Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has doubled down on his efforts to change the service’s focus rapidly from post-9/11 fighting to an unprecedented clash with China, setting a January deadline for a new war plan.
Six days after issuing a new call to arms in a servicewide memo, Kendall this week said that while the terror threat continues to be the main target of the military, “China is by far our pacing challenge.”
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In a speech Monday to the Air & Space Force Association’s 2023 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Kendall said, “Our job is to deter that war and to be ready to win if it occurs.” He added, “We’re all talking about the fact that the Air and Space Forces must change, or we could fail to prevent and might even lose a war.”
In recent years, several military planners have been pressing the Pentagon to focus more on China and less on COVID-19 rules and “woke” policies in the military. This week, they sent Kendall’s memo and speech to Secrets as indications of hitting pay dirt.
Concerns have been raised for years that China is outpacing the U.S. in weapons development. Even when former President Donald Trump formed the Space Force, some insiders feared that the United States was still ignoring China’s efforts to expand into space.
Kendall said in his Sept. 5 memo that China is America’s top threat and one the military has to plan for.
“It has been clear to me for over a decade that China is intent on fielding a force that can conduct aggression in the Western Pacific and prevail even if the United States intervenes. While China has focused on creating the regional conventional forces it believes it needs, China is also dramatically expanding its nuclear force and military space capabilities. We cannot sustain deterrence by standing still,” he wrote.
He added, “It has become clear to the entire senior leadership team that we are not optimized for great power competition. Over more than two decades, we have optimized to support post-9/11 conflicts and demands; this is not what the nation needs for the coming decades of strategic competition. Accordingly, we will conduct a major initiative over the next several months to identify and implement the changes needed to meet our pacing challenge. This initiative will involve a comprehensive look at all aspects of how we organize, train, and equip the Air Force and Space Force.”
Kendall expects that phase to end in January and for the service to shift to implementation and funding after that. “It will conclude by January 2024 and be followed by an implementation phase. Fortunately, the movement to reoptimize for great power competition has already started; I see evidence of that everywhere I go. But we must move faster and more comprehensively. We must identify all the changes we need to make and accelerate them,” said the memo, posted below.
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The secretary indicated that he is not interested in an academic debate on war fighting, but a concrete plan. “Change is hard, losing is unacceptable,” he wrote.
“The fact is that this is why the Air Force and Space Force exist,” he wrote. “No one wants a great power conflict, and no one can predict when one might occur, but come it may, and we must be as ready as we can be — now, tomorrow, and every day.”
