Last March, the customarily lively halls of the Air Force’s largest warfighting conference felt more like a ghost town.
Military attendance at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium just outside of Denver had dwindled after a travel ban was put in place to curb federal spending. Air Force initiatives aimed at competing with China were frozen by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As the Air Force waited for the administration to nominate its top leaders, there were no splashy policy announcements.
Now, as the conference returns to Colorado this week, all of that has changed. Airmen and guardians have been approved to travel for the events, said Amy Hudson, the association’s spokesperson. As of November, the service had all of its top leaders in place. The administration rolled out its Western hemisphere-focused defense strategy last month, and the Air Force is rallying around Hegseth’s defense-industry reforms.
But the Trump administration’s visions for air and space power priorities are still vague, experts and former Pentagon officials told Defense One. Keynote addresses by service leaders scheduled for Monday offer a much-needed opportunity for the Air and Space Force to pitch how they plan to counter global threats, including China. The National Defense Strategy’s China observations are seemingly contradictory, and one former official said it’s unclear how the Department of the Air Force will use it.
“I think a lot of Air Force officers will be looking closely to see how China is being discussed,” a former Pentagon official said. “It was such a central facet of the Air Force approach in recent years that I just think people will be looking hard for signals there to understand how to think about it, how to posture their efforts vis-à-vis the competition with China.”
Defense analysts have said the Air Force is not prepared for a potential fight with China—and the service’s current inventory and structure is to blame.
“Despite the United States Air Force’s (USAF) stellar performance in recent operations, a geriatric fleet of aircraft, low readiness rates, and dismal prospects in a potential future conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) mean the service could decline within a decade from invaluable to incapable,” a Hudson Institute report released last week said.
An analysis this month from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said the service needs a total of 500 next-generation fighters and bombers to take on China’s Integrated Air Defense System.
“The Air Force must size and shape its forces to defeat Chinese aggression while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland and deterring nuclear attacks,” the Mitchell report said. “It cannot do so at acceptable levels of risk with its current force mix and inventory.”
Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said the new National Defense Strategy, or NDS, does not have specific details on how the services are going to implement the ideas.
The service’s previous focus on competing with China included long-range nuclear bomber and a next-generation fighter jet. Harrison said the service needs to explain how that build-up and preparation is best suited for the new defense strategy.
“The NDS’s No. 1 priority is homeland and hemispheric defense,” Harrison said. “The Air Force leadership has got to basically resolve this discrepancy between the force that they have been building and the force that the NDS prioritizes. Because they’re very different capability sets. You don’t need power projection forces in the same way if your priority is homeland defense.”
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach is scheduled to give his first keynote address at the conference since taking over as the service’s top uniformed leader in November. The speech, titled “Fly and Fix: Empowered by Airmen,” will likely mirror themes in his initial message to the force, which did not mention China.
“Our shared purpose is simple and enduring: to fly and fix so we are ready to fight,” Wilsbach wrote in December. “At our core, we fly and fix aircraft. It is the heart of who we are and what we do.”
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink’s second Air and Space Forces Association keynote address is titled “Innovating Faster: Acquisition Transformation.” It follows Hegseth’s repeated calls for the defense industry to invest more money in creating new weapons and to move to a “wartime footing.”
Some of the service’s highest-profile and most expensive acquisition programs, such as the ICBM, B-21, F-47, and Air Force One efforts, have been moved under Defense Department oversight under a newly-created direct reporting portfolio manager role. Harrison said the move signals a lack of confidence in the service to manage its “too-big-to-fail” programs, but added it also offers a new chance for the Air Force to focus on developing programs that are critical to the service’s missions.
“I think it also clears the deck for Secretary Meink and the whole Air Force acquisition enterprise to refocus on the things that are coming along that they can control,” Harrison said. “A next-generation tanker, a next-generation airlift, CCA, those are the kinds of things that they can, and should, be focusing on, and that’s where some of these new acquisition priorities could actually be put to good use.”
Gen. Chance Saltzman is scheduled to give one of his last Air and Space Force Association keynotes as the uniformed leader of the Space Force. He was confirmed to the four-year chief of space operations position in the fall of 2022.
His address, titled “Charting the Future of the Force,” follows recent calls from Space Force leaders to double the size of the smallest military service as it embraces an operational focus and warfighting mentality.
The former Pentagon official said White House and budgetary support for the Space Force’s growth will also be tied to how the service defines its role within the new National Defense Strategy.
“[Space]was a huge priority the first Trump administration, and they’ve been much quieter about space as a priority outside of Golden Dome, which is very homeland focused,” the former Pentagon official said. “The whole push for space as a war-fighting domain, and making more investments in space, is tied to that concept of how to make sure that you control the ultimate high ground in a future conflict with a peer competitor, that’s a huge choice. And it will tie into the choice of the president and [Management and Budget Office] make on the top line.”
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