Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who took over as the department\u2019s top civilian official July 28, contends his cold warrior mindset will serve the Air Force and Space Force well as they turn their focus to beating China and Russia in the 21st-century global influence wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He\u2019ll also have to contend with the effects of withdrawing from America\u2019s longtime involvement in the Middle East, and face the myriad social issues plaguing a stressed force. The former Pentagon acquisition boss will also shepherd the Air Force and Space Force through the congressional budgeting process that could stymie the services\u2019 plans for change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kendall spoke with Military Times via Zoom on Aug. 13, about two weeks after being sworn into office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What are your initial priorities in office? Are there mission areas or career fields that you believe are due for a revamp?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
First and foremost is, raise everybody\u2019s sense of the urgency of dealing with a peer competitor. \u2026 It became an assumption that the U.S. was the dominant military power. I was briefing a senior government official near the end of the Obama administration, but what I said at the time was that, \u201cWe\u2019re the dominant military power until you get within about 1,000 miles of China, and that starts to change.\u201d The reason it starts to change is that China has been very careful and strategic about fielding capabilities designed to keep us out of their part of the world. \u2026 We do have a serious challenger, and we\u2019re at some risk, and we need to address that and focus on that and work together to achieve that objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are some things that I think have atrophied. \u2026 One is our ability to do operations research and systems analysis. Another is our focus on engineering and technological threats and technological superiority. Those are two things that I\u2019ll be making sure are healthy and trying to improve the capability of, so career fields \u2026 related to that would be of great interest to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve also got the problem of the new Space Force and how to make that a success. We\u2019ve got a department that traditionally has been a one-service department, which is now a two-service department. We\u2019ll be taking a look at what we\u2019ve done so far to address that reality, and seeing if some adjustments need to be made there. That\u2019s a work in progress, but I think it\u2019s off to a good start. I think there are a few tweaks that we may want to make as we define the different roles or the different parts of that organization overall, and decide what functions belong where and how they\u2019re structured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to look at management practices, and how we\u2019re measuring our own performance in a whole bunch of areas, and see if we have good metrics in place and we\u2019re tracking them and trying to correlate our policies and the things we do with the results that we\u2019re getting so that we know if we\u2019re moving in the right direction or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What changes to the fiscal 2023 budget request are you considering right now?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am oriented on the high-end threat. \u2026. If it doesn\u2019t make China frightened of us, then we\u2019ve got to really think carefully about why we\u2019re doing it. \u2026 There\u2019s a priority towards fully funding our strategic deterrent, we have to make sure we do that. So those are at the top of the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the Space Force side, I think we are starting to move towards a very different type of posture in space because of the threats that we see there. The startup years … tend to be relatively inexpensive compared to the years in which you\u2019re procuring and fielding capability. It\u2019s not close to us, necessarily, yet in terms of immediate years. But at some point, we have to get the order of battle that we need in space, and I think that\u2019s going to require some increased funding in that area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019ve worked in Pentagon acquisition, in the defense industry and in the human rights arena. How might that combination of careers shape your time in the Air Force?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
A long time ago, I made a decision that my life should be about defending freedom. You can do that in different ways, through the military, obviously, protecting our freedoms directly, and our allies and so on, and standing up for American values. The thing I love about serving my country is, this is a country that stands for human rights. We were the pioneers in that field — we led the effort after World War II to publish the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So we\u2019ve been a leader in that area for a long time, and our military is called on to defend those freedoms. I got a law degree so I could defend them in another form. That\u2019s all very consistent to me. That perspective informs, certainly, my work in defense and always has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Air Force is moving away from its plan for 386 squadrons. What\u2019s your current thinking on what kind of force structure the service needs?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have to win the fights that we\u2019re going to be asked to fight, and we have to defer the fights. Our first mission, of course, is deterrence — strategic first, and then conventional. And the way you deter is by having capabilities. I believe that deterrence should rest on real capabilities that intimidate your adversaries, and that if you\u2019re called upon to use them, that you can actually prevail. The thing that drives me more than anything else is focusing on the more stressing cases that we might be asked to operate in, and ensuring that we can achieve victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve been spending an awful lot of time focusing on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and that\u2019s not where the strategic threat is. I think that\u2019s well understood now. I\u2019ve been pounding the drum about the seriousness of the pacing competitor in China, and also some of Russia\u2019s modernization programs. So we\u2019ve got to turn our attention back to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started my career when we were engaged in another counterinsurgency, one in Vietnam. We turned from that, after Vietnam ended, to the Soviet Union, and I spent the next 20-odd years worried about that problem. So I have a long history of being in a mindset that you have a competitor who is going to be watching you and responding capably to what you do. You need to be ahead in that game, and take it very, very seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You told the Senate Armed Services Committee you want to advance the Air Force\u2019s conventional deterrence capabilities. How might you do that?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I came back [to the Pentagon] in 2010, after being out for 15 years, I noticed that we were making a lot of requirements decisions essentially by intuition, as opposed to based on analysis. I think we need to strengthen our analysis capability in that regard, so that we make better informed decisions about our requirements. In general, I think we\u2019ve got to improve our engineering capacity. That\u2019s another thing that I think, to a certain extent, atrophied, and there are a lot of reasons for that. \u2026 We\u2019re in a technological competition. Our potential enemies out there are designing systems that are intended to defeat the ones we\u2019ve designed. And at the end of the day, that\u2019s a job for engineers, informed by and working very closely with operational people. So I think we need to up our technical game quite a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the conventional side, technology\u2019s moving fairly quickly there and it\u2019s opening up a lot of opportunities for us and for our adversaries. \u2026 We\u2019ve had advantages in areas like stealth, for example, for some time. We\u2019re moving towards greater advantages, we hope, in network systems and in information warfare. Cyber warfare, cybersecurity is another area that moves very quickly at the pace of technology. Autonomy, artificial intelligence are all tools that are coming along, available to militaries to apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re going to be trying to figure out how to flesh out some of those [Third Offset] things and make them into meaningful operational capability. I\u2019m also somewhat fixated on the idea of focusing on getting meaningful capability in the field. There\u2019s been a lot of discussion in the last few years about moving quickly. But you have to be careful, when you move quickly, about where you\u2019re trying to get to, and keep that in mind. We\u2019re not in a sprint, we\u2019re in a marathon. What we really need to get to is a better generation of actual fielded capability. I\u2019m going to be focused on the shortest path to that goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do you plan to address the myriad social issues facing the Air Force and Space Force, from military housing to ideological extremism to suicide?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will be talking to families, I will be talking to military people, airmen and guardians, particularly, to understand what their lives are like today. My own experience in the military was quite a long time ago. Things have changed a lot: what people are interested in and how they\u2019re motivated, and what they expect has changed a lot. I want to develop a better feel for that by first-hand interactions, and I want to look at all of our programs that are designed to improve things in that area and see if they\u2019re working or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used to have a sign outside my door that says, \u201cIn God we trust, all others must bring data.\u201d That applies to human resource management, just as much as it does to acquisition programs. We need to understand where we are, and we understand where we\u2019re trying to get to, and then measure our ability to move forward. There are a number of programs in place. I will want to assess those, and I\u2019ll look for creative ideas for other things that we can do to improve the quality of the lives and the performance of the people that come into the Air Force and Space Force. There\u2019s a lot of work to be done there. It\u2019s incremental in many cases, but you have to keep your eye on that as a primary focus of leadership throughout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can this cold warrior bring lasting change to the Air Force and Space Force?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":57763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":7,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[75,7,160,29,36],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3484],"class_list":["post-26011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-air-force-association","category-air","category-daily-news-roundup","category-digital-show-dailies","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"SO5DABDS5NFSBDXHZ2XN7WYB64","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-air-force\/2021\/09\/20\/six-questions-with-us-air-force-secretary-frank-kendall\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n