Air Force leaders are axing more major organizational changes started under the Biden administration such as reorienting commands, creating new offices, and shifting combat forces for a potential fight with China, the service’s top leaders said Tuesday.
The service will no longer stand up Air Development Command, which aimed to subsume Air Education and Training Command and further combine the service’s force-development efforts, consolidate its functional managers, and create several new centers of excellence for certain career fields. Instead, AETC will retain its name and responsibilities, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in a press release that described a memo sent to their service the previous day.
Nor will the service reorient Air Combat Command to “focus on generating and presenting ready forces,” but rather keep it working to “organize, train, and equip combat ready Airmen,” the release said.
The service will:
- Stop establishing its Air Base Wing concept.
- Cancel plans for a new Program Assessment and Evaluation Office to handle resource analysis.
- Not create an Air Force Materiel Command Information Dominance Systems Center, Air Force Nuclear Systems Center, or an Air Dominance Systems Support Center to sustain and improve aircraft and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
These steps are the latest in Meink and Wilsbach’s efforts to undo “Reoptimization for Great Power Competition,” a 24-point plan released in early 2024 by then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. Execution of the plan, which aimed to prepare the Air Force for a potential fight against China, was put on hold in February by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
For months, it wasn’t clear what initiatives Meink, who took office in May, would keep or gut. In September, the Air Force secretary told reporters that he was “getting close” to making decisions on the reorganization plans tied to China, but hinted that he wasn’t “a big believer in the competition side of the house.”
In the press release, he and Wilsbach appeared to allude to the Trump administration’s decisions to shift national-security focus to the Americas.
“As our adversaries and the strategic environment continue to evolve, our approach to ensuring a credible and ready force must also adjust. Air superiority is not guaranteed,” the service leaders wrote. “Through flexibility and clear-eyed assessment, our Air Force will continue to fly, fix, and fight now and into the future.”
In October, the service spiked plans for a new Integrated Capabilities Command intended to speed up the acquisition of new technologies and weapons.
One former defense official familiar with the past efforts said it wasn’t clear how the current Air Force leaders intend to improve such integration.
“There’s different ways to solve that problem and it is not shocking to me that they would choose a different way than what was chosen by the previous team, but the question remains. How are you going to do it?” the former defense official said. “The announcements that I’ve seen do not explain how it’s going to be done, and so my concern would be if they just don’t do it, if they don’t provide that integration function, it will knock back our ability to compete with China.”
The official added that Hegseth’s mandate to reduce the number of general and flag officers across the military services likely sealed the fate for many of those commands and centers the Air Force hoped to create.
The memo also scraps a plan to to change Air Forces Central Command and Air Forces Northern Command/Air Forces Space from numbered Air Forces into Service Component Commands that report to the Air Force Secretary through the Air Force Chief of Staff.
Those will remain as numbered Air Forces. Similarly, Air Forces Southern Command will remain the air component to U.S. Southern Command and the 12th Air Force will be re-established as a numbered Air Force inside Air Combat Command, the release said.
The memo noted that Meink and Wilsbach were keeping some elements of the reoptimization plan, including keeping warrant officers focused on cyber missions, wing units of actions, large-scale exercises and keeping various smaller integrated development and capabilities offices.
The former defense official said it was encouraging to see some of those ideas kept, and believes some of those smaller offices could take on some roles that those centers would have taken on for the service’s integration efforts.
“They can beef up those organizations to perform more of the functions that you would have seen, for example, in the system centers,” the former defense official said. “That’s certainly a possible solution, and I hope they do that.”
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