only 65% can get promoted this cycle,’” he said. “The only thing that the guardians should be … comparing themselves against is the standard, not one another.”

Kelley, the civilian personnel boss, said the service will advocate for guardians to be allowed to pocket salaries that rival those in the commercial space, cyber and other technology-focused sectors that compete with the Space Force for talent. When guardians may qualify for bonuses and how large those might be is also under consideration.

Officials contend there’s no time to lose in nailing down the details.

“There’s [a] real world at stake here. This is not hypothetical,” Kelley said. “As much as I worry about how much we’re trying to attack at once internally, to get stood up and do all these new things and build new laws and new policies, what’s at stake is you’re farther and farther behind where you need to be. And so I’m excited for what we can do.”

The Space Force is considering giving prospective guardians the option to enlist for an initial term of eight years on active duty — twice as long as first-term troops usually sign up for — in a bid to build a more stable workforce to span the coming decades.

It’s one change to personnel policies now under consideration as the Space Force looks to break typical military molds and craft a workforce that meets its unique needs as the Pentagon’s newest and smallest branch.

“I know eight years is a big commitment to make if you’re 20 years old, 21 years old,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna told Air Force Times Jan. 11. “But let me explain to you … the training you’ll get, the opportunities you’re going to get, the experience you’ll have — it takes time.”

All enlisted troops across the armed forces are already required to agree to at least eight years in uniform. But most serve out a four- or six-year term on active duty before spending the remaining time in the individual ready reserve — a pool of former active duty, National Guard and Reserve troops who can still be called up in an emergency.

Instead, the Space Force could ask guardians to spend their entire enlistment on active duty. Once those eight years are up, they would be off the hook — with no commitment to the individual ready reserve.

In a statement emailed after publication, Bentivegna clarified that the idea would not be mandatory for new enlistees.

“If offered, in addition to 4- and 6-year enlistments, 8-year enlistment options would be voluntary and tied to a potential incentive bonus,” he said. “The Space Force is carefully considering the impact of voluntary extended enlistment contracts; we have proposed a third-party study on the impact of this concept.”

Bentivegna hopes that a new set of policies, which will allow guardians to toggle between full-time and part-time service while remaining on active duty, can offer the enlisted force more flexibility while keeping them in uniform longer.

The idea is on the table because the Space Force, established in 2019, has discovered that its enlisted recruits skew older — averaging 22 years old — and are more educated than those of the other services. Rather than joining the military straight out of high school, 40% of those recruits enlist after earning an associate’s, bachelor’s or master’s degree, the service said last month.

The Space Force also handles a niche set of highly technical missions, like cyber operations, electronic warfare and space-based intelligence, using an enlisted workforce of more than 4,000 people. All enlisted guardians must pass the background checks and polygraphs needed to receive a top secret/secure compartmented information clearance as well.

Because its recruits come in with more skill, and because the force is so small, the service doesn’t want to lose that expertise — or the money and time it takes to train guardians in those fields — after just four years.

The service will also explore how to structure re-enlistment bonuses and other incentives to avoid losing them to lucrative jobs in the space and cyber industries once the eight years are up.

“A guardian’s journey doesn’t end at the traditional four- or six-year mark, which enables the service to build the technical depth and expertise we need for great power competition,” Bentivegna said in a follow-up email from a spokesperson Jan. 30. “We are working to enrich their experience through technical training schools, fully qualified promotion policies, bonuses and [reimagining] our professional military education.”

Speaking at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium on Wednesday, Bentivegna noted that the U.S. also needs to reform military pay and benefits to make service more enticing and sustainable for those who do opt into years in uniform.

“That model that we’re looking at may be just a little outdated. What is the value proposition of service? It’s changed,” he said. “I think that’s the goodness of the dialogue we’ve had.”

It’s unclear whether asking prospects to join the Space Force for nearly a decade would make a dent in the service’s recruitment efforts.

More than 4,000 people sought to enlist in the Space Force in 2023, the service told Congress in January. But just a fraction make it into the limited number of available billets. The service plans to recruit nearly 700 new enlisted guardians in fiscal year 2024.

That’s a sliver of what the other armed forces aim to bring in throughout the year. For instance, the Air Force hopes to sign up 25,900 new active duty enlisted airmen by the end of September.

Todd Harrison, a military space expert at the American Enterprise Institute, warned the Space Force to do its homework before settling on major changes to career models.

He worries an eight-year commitment could make it harder for the Space Force to compete for talent with private industry and the other armed forces, if recruits see the contract as a long time to be locked into military service.

Harrison also questioned whether high performers, who may have other options to consider, would be attracted to an eight-year commitment. He suggested the Space Force track the correlation between how people feel about longer enlistments and how well they score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, an entrance exam that determines which jobs a recruit is qualified to hold.

“Look before you leap,” he said.

The Air Force and Space Force’s top civilian and uniformed leaders unveiled the sweeping slate of plans at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here following a monthslong, department-wide review that began in the fall. Its results comprise one of the most significant reorganizations since the end of the Cold War.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the goal is to prove the Department of the Air Force’s competitive resolve to U.S. adversaries — particularly Russia and China — and to execute those plans with urgency.

“We can no longer regard conflict as a distant possibility or a future problem that we might have to confront,” Kendall said. “The risk of conflict is here now, and that risk will increase with time.”

Among the biggest shakeups is the launch of a new Integrated Capabilities Command. The organization will become a central planning hub as the service crafts its requirements for the decades ahead — removing that responsibility from the service’s other commands and allowing the Air Force to think more holistically about its needs.

The new command, to be led by a three-star general, is “just what the name infers,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin said.

“This is where the operators will test operational concepts against our force design,” he said. “They will also ensure that when we have modernization initiatives, those are rationalized to ensure … we do not unintentionally put modernization on platforms that really don’t have a long-term play in the future force design. It wastes money.”

The move also frees up the Air Force’s major commands, which organize, train and equip troops for missions around the globe, to focus on daily operations rather than future force planning.

The Space Force will create a similar organization, Space Futures Command, to lay the groundwork for expanding the service’s missions through experiments and wargames.

While much of the proposed updates aim to revamp the Air Force and Space Force’s acquisition enterprise — including several more offices that will lend greater focus to the department’s highest-priority projects, like nuclear modernization and information warfare — the services also hope to improve how airmen and guardians are trained throughout their careers.

To that end, Allvin said, the service will replace its Air Education and Training Command with a new Airman Development Command. While few details accompanied the announcement, Allvin said the renamed command aims to streamline the educational pipeline, so that when troops move “from one part of our Air Force to another part of our Air Force, they don’t need to relearn the systems and tools and they can develop faster.”

“We believe we’re going to have a more coherent force … that can move rapidly through the future,” Allvin said. “We’re all also reinforcing mission-ready training.”

Many details of this week’s announcements, on which the service had raced to build consensus by Monday’s keynote, are still being finalized. It’s unclear where the headquarters of new organizations will be located, or how quickly the department can launch them.

Senior leaders had discussed the possibility of consolidating the Air Force’s nine major commands into a more streamlined system, according to two sources outside the military who are familiar with the internal discussions.

But rather than combine or eliminate commands, Allvin said, the service can do more to highlight the various roles within them — particularly, how they provide forces to the larger joint combatant commands like U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Transportation Command.

That includes a plan to move Air Forces Cyber from under Air Combat Command and elevate it to a service component command. AFCYBER would report to U.S. Cyber Command for daily offensive and defensive operations on military networks and systems. Doing so may allow CYBERCOM to more seamlessly direct Air Force cyber units and give the organization a larger role in managing its own training and resources.

The shift marks Air Forces Cyber’s third major move since 2018, when the organization moved from Air Force Space Command to Air Combat Command. It later combined with Air Force intelligence units to create 16th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

As it seeks to become more nimble and responsive to the joint combatant commands that direct daily operations around the world, the service will also turn its operational wings into “units of action,” categorized as deployable combat wings, in-place combat wings and combat generation wings, the Air Force said.

The idea is to create standardized packages of combat assets, like aircraft, maintainers and other support staff, that can deploy alongside the same squadrons with which they train, without shortchanging bases of the airmen needed to run daily operations and protect their perimeters.

The plan is expected to contribute to more predictable deployment schedules, a top focus for the service after leaving Afghanistan in 2021.

Allvin also said the Air Force will aim to mount a new service-wide training exercise in the Indo-Pacific in fiscal year 2025 that tests how pieces of the force work together, rather than limiting those lessons to individual commands.

Hints of other planned personnel changes have already trickled out, including news that the service will bring back warrant officers to bolster the Air Force’s technical expertise in cyber operations and information technology. The Air Force’s last active duty warrant officer retired nearly 50 years ago after the service deemed them too inflexible to meet its personnel needs, according to the Warrant Officer Historical Association.

The Department of the Air Force isn’t requesting specific funding for the changes in the fiscal year 2024 or 2025 budgets, but will ask Congress to move money around mid-year if necessary, Kendall said. New funding will be built into the fiscal 2026 budget request that is starting to take shape, he added, but officials will largely try to use existing appropriations in new ways.

One challenge the Air Force faces will be defining the separate responsibilities of each organization, one retired general officer told Air Force Times. Defense organizations tend to multiply over time because it’s typically easier to stand up a new unit to address a problem than to repurpose existing ones, he said, so leaders must have a clear implementation plan and ensure airmen understand the long game.

Another retired general officer questioned whether the Air Force and Space Force have enough time to put the plans into action before Kendall, a political appointee, may leave his post at the end of President Joe Biden’s current term.

The department must see its vision through to the end to ensure piecemeal changes don’t cause more confusion than good, he said.

“The question is, will it be done right?” he said.

Brig. Gen. Mike Zuhlsdorf is a key player in those discussions. He serves as the deputy director for resource integration under the Air Force’s logistics, engineering and force protection branch.

As other defense officials negotiate with foreign leaders for access to bare-bones airfields and more established bases overseas, it’s Zuhlsdorf’s team that is figuring out how to turn those sites into valuable Air Force lily pads in a maritime-dominant region for the decades ahead.

Zuhlsdorf spoke to Air Force Times at the Pentagon on Dec. 15. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Is the Air Force talking to other countries about using foreign bases that already exist, or are you considering building new sites?

We are not putting in new bases. These are bases and airfields that we’ve had since World War II, where we were able to hopscotch across the Pacific to ultimately get close enough to Japan. There are a lot of airfields like that, whether it’s in the first island chain — Japan down through the Philippines — or the second island chain, near Guam and Tinian.

We’re talking about renovating, rejuvenating and rehabilitating. We will make sure the pavement is still viable, trim back the vegetation where the jungle has encroached on the runway, and set up the basic essentials that we need in the event that we need to flush aircraft from a hub into these spokes, keep them safe and then turn them.

What do we need? Things like fuel; major aircraft parts that six to 12 airmen might be able to fix there; maybe some munitions [and airfield repair resources]; the essential lighting or navigational systems for nighttime operations. A little bit of base air defense might be part of that, or camouflage, concealment and deception. Almost all the hubs will have a command, control and communication system that will fly in with them so that we can maintain connectivity to the mothership at all times.

We are working with allies and partners. Pacific Air Forces has identified airfields that we want to invest in, and they’re going to work with the Philippines and Australia to do that. We are teaming with them on some projects that will allow us to get fuel out there, some munitions capability and other long-range transport aircraft that would come in and be able to resupply.

Which existing airfields are currently on the list?

There are more in the second island chain that we are identifying. There are additional airfields that are in Guam and a few in the first island chain that we’ll eventually get to.

What we’re trying to do is nail down access and overflight stuff before a formal announcement would come out. Those that have been in the press are the ones where we’ve already teamed with those countries. We are working with other allies and partners in the area to secure that very critical access, overflight and basing.

[Editor’s note: A spokesperson for the Air Force’s international affairs branch declined to provide specifics about which countries the U.S. is in talks with to host air operations abroad.]

Will the Air Force expand Andersen Air Force Base on Guam or other areas on the island?

We have projects for some hangars that are going in at Andersen, and at some of the chosen hubs we want to operate out of, maybe a spoke or two — wherever we decide is optimal. We’re looking to maybe throw up a shelter system that allows us to safeguard critical equipment. We need to take into account the sustainment of all that equipment we pre-position, and so we will want to put those into a controlled-environment facility so that when we need it, it’ll operate as advertised.

We’re also thinking about protecting those hubs and spokes so that the airmen, soldiers, sailors, Marines and guardians that we’re going to send out there will be as safe as possible. There’s a big threat from ballistic missiles and hypersonic missiles. We’re trying to make sure those airmen can turn those aircraft as advertised.

None of us who wear this uniform are looking for war. Our job is to be prudent with taxpayer dollars, and what the American people want from us is to plan.

What’s the timeline to open these sites? How are you phasing them in?

Two to three future years defense programs (FYDP). We are working through [which sites should be prioritized].

Is 10-15 years too long?

We’re going to see concrete stuff within a [five-year] FYDP and it will continue to manifest through that time period. We’ve got some weapon systems in the queue — Next Generation Air Dominance, collaborative combat aircraft. It’ll happen in that window.

What are you learning from Air Force spokes across Europe that you’ve used in partner countries since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022? How are you applying those lessons to the Pacific?

This is a unique opportunity for us. We’ve been in U.S. Central Command, and being able to move pieces, parts, munitions, aircraft, personnel and everything like that has been relatively uncontested. Yes, the Army has had some challenges there when you talk about the main supply routes, but generally it was not a contested environment. Ukraine is a contested environment, and logistics lessons that we learn are invaluable.

What are the critical pieces and parts that they need? How did they get these parts from location X to location Y? Did they use this system or that system? How did they pull the data? We are rapidly getting to a data analytics framework that’s going to allow us to visibly see what supplies and equipment we need. We’re going to be able to throw that up into a basing and logistics data analytics environment that’s going to allow us to, as logisticians, figure out where we need to put the next aircraft part or the next load of fuel.

Russia and Ukraine have a lot of small unmanned aerial systems that are impeding each other’s progress. How are they tracking those systems? How are they taking those systems down? How are they doing air defense for air bases? Those lessons are being gathered up.

What is the proposed cost for Pacific basing projects in fiscal 2025?

We’re working through FY25. That’s part of the resourcing our senior leaders are churning through right now.

There hasn’t been a profound change in counter-drone technology over the past several years. Where does that capability stand and what would you like to see?

We are probably still nascent. We literally just had conversations about this — within the last four or five months — about expanding and investing more in that very important battlespace. There’s a lot of research and a lot of dollars that are being applied to that problem set. You see that coming into play not only in the Ukrainian-Russian war, but also now with Hamas and Israel.

Are small drones a threat in the Pacific, despite the region’s significant size?

These are all islands, and they all have an indigenous population. You can rest assured that there’s probably people who don’t like the United States on those islands. Some of these smaller systems could absolutely impact an air tasking order. To protect the integrity of that air tasking order, we need to think through how we can get at that small threat, while other people are thinking through those ballistic missiles and those hypersonic missiles.

It is a full-spectrum air defense platform for an air base that we’re looking at, along with the camouflage, concealment and deception program, electronic warfare, and all these bits and pieces.

What are the main hurdles to achieving this vision?

One of the big problems is not having a budget. When you think about procurement lines that we need to stand up and invest in, we absolutely need Congress’ help in getting a budget passed so we can get the capabilities that we know we need.

There’s always the joint interoperability piece that we are yearning for, and the ability to share information with our allies and partners. We’re trying to work a little bit more aggressively on what information we can share with them, and what tactics, techniques and procedures we might be able to share. We’ve had success in Australia recently on some refueling efforts with the F-35 fighter jet. That’s a big success.

We’re breaking down barriers where we can to make sure that we’ve got the necessary capability and that everybody understands what that is. We’re sending people over to Japan right now to work with them even closer on exercises and on different weapons systems. Those are big barriers, but we’re overcoming them.

The threat that’s been posed to us over the last three or four years from the People’s Republic of China has galvanized a lot of allies and partners of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. There’s an impetus for us to work even closer together moving forward.

What near-term spending is on the horizon?

We’re investing in pre-positioned assets. That includes the kits with the tools and equipment that are necessary to do the maintenance on those aircraft. We’re investing in fuel bladders, in the renovation of the airfields, and in the airfield damage and repair equipment.

Think about heavy equipment — mobile aircraft arresting systems. Some of that stuff we have not put on a production line in a long time. We are investing in production lines to get that built and put in place within this Future Years Defense Program. We’re investing in communication equipment that will allow us to do command and control.

We’re investing in our airmen with multi-capable airman training. The Air Force Expeditionary Center at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, is putting together the curriculum that’s necessary for us to train our airmen and get them ready to have a civil engineer do not just civil engineering work, but maybe change a tire or load a bomb or refuel a jet or protect the base. It’s about investing in all those things that are necessary for us to get at a threat that, frankly, we just haven’t had to think about as much in the last 30 years.

When I came in, it was the Soviet Union, it was protecting the Fulda Gap in Germany. We learned a lot of skills that were multi-capable back in the late 1980s that we are now dusting off. We’re going to apply that to this near-peer fight.

Slife’s assignment to the Air Force’s second-highest position is part of a wide-ranging shuffle of the branch’s top brass that began in the fall. His promotion to four-star had sat in limbo since September as part of Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s lengthy blockade of over 400 military nominees that ended Dec. 19.

“Leaving things better than when you found it … is one of his hallmarks,” Gen. David Allvin, who became the service’s uniformed boss in November, said at Slife’s swearing-in event. “I could not be happier to be able to have this ceremony, put these stars on and get to work with Jim.”

The career special operations pilot replaces Allvin as vice chief of staff following a yearlong stint as deputy chief for operations.

As vice chief, Slife will help drive new policies to organize, train and equip 689,000 uniformed and civilian employees across the active duty Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve. Together, he and Allvin will tackle a slew of modern military challenges ranging from lackluster recruiting, to sweeping deployment reforms, to a host of digital-age threats.

Slife will also join the Pentagon’s other No. 2 officers in shaping requirements for major acquisition programs as the Air Force tackles its own multibillion-dollar modernization plan.

“We stand at the precipice of a different strategic environment,” he said at the ceremony. “[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ] Brown called on us to accelerate change. [Air Force Secretary Frank] Kendall has empowered us to actually think about … what we need to have to be competitive for the next several decades.”

Slife’s Air Force career began at Auburn University, where he earned his commission through the Reserve Officer Training Corps. He went on to become a decorated pilot with more than 3,100 flight hours on the MH-53 Pave Low search-and-rescue helicopter and the MQ-1 Predator attack drone, among other platforms, according to his official biography.

He also led Air Force Special Operations Command for more than three years and served as the vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

It’s the first time in more than a decade that neither the Air Force chief of staff or its vice chief hail from a fighter background.

While Slife’s proponents have praised him as a strategic thinker who looks to improve airpower overall rather than push parochial interests, others have criticized him for what they see as seeking change at the expense of military readiness.

“He’s not very patient. He’s not willing to look at things and shrug his shoulders,” one retired general said of Slife last May. “I think they’ll probably be, kind of, [Allvin] as the idea guy … and then Slife as the executor.”

Allvin, a career mobility pilot and strategist who previously served as the Air Force’s No. 2 officer, believes airmen stand at an inflection point between how past wars were fought and what tomorrow’s conflicts will demand.

“We have accelerated change, and now must turn this momentum into outcomes,” he said in prepared remarks at a Nov. 17 welcome ceremony. “The time to execute is now.”

To avoid losing on the global stage — and jeopardizing America’s superpower status — the four-star wants to continue a multibillion-dollar modernization of the Air Force arsenal to rival China, crafting more relevant training and agile deployments, and ditching outdated rules that can hinder airmen’s well-being.

As chief of staff, Allvin oversees an approximately $180 billion portfolio and around 689,000 uniformed and civilian employees across the globe. His right-hand man will be Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, a career special operations airman who was confirmed Dec. 19 as the service’s four-star vice chief of staff.

Also newly confirmed are Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, who will move from running Pacific Air Forces to Air Combat Command, and Lt. Gen. Kevin Schneider, who will take over as PACAF’s top officer, among other nominees for senior roles. They’ll need to ensure the force can juggle myriad conflicts around the world without significant growth, and convince a restive Congress to fund those plans.

“We face a security environment which grows more complex by the day and a pacing competitor which continues to advance at an alarming rate,” Allvin said Nov. 6. “We have a responsibility to lead and advance the integration of the joint force. … We must now follow through.”

A “small number” of Ukrainians started training at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson this week, Air Force spokesperson Rose Riley said in an emailed statement. Morris is home to the 162nd Wing of the Arizona National Guard, an F-16 pilot training hub that hosts international students.

“The training curriculum will align with the foundational knowledge and skills of each pilot and is expected to last several months,” Riley said.

The initiative is the latest step in America’s efforts, along with its NATO allies, to support Ukraine in its nearly two-year war with Russia. The U.S. has provided more than $113 billion in military, humanitarian and other aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded its eastern European neighbor in February 2022.

The New York Times reported in August that the war had killed nearly 500,000 troops in its first 18 months, citing U.S. officials. Thousands more civilians are dead and millions displaced.

U.S. officials have stressed that building a Ukrainian F-16 enterprise is a long-term solution to modernize the country’s military and bolster regional security, not an immediate way to add combat firepower as Ukraine tries to drive out Russian forces.

In September, Air National Guard boss Lt. Gen. Michael Loh told reporters the first group of Ukrainian pilots could finish F-16 training by the end of the year, though it would take longer to get the jets into combat.

The initial pilots were expected to come in with more flight experience than others who may follow them, which would require the U.S. to spend more time getting them up to speed. Air Force leaders have estimated that training each batch of pilots could take up to nine months on average.

Ukraine’s leaders have pushed their Western allies to provide fighter jets. The Biden administration demurred for months, citing concerns about the cost, the possibility of provoking Russia and the planes’ survivability against Russian air defenses.

But an Air Force-run study showed the idea was possible, and earlier this year, the administration signed onto a plan to send Ukraine the airframes — provided by the Netherlands and Denmark — and to train troops in Europe and the U.S. with a coalition of nearly a dozen countries.

Before arriving in Arizona, the first pilots headed to an English-language training program at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

The Defense Language Institute’s English Language Center, led by the Air Force, graduates around 350 foreigners from about 50 countries each year. The program prepares airmen to hold conversations with pilots in flight, crew members in the back of an aircraft, and air traffic control towers, while minimizing accents and familiarizing students with Western aviation norms.

Learning to operate the F-16 will put existing combat skills and the English-language program to the test. Politico reported Oct. 13 that Ukrainian pilots had already begun learning their way around the jet in flight simulators in Europe.

Some U.S. officials have publicly doubted how much of a difference giving Ukraine more advanced fighter jets than those in its Soviet-era fleet will make.

F-16s “will give the Ukrainians an increment of capability that they don’t have right now,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in May. “But it’s not going to be a dramatic game-changer, as far as I’m concerned, for their total military capabilities.”

Not all agree with that assessment.

Loh told reporters the F-16′s ability to disable enemy air defenses and fly low-altitude strike missions could help Ukraine. The jet is also supported by a robust network of international users and is still in production at Lockheed Martin.

“I definitely think it can be a game changer,” Loh said.