A Conversation with Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall on The Department of the Air Force in 2050

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This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on January 13, 2025. Watch the full video here.

Seth G. Jones: Welcome, everyone, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Seth Jones. I run the Defense and Security Department here. We’re honored to welcome Frank Kendall, the 26th secretary of the Air Force. Secretary Kendall, as all of us know, has had a distinguished career. I’m going to talk a little bit about his bio, but I want to end with just a thanks to him in general.

He’s held numerous posts within the government, including undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, AT&L, as well as deputy director of defense research and engineering for tactical warfare programs. He’s also a former member of the Army Science Board and Defense Intelligence Agency Science and Technology Advisory Board. And actually a phenomenal career, graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, served for 11 years as an active duty Army officer, including assignments in Germany, teaching engineering at West Point, and in research and development positions. Also a law degree from Georgetown.

Now, why do I say all that? I say all that in part because before handing this off to Kari Bingen, and who’s the head of our Aerospace Security Project at CSIS and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, I wanted to say, on behalf of all of us at CSIS, a big thank you to Secretary Kendall for his more than 50 years of service to the government and the broader defense and national security sphere. Secretary Kendall, you have been one of our generation’s most thoughtful defense icons, including on subjects like today, the U.S. Air Force in 2050.

And you’ve come up, for any of us that work in this area, with some of the best quotes of any senior government officials, including ones like “one team, one fight,” you’ve repeatedly reminded us. And I love your top three priorities. I use them frequently – China, China, and China. (Laughs.) Very succinct. So thank you very much for your decades of service to this great country of ours. You’ve been an inspiration to all of us. And if all of you in the audience can join me in thanking Secretary Kendall for his distinguished service, 50 years of service, please join me in thanking him. (Applause.) Really appreciate it.

All right, Kari. Over to you.

Kari A. Bingen: Great. Thanks, Seth. Kari Bingen. I’m the director of the Aerospace Security Project here at CSIS. And it is such a privilege to welcome the honorable Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force, especially for your last think tank event as the secretary.

I went back and looked at some of his past appearances at CSIS. And it turns out, at the end of the Obama administration in January 2017, with 48 hours left in the job, he came here with Andrew Hunter, who is assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and talked about a new book he was unveiling on getting defense acquisitions right. We’ll talk about that a little bit later on, but I thought, gosh, is he coming here to unveil a new book? Not quite, but I know you are going to unveil a report that you authored on the Department of the Air Force in 2050, which sounds like a pretty daunting task to outline, you know, hat does the Air Force and the Space Force look like 25 years from now?

Secretary Kendall will provide some opening remarks on that. We’ll do a little bit of moderated discussion. And then I’ll save time at the end for questions. So, please, if you’re here click the QR code to submit questions. If you’re joining us online, you can go to the event web page and there’s a button to ask a question. And I’ll get that here. So with that, Secretary, I’d like to turn it over to you to talk about this Department of the Air Force 2050 report. That was a report you were required to deliver to Congress, but it also was a way for you to lay out your vision for where the Air and Space Forces need to go in the future. So, sir

Secretary Frank Kendall: Thank you, Kari. Well, the quote that was left out, first of all, was acquisition malpractice. Anybody remember that one? Anybody know what program it was I was talking about? Some people nodded their heads. It was the F-35. But anyway – which has turned out, like a lot of programs, to be a fantastic product once you get through all the things we had to go through to get it fielded.

There are a couple of books possible here, but I’m not announcing one today. I want to talk about the report, DAF 2050 report. The two books, one I haven’t written yet, which when I have a little more time on my hands I think I may write, and one that I wrote for DARPA when I was out of government between the administrations on the future of warfare. And we’ve been working on getting that declassified. Started out as secret, but I think at this stage of the game we might be able to provide it to stimulate some public discussion. But today let’s talk about DAF 2050.

The origin of DAF 2050 is a conversation I had with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the time, Jack Reed, who was a classmate of mine at West Point. And I said, Jack, I think it would be good if we could put out something on where we’re going to be, or where we ought to be, with the Air Force and Space Force in 25 years. Would you mind giving me a task to do that in the NDAA, so I can write something like that? So Jack was very accommodating and here we are.

The Congress asked for more than I had anticipated. They asked for a number of things that are not in the report because it’s just too – there’s too much uncertainty about the future to define all these things in detail. They essentially wanted a road map for the force structure, the order of battle, if you will, between now and 25 years from now. And what would be – you know, what numbers of what airplanes, what kinds, and what kind of units and so on will be in the force. That’s almost impossible to do with any sort of accuracy.

But what we could do was paint a picture of the Air Force and Space Force that the country is likely to need in 25 years. And you have to make a lot of assumptions to get there. You have to decide a lot of things. And the report lays a lot of groundwork for that as it goes through the national security situation, it goes through technology development, it goes through things like international alliances and what happens to them, what happens to the nuclear regime, et cetera, arms control. And basically, takes a – projects a situation in which strategically things haven’t changed a great deal. China, China, China remains a problem. Russia doesn’t go away as a serious threat. China increasingly dominates the story, though, as a strategic competitor to the United States.

And then we laid out what the Space Force and the Air Force both should be. The missions don’t fundamentally change, but both services need to go through a transformation. There’s a chart up now that talks about the Space Force of 2050. And these are some things we’ve taken out of the report. We’re going to need a much bigger, much more capable, much more powerful Space Force. General Saltzman and I both say that we have to go from having essentially a merchant marine to having a navy, an armed force. That’s the transformation that’s already started. And we’ve made some pretty good progress on that since just five years ago, when the Space Force was created. And particularly, I think, in the last few years, as we’ve moved to acquire and field distributed, resilient architectures.

We also need a lot of counterspace capability as well. That’s the first sub-bullet up there. We need a cost-effective mix of terrestrial orbital weapons and orbital weapons. The threats are going to evolve. They’re going to change pretty significantly. Access to space has become much cheaper. Will continue to do so. So we are going to have to do something to counter the militarization of space that China has embarked upon, largely to target our joint force and largely to deny us the capabilities the same thing to Chinese forces, as well as to deny us some other services. So in the counterspace piece we’re going to have to expand substantially there, with a range of capabilities. Space domain awareness is going to be increasingly automated. There are thousands of satellites in orbit already. Trying to monitor all that and track it without a high degree of automation is impossible. So we’ve got to go much more in that direction.

Surveillance and targeting. The joint force will not be able to go anywhere and do anything unless we can protect it from targeting from space. And so we’ve got to get that capability developed. Missile warning and tracking, the numbers and the ranges at which missiles will operate, the introduction of additional hypersonics, and so on are going to make that a very dominant threat. And we’re going to have to be able to provide warning and tracking in support of defenses against those systems. Communications, again, heavily leveraged commercial partners. There are – there are obviously large constellations being deployed that we can – we can piggyback on, rely on, and leverage. That’s going to continue. That market will sort itself out. But we’re going to want to augment our capabilities, our dedicated capabilities, with commercial capabilities. It makes the other side’s problem a lot harder. We got to continue to do that and expand it. And that’s probably true in some other areas as well.

And then PNT, critical service that’s provided from space right now through GPS and other systems like it, that’s one of the most important dependencies that we have for the military across the military and across our civil society. So we have to find a way to make that more resilient than it is currently. And then space access. Costs continue to decline. Open up a lot of possibilities for what we do, and what we deploy, and we have in space for warfighting. So major changes and a transformation that was already, I think, to some way, pretty well understood and underway.

OK, let’s go to the Air Force now. The Air Force, of course, operates two legs of the triad. We don’t see a change in the need for nuclear deterrence. We see that problem getting much more difficult in a triparty world. And we’re just starting to enter into that and understand the implications of that. I think Sentinel and B-21 are obviously going to continue, but I think we will have at some point to take a look at whether that’s adequate, given the two hostile nuclear powers that we’re most concerned about. And also, of course, we may be in a world in which there’s a lot more proliferation in the future. Global conventional strike. Right now, the Air Force is very heavily dependent on relatively short-range tactical aircraft, fighters, and has a relatively small inventory of longer-range strike platforms, bombers. And I think that balance needs to shift. And I’ve talked other times about increasing the rate of production of B-21. By 2025 you can talk about possibly another platform or other platforms in addition to the B-21 as being in the mix.

Tactical air, the big problem there is survivability in forward air bases, as well as, of course, the competitiveness with adversaries who are developing pretty robust air dominant systems of their own. We are going to be forward deployed. We’re going to continue our system of alliances around the world. And we need to be there with our partners and our allies. So there have to be aircraft that can operate from those kinds of environments, be survivable, and deliver the effects that we need forward with our partners.

We’re going to still have a debate here just in the next few months, I expect, about NGAD, the platform, but the idea of a Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems is very valid. The work we started with CCA is going to continue and become a much bigger part of the force by 2025. I won’t – I won’t – we don’t make a prediction whether we’ll go all the way there or not. I see a continuing need for crewed aircraft to have reliable communications and command and control over uncrewed aircraft. And that can be done from tactical band aircraft working with CCA. I think that’s model will probably follow for quite a bit of additional time.

Next generation aerial refueling. All of our longer-range aircraft, based on conventional models of aircraft, are increasingly vulnerable to very long range, even ultra long range, counter-air systems. And we have got to address that survivability issue. So that’s part of the equation as well. ISR and C3 battle management, we’re shifting the space. We will always have some capability in the Air Force with aircraft, but increasingly we’re going to rely on space. And we’re going to be providing all of our allies and partners with a suite of capabilities that is hugely beneficial to them as well as we do that. And we need to find a way to make that much more seamless and accessible to our partners.

And a lot of automation, obviously. There’s no question that various forms of AI are going to continue to grow. I was reading just this weekend about some relatively recent really dramatic growth in some areas there. That technology is moving really quickly. But in 2025, the degree of automation we’re going to require and have available to us, I think, it’s going to be very, very high. And then, obviously, cyber. One of the areas we’re trying to increase emphasis on in the Department of the Air Force. We’re going to do a lot more of that for more of that. All of the things – all the other things on the list can be negated potentially by cyberattacks. And we’ve got to be resilient. We also need the capability to do cyberattacks against our adversaries as part of our suite of capabilities. So I can see we’re starting to grow that part of our infrastructure. I think there will be more of that, certainly by 2025.

And then mobility. I talked about this reliability issue already. We’re going to have to have –we’re going to have to rethink how we provide mobility to the force and how we ensure survivability. And that may require completely new designs. We are looking at that with NGAS. And there is no final decision on that. That’s part of the suite of decisions the Trump administration will have to make. But the need for survivability is obvious. And it’s going to continue. In general, very fundamental in warfare about increased range in which people can deliver effects over the centuries. And that’s now come to the point where intercontinental effects are going to be – conventional effects are going to be much more accessible to our adversaries.

So the Air Force will still be the centerpiece of resilient U.S. power projection in the future. I’m not going to say much about it while I – for the next week, but the Navy has a really big problem with survivability. It’s addressing it, but I think that they’re confronting a very, very steep challenge there. And with air power, you can at least avoid some of that. Our air bases may be attackable, but they don’t sink. Next chart kind of wraps it all up here, and then I’ll let Kari ask some questions.

But in the Air Force side of the house, we’re going to be competitive. We have to make substantial improvements. We’re going to need a lot more resources. The picture that we lay out in the report starts with a – you know, lays out an optimistic, if you will, scenario for us getting the funding we need to have the Air Force and Space Force we need. The cover letter talks about how there are two futures, and they’re kind of bookended by one in which the 2050 report is fulfilled in one in which a number of other factors prevent that from happening – constrained budgets, reluctance to retire obsolete platforms, reluctance to embrace new technologies and exploit them fully, reluctance to limit our overseas commitments. All of these things can have a negative impact on our ability to get to where we’re going to need to be to be competitive with China, in particular.

So I’m having a hard time reading my own charts there at the back of the room, but we are no longer in an era where we can buy a platform, wait for it to wear out, and then replace it. We’ve got to buy things to stay competitive over time. And that’s going to be a fundamental change in how we – how we resource and plan for the future. So that’s the big picture. I got about, I don’t know, 25 or 30 dense pages in the report of dialog of pros about all of this that has been made available to you, I think. And I wrote it. We started out when I – when we started out to do this, my initial thought was to bring a group of people together to try and do this as a committee. It became clear that that was not going to be a really good way to go forward. So we talked about hiring somebody else to come in and do it.

And I just ended up writing it myself. I had inputs from the undersecretary, and the service chiefs, and a few others, but this is pretty much a Frank Kendall report. I have had enough people take a look at it and give me feedback that I feel reasonably comfortable with what it says. I don’t think you’re going to see dramatic surprises in there, but hopefully it paints a fairly clear picture of the transformed Air and Space Force we’re going to need 25 years from now. And after my 50-years-plus of service, 25 years can go by pretty fast. So we really need to get going on this. So I’ll leave it at that.

Ms. Bingen: Well, thank you, sir. Let’s dive into many aspects of that here. And the first is – let me start with another Frank Kendall quote. You were quoted as saying that the United States must be ready for a kind of war we have no modern experience with. So coming back into government in 2021, can you reflect on the most significant changes in the security environment you’ve seen? But really, what does that future of war look like? Are Ukraine, the Middle East, other areas instructive for that kind of war that we need to be prepared for?

Sec. Kendall: There’s a section in the report that runs through technologies and their implications. Highly automated. The highly autonomous action at long range, precision, space becomes a decisive theater, or a decisive domain. The point of that comment is that at the end of the Cold War we have not had a conflict with a peer competitor. The closest thing we had shortly afterwards weas the first Gulf War. And we demonstrated the dominance of the systems I’d worked on for the first half or so of my career. It was – it was a – those of you who remember that 30-odd years ago, it was an eye-opening thing for the world to see the total conventional warfare power projection dominance the United States brought to bear.

We went into the conflict thinking we were going to have 10(,000) or 20,000 casualties, and we had a couple hundred. We decimated a fairly modern military. Not on the scale of the Soviets, obviously, but similarly equipped. And then that’s 30-odd years since then. So an awful lot has changed. And we’re seeing the implications of some of those changes in Ukraine. We saw them in Nagorno-Karabakh. Drones, obviously, at scale, and attacking in depth. Not just in the front lines near the battlefield. So the use of space for targeting and for intelligence and so on, but particularly for targeting. Then the integration of all that so that response times to bring effects to bear are very short.

We’re going to be in a world by 2025 where decisions will not be made at human speed. They’re going to be made at machine speed. And humans will have to oversee. And we will – we will remain consistent with our values. But time is the most fundamental parameter on the battlefield. And even if you – you know, when I talk to our pilots about engagements today and, you know, things that they do at red flag and so on, fractions of a second matter. And human beings can only handle so much data at a time. We’re good at it. Our best people are fairly good at it.

But General Brown has talked to me about how when you get a saturated situation for even the best of pilots, you basically sort of simplify the problem for yourself. You narrow it down to some of the basic things you know that you need to do and stick to that, because you just don’t have the capacity to deal with everything else. Machines aren’t limited that way. So we’re going to – and it’s a competitive game. I think the thing that I’ve tried to introduce to a large extent in the Air Force is to renew a sense of urgency about the importance of time, and how we can’t just wait and presume we’re going to be dominant anymore. We’ve got to be moving at the pace that the situation demands, that the competitiveness demands. So that’s basically how I see the future, in a nutshell.

Ms. Bingen: Well, and I want to pick up on that autonomy, AI, moving at machine speeds in the air domain. I mean, there is a – and you’ve hit on this – there’s a major revolution underway in the air domain, you know, whether we’re seeing it in Ukraine, the Red Sea, even here at home, New Jersey, New York. We’re seeing the rise and proliferation of these basically thinking machines. And you’ve talked about CCA, where it’s the convergence of drones, autonomy, AI. Can you reflect a bit on the trends that you’re seeing, but really, those – the broader implications for the future of warfare, but also what are those issues that we are going to have to tackle as this technology is really here now? I mean, what are the policy, the operational, the integration issues that we’ll have to face?

Sec. Kendall: There are a lot of people, big and small businesses, working on the technology. And it’s – and some of the technologies are relevant here, are being developed for commercial reasons. And they’re going to move at the pace at which commercial things develop. Some of the core technologies, processing capability. You know, you’re probably all well aware of the massive computing facilities and data storage facilities that some of the big AI companies are using. You know, getting that down to more operational levels of compactness and so on, and reasonable energy demands. All those things are going to be contributors here.

The hardest thing, I think, for us to come to grips with is going to be the human-machine interface out of it, and how the decision making takes place. I had a switch on my console in 1975 in Europe, my Hawk battery command center. And I could turn a switch to something called “automatic.” And if I put that switch in automatic, my system with its radars and its air defense missiles, was going to be shooting down airplanes on its own. This isn’t new. We never, ever put that switch on automatic. (Laughs.) And I don’t think anybody has since. Maybe in Ukraine today they’re still using the system. Who knows?

But in any event, we’re going to have to figure out how to manage this in a way which is cost effective, which is consistent with our values, and which is militarily competitive. And I think that’s going to be a tough problem to resolve. And if you go to the battle management and the planning and application of forces, in particular as soon as you’re implementing lethal means, we have got to figure out how we’re going to manage all that. The cultural changes that are going to have to happen, I think, are just as important as some of the technological ones. And that’s one of the barriers, as I said, to getting to the vision we have in the report. So I think working our way through all those is going to be an important part of what we do.

Ms. Bingen: And air superiority. You know, China recently unveiled these new advanced fighter jets, possibly sixth generation. While the United States has put NGAD, the Next Generation Air Dominance platform on pause. I think it generates an array of questions. How are we maintaining air superiority? What is the future of manned platforms? You hit on that a little bit. How do we, though, balance – you know, we need to pursue these advanced platforms, but then not also fall into the – you know, F-35 is so expensive and increasingly a larger share of the budget. So how do you look at the future of air superiority?

Sec. Kendall: I think it’s going to be a mix of capabilities for a long time. And I mentioned earlier, the uncrewed combat aircraft would be part of that mix. We’re getting our initial serious fielding of that capability with Increment 1 that’s under contract now. And we’re going to learn a lot from that. We had started the work to define Increment 2, and what additional capabilities should go on that aircraft, and how should you distribute capability among aircraft in a formation so that you don’t put everything on every aircraft? I think we’ve got to think through all of that. We’ve got to, again, think through the command and control, how, I think for the foreseeable future, crewed fighters, if you will, are going to be managing the force, the formation that includes CCAs.

So we got to go work our way through all of that. The NGAD decision is really interesting. And we – I wish I could stick around to try to – for a few more months at least, or maybe a few more years. But we got to a point where, with the election results, I really felt that the right thing to do was to let the next administration make this decision. They’re going to have to live with it. And they’re going to have to execute it. So hopefully we’ll get people in who can, you know, make wise judgments about this pretty quickly. Here’s the dilemma. What the Air Force had started out to do, going back several years, was build a replacement for the F-22. I was in that tactical warfare program’s job when the F-22 came through for its Milestone B to start full-scale development.

It’s a world class fighter from its era. But that was 30 years ago. It’s still the premier air superiority aircraft in the Air Force. The F-35 has a lot of capabilities that the F-22 does not, but it’s a more multi-role aircraft. It has different flying characteristics and so on that are less specifically designed for air superiority. So when I started the Aerospace Innovation Initiative in about 2014 I got a billion dollars in the budget to do the technology for the platforms that would follow F-35 – or, the platform that would follow F-35. And that technology program was put on contract in about ’15 or so, 2015. It produced X planes that demonstrated the technologies that we were looking for. And the Air Force wrote requirements for an aircraft that is essentially an F-22 replacement. And for the last few years, that’s what we’ve been working on.

We’re now at the point where we commit to going forward, to finish design and go into production of that or not. And this is really the most important milestone for almost any program. And two things made us rethink that platform. One was budgets. You know, under the current budget levels that we have it was very, very difficult to see how we could possibly afford that platform. That we needed another $20-plus billion for R&D, and then we had to buy – start buying airplanes at a cost that’s multiples of an F-35, that we were never going to afford in than small numbers. So it got on the table because of that.

And then the operators in the Air Force, senior operators, came in and said, you know, now that we think about this aircraft, we’re not sure it’s the right design concept. Is this what we’re really going to need? So we spent three or four months doing analysis, bringing in a lot of prior chiefs of staff and people I’d known earlier in my career who I have a lot of respect for, to try to figure out what the right thing to do was. At the end of the day, the consensus of that group was largely that there is value in going ahead with this, and there’s some industrial base reasons to go ahead, but there are other priorities that we really need to fund first.

So this decision ultimately depends upon two judgments. One is about, is there enough money in the budget to buy all the other things we need and NGAD? And is NGAD the right thing to buy? The alternatives to the F-22 replacement concept include something that looks more like an F-35 follow on somewhere, something that’s much less expensive, something that’s a multi-role aircraft – multi-role aircraft that is designed to be a manager of CCAs, and designed more for that – for that role? And then there was another option we thought about, which is reliance more on long-range strike. That’s something we could do in any event. You know, that’s sort of on the table period as an option. It’s relatively inexpensive and probably would make some sense to do more that way.

But to keep the industrial base going, to get the right concept, the right mix of capability in the Air Force, and do it as efficiently as possible I think there are a couple of really reasonable options on the table that the next administration is going to have to take a look at. People have talked about not doing another crewed aircraft. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think that could be considered. We could just continue to rely on F-35 and keep it going in the foreseeable future and focus on CCAs. I’m not quite ready to do that personally, but the next administration could take a look at that. A very prominent industrialist has made a comment about that. (Laughs.) You all know what I’m talking about.

The culture and the history and the legacy of the Air Force, which I’ve been steeped in for – particularly for last few years, but for my whole life, really – is about the role of the pilot. And letting go, to some degree, of that I think is an incredibly difficult emotional thing – emotional thing for people to do. So we’ll all be convincing from the outside. And we’ll all watch see how this all plays out over the next few months.

Ms. Bingen: OK. I want to shift to space, because you mentioned that space will be the decisive domain for nearly all military operations by 2050. And I think, you know, when you came back into government Space Force was one year old. There was still a bit of discomfort with this idea of space as a war fighting domain. But you’ve embraced that and very much pushed that forward. There was a New York Times headline over the holidays –

Sec. Kendall: A little inaccurate, but OK. (Laughter.)

Ms. Bingen: But yeah, that’s what I’m going to – I’m going to take you on here. “The departing Air Force secretary will leave space weaponry as a legacy.” So discuss how you see space power evolving, the need for these capabilities, you know, what you meant by that maybe, and what we should expect to see in the coming years in this area.

Sec. Kendall: I’ve been asked multiple times about my, quote, “legacy.” First of all, I think that people with jobs like mine shouldn’t be too worried about that. They should be worried about being good stewards while they’re in office, and moving the ball as much in the right direction as possible while they’re there, and then handing it over, you know, seamlessly to somebody who takes over after them. But if I were asked about what we’ve gotten done in the last few years that I feel best about, the very first thing on my list isn’t anything specific like this. It’s creating a sense of urgency in the department about responding to the threat, and getting everybody – it’s China, China, China. It’s getting everybody focused on we have a serious competitor, and we better start taking that seriously.

And I made everybody in the – in the headquarters put a sticker on their computers early on that said war with China or possibly Russia is not unlikely. It can happen at any time. Even if the probability is only 5 or 10 percent, you’ve got to take that seriously. And that’s the reason – deterring that is the reason we have an Air Force and Space Force. And winning, if we get into a fight, is the reason we have the Air Force or the Space Force. So given the pace at which China in particular, was modernizing, we need to get our heads in the game. And I think to a large extent, we have. I think that the reoptimizing for great-power competition things we’ve done have helped that enormously.

The big emphasis early on was – for me, was modernization and what we called operational imperatives. That was really about the communities that just do requirements and acquisition. But the whole Air Force is affected by the reoptimizing for great-power competition set of decisions. And they’re about 80 percent implemented. So we’re well down the path of doing all those things. So that sort of collection of things under the terms of posture is better, sense of urgency would probably become the top of my list.

I mentioned if I were to pick one specific thing I think introducing CCAs. When I gave that direction in the fall of my first year in office, I made it very clear. We are committed to fielding these in scale. This is not an experiment or a prototype. We’re going to put these in the force structure. Let’s get going. And then that’s where we’re headed. We’re going to have more than a couple hundred at least in the next few years fielded and in the forest structure. I feel pretty good about that. But the overall bigger picture things come first. Weaponization of space isn’t really on the list, but it makes a good headline.

Don’t you all love headline writers? Anybody who’s been this business and talked to the press, the people you talk to, who do the interview or whatever, don’t write the headlines. At least, that’s what they tell you. The headlines are written by other people, editors I guess, in order to attract as much attention to the article as possible. And they don’t really have much necessarily to do with the actual things you said. But they’re – you know, they get clicks. This is one of those.

But, yes, space is going to be the decisive domain. The ability of the entire joint force to project power depends upon our success in space. If we do not deny China, in particular, its targeting capabilities with AI assistance and automated battle command and control and long-range precision munitions that depend on that – if we don’t keep those centers from acquiring our targets, we’re going to – our assets – ships, partly airfields where we’re distributing aircraft, where our ground forces and logistics nodes and so on are located – if we don’t deny that precise and real-time targeting capability, the whole joint force is at grave risk. And we also have to have systems that can continue to provide the joint force with all the services they get from space – communications, PMT, surveillance and targeting, all those things. So space is becoming the decisive domain.

We recognized this in the Obama administration. We recognized that it was a contested domain and that, you know, the move to militarize space, if you will, weaponize it, ultimately, also had already started. And we had to respond to that. So we changed our strategy a couple years before the Obama administration ended. But we didn’t really solve the problem of, OK, what do we do about it now? That work happened – was initiated really more seriously, I think, in the Trump administration, the first one. And when I walked in the door in 2021, I was pretty happy with some of the things the Space Force had already done to try to move in what I thought was the right direction. And we just amplify on and continued that.

Ms. Bingen: Well, I want to pick up on a certain industrialist that you mentioned. DOGE, Department of Government Efficiencies initiative. But, really, you know, you’ve seen this so many times when you’ve served in the Department of Defense, of these efficiency efforts. And I’m wondering – and I recall, when I was in the department we had Secretary Mark Esper went through Night Court and other similar efficiencies efforts. So are there efficiencies to be gained in the Department of the Air Force budget and DOD writ large to create that room for modernization? Or are we really at a point where we’re facing decisions on major strategic tradeoffs? And what are some of the ones that you think they’ll have to wrestle with?

Sec. Kendall: Quite frankly, I think it’s more important to deal with the major strategic tradeoffs. If we’re going to have the Air Force and the Space Force I laid out in 2050, we’re going to need to make some trades. And I think we’re going to have to – I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself by about a week or so here, but we need to rethink our posture. And I visited our five wings that are in the Middle East at different bases, major bases. I visited a lot of deployments in the Pacific, and places like Korea, and in Europe, and the Middle East. If China’s the pacing challenge, are we really postured the right way to deal with that?

And a lot of where we are in the world is a legacy of past activities or involvement that we’ve had. All the places we are like having us there. They love having us there as a guarantor of their security. I think we can still accomplish that without necessarily as much forward deployments. Are we going to be able to hang on to all the increasingly obsolete legacy force structure that we have as we shift to the future? We’ve had some success with that. We’ve had basically no success to speak of with the international – (inaudible) – department. The United States has taken on global obligations and supported those obligations with a lot of cost structure associated with those deployments. I think we need to rethink that.

I think we need to think about whether the way we’re spending money, the way we’re using force structure, is consistent with our strategy. And every administration does this. And every administration writes a document that talks about, you know, how it’s going to address the strategy. But very little actually changes. And I think there need to be some strategic changes. So that’s something that needs to be done. On the other hand, the quest for efficiency. My whole 50-some years, we’ve tried to be more efficient. I don’t know any civil servant or uniformed person who isn’t trying to get more for the amount of money that they have.

There are two things that are true about that. One, it’s really hard to get those efficiencies. It’s not easy. And people come in from industry, in particular, from the outside, and have been into cases where they’ve gone into companies that needed restructuring and so on and have done that, have done it on the industry side, do not have any understanding of what it takes to do the same sort of thing in the government. Every single thing you want to cut, somebody cares about a lot and is going to fight you in the Congress to keep you from cutting it. And the second thing that’s true, most of the things we do, that massive amount of regulations we have and so on, they’re all required by the Congress. Every year the Congress writes a law that’s, like, a thousand pages that tells us a bunch of things we’re supposed to do. Those things get translated into regulations.

And they’re kind of haphazard. They’re not really a strategic plan being executed. They’re individual things that individual congressmen or staffers have thought are good ideas. So that all builds up, right? Carving that away and getting rid of it is hard, tedious, difficult work, and requires the cooperation of the Congress. The other thing, the second point on efficiency, is that improving efficiency often requires investment. It isn’t free. (Laughs.) If you want to make your factory more efficient, you’re going to have to buy some modern machinery. If you want to make our government more efficient, you got to buy some modern IT. We don’t refresh our IT in the government at anything like the rate the commercial world does. That’s because we want to buy aircraft and other things. So we tend to – we tend to get by with what we have there.

So you have to shift priorities or you have to add more resources if you’re going to do those sorts of things. So I think it’s fruitful ground to plow, but you’ve got to do it professionally. You’ve got to do it with a deep understanding of what you’re actually trying to do and what the situation is that you’re dealing with. The past attempts to make efficiencies – and I’ve been through quite a few of them – generally say something like this: We’re going to be more efficient. I’m taking 10 percent of your budget. Be efficient. (Laughter.) Job done, right? That’s a cut. That’s not an efficiency exercise.

And essentially, what people do is they cut content, ultimately. It’s hard to cut force structure. It’s hard to cut the civil workforce. And there are a lot of rules in place that limit how much you can – how you can do that. When I took this job, Jack Reed, who’s chairman then of the Armed Service Committee, classmate of mine at West Point, and good friend, said: Frank, you’re going to learn how much everybody loves their C-130s. (Laughter.) We keep buying C-130s. Well, there’s an efficiency for you. Can we please stop buying C-130s? We’ve got enough, OK? Anyway, I’m going to get – you know, I’m venting here a little bit. Sorry, Kari.

Ms. Bingen: Well, let me add one more question here.

Sec. Kendall: But there are a series of frustrations one experiences as the secretary of a military department, so. (Laughs.)

Ms. Bingen: I’ll ask one more question, and then I will shift here to audience questions. Industrial might. So Seth Jones right before the holidays hosted National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan here at CSIS to discuss how the administration is addressing the erosion of our industrial base. And it’s been really strained by just security assistance to Ukraine. I mean, we don’t really even have boots on the ground. You know, you’ve been on both sides of this, in government, in industry. You’re quoted as – another Frank Kendall quote – quoted as saying, “China is preparing for a war, and specifically for a war with the United States.” So do we need to be on a wartime footing with our industrial base? What will it take? And, you know, what are some of the things that you were focused on and you’re teeing up for your successors?

Sec. Kendall: Yeah. China’s building a military that’s designed to seize Taiwan and to defeat the United States if we try to intervene. First and foremost, it’s designed to deter the United States from intervening. But if we do, Xi Jinping wants a military that can defeat us, if we try to do that. He’s not building a military for a protracted World War III with the United States or a long-term conventional war. Nobody is preparing for that. And we couldn’t afford that, by a wide margin. It’d be going back to World War II kind of mobilization to try to do that. So we have to basically do what I would call risk management about this. And we have to be thoughtful about our priorities for our investments.

If there’s no additional money, I don’t think you’re going to get a different result. On the margins, you can do a few things. You can talk about, first of all, and Secretary Austin’s talked about the need for additional money I think just recently. We can replenish the stocks we’ve drawn down to support both Ukraine and Israel. We had a similar problem when we were in the fight with ISIS that went on for quite a long period of time when we used up a number of our preferred munitions. So, you know, reordering the priorities a little bit in the Pentagon so that things like munitions and high-demand spare parts are higher on the list of priorities.

The other thing we can do is, as we develop acquisition strategies particularly for new products and we can go back and look at the ones we already have as well, is look at what we can do to mitigate risk there. You can keep old production lines. Traditionally we’ve had – we tried to do this, keep mothballed production lines so that you can bring back if you need to. But with the pace of technological change and so on that’s not going to be a high payoff thing to do in very many places. But you can also look carefully at the structure of the supply chain and which elements of it are really imposing the most lead time constraints on you, and stockpile some of those, or increase the capacity to do some of those.

So I think there’s not a sweeping policy answer here. I think that the way you manage that risk is by very detailed and thoughtful analysis of the products, their priority, and what it would take to have a more efficient and more responsive supply chain that could get you additional capability when you needed it. And then on what you have in stock, again I’d focus there primarily on munitions, I think, and on high-demand spare parts. So those are the sorts of detailed things that I think really need to be done to put us in a better posture. And all of it takes money, of course. So you got to end up, you know, reallocating funds to do that. And how much you’re prepared to reallocate to that depends in part on what you can get out of that and, you know, what your overall situation is.

The new administration – and I’m – I keep – I’ve had a few conversations with the transition team. My impression is that they don’t appreciate how big a job they have the day they walk in the door of getting the budget done. They’ve got to finish negotiating ’25 with the Hill, and they’ve got to get ’26 delivered to the Hill. Thousands of lines that they’ve got to sort through. And questions like the ones and issues like the ones I’ve just talked about should be part of that process. And I hope that they’re ready and focused on that when they come in the door. It’s going to be, from my point of view, their highest priority.

And I have no idea right now whether the Trump administration that’s coming in is going to increase defense budgets or decrease them. Does anybody in the room know which way it’s going to go? If you do, put up your hand. You know, usually you should have – now, hopefully somebody does. And hopefully there’s some planning being done consistent with that. But I don’t know the answer to that question right now.

Ms. Bingen: And I’m going to come back to exactly what you’re saying here but let me go to a couple audience questions. I’m going to lump a couple of nuclear questions together. So I’ve got one from Diya, who’s in our CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues, that mentioned – asks: You recently quoted on the B-21 and accelerating production. So what are some of the near-term measures for the DAF to work towards this? And we’re going to combine it with the director of PONI, Heather Williams, question. Which is: What are gaps in our thinking about deterrence, particularly in this two-peer environment that we’re in?

Sec. Kendall: In terms of the B-21, the program plan which I approved when I was at AT&L laid out a relatively modest production rate. The inventory objective was consistent with that. I think as the situation has evolved, particularly with China’s breakout of their nuclear force and the increasing the size of their inventory and their fielding capabilities, we might want to rethink that. And I’ve asked industry to give me a feel for what additional capacity they could generate at what cost. I think that’s worth considering. It’s not going to have an immediate impact. It’s something that’ll happen over a few years. But we’re essentially starting production on the B-21. So increasing the rate at which we can do that as soon as we’re confident of the design, and we’re close to that, I think is something worth considering. It’s going to cost money.

The broader issue of nuclear stability keeps me up at night. I’m a cold warrior. I spent 20 years involved in strategic defense. It was my first job in the Pentagon, way back when, 1986. And in an environment in which there was a very high level of consciousness of the dangers of nuclear war, and how a miscalculation could put us into something that would spiral out of control. That was in a bipolar world, relatively simple. You know, anybody who knows astrophysics knows about the three-body problem, and how few solutions there are to the three-body problem, right?

It’s a different world when China, Russia, and the U.S. all have a thousand-plus nuclear weapons in the field. It gets more dangerous as there’s other countries that proliferate weapons. It gets more dangerous as people think about and talk about using tactical nuclear weapons as part of their escalation control or just for military objectives – which Russia is doing quite a bit of, and China is moving more slowly but potentially more in that direction. The lack of dialog really bothers me. We had extensive and continuing dialog with the Soviets during the Cold War.

And, you know, you used to be able to go to a restaurant down here where there was a table at which the backchannel during the Cuban missile crisis occurred. Elliott (sp) knows what I’m talking about, right? Where the – I think it was somebody from the Soviet embassy and a journalist, I think, who was in contact with the Kennedy administration. And we solved the Cuban missile crisis at a table in a restaurant in downtown D.C. That’s kind of scary to me, OK? But we were able to talk. We had channels by which we could communicate.

China very recently has sort of come back on the net a little bit. They were off the net entirely for a while. So the cultural differences between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were pretty substantial. And the culture difference between the U.S. and China are vast, by comparison. I remember in the Cold War there were a number of things that the Soviets would say that I would think they were lying, that they didn’t possibly – couldn’t possibly believe these things they were telling me. After the Cold War ended, I found that they did believe those things. And that kind of a misunderstanding and confusion is very dangerous when you talking about nuclear brinksmanship and so on.

So, yeah, I think it is going to be a much more dangerous world going forward. And I think we need to start doing our best, despite the state of current relationships, at starting to get dialog happening on as many levels and as many places possible, to gain a greater understanding of each other and hopefully start to appreciate some of the risks here. There is a possibility people are getting increasingly concerned about a stronger alignment between China and Russia. I don’t – I think that their fundamental interests do not overlap enough other than, you know, the competition with the United States or negative views in the United States, that they’re going to tie themselves tightly to each other’s futures and to the potential for a nuclear war.

But it’s something you’ve got to watch. And I think from the diplomatic side of the house, you’re really going to have to do everything we can to manage our relationship with both of those countries as they try to affect their relationship with each other. It’s going to be a dangerous time.

Ms. Bingen: OK. I have two more questions for you. Brian Everstine from Aviation Week.

A theme throughout the document is the vulnerability of bases. Is ACE, agile combat employment, enough? How does the new force structure planning help address this issue?

Sec. Kendall: Agile combat employment by itself is not enough. We’re relatively better positioned in Europe. There are a lot more places we can fly airplanes from. The Pacific, the geography really limits you. And not only limits you in the numbers of air bases you can have. It limits you in your ability to put logistics support into those air bases. You don’t have a road network that controls – you know, connects those islands. You have to do by sea, or by air.

We’ve been working to expand our access to bases in the Pacific, to raise those numbers, to compound the Chinese targeting problem. There’s a mix of hardening, deception, proliferation, and defense that’s necessary to make that strategy successful. One of the highest priorities of the operational imperatives that I started in 2021 was air base resilience. And we finally got significant amount of money – it was our biggest ask, I think – in 2024 to apply to that. General Allvin was in the Pacific recently. And he was heartened to see some of that money being spent and things being created to make our bases more resilient.

But we got a long way to go. And one of the necessities, I think, is going to be an effective defense against the range of threats that we’re faced with. That means cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, launched from various platforms, and UAS’ are somewhere in there, but it’s not an inventory of UAS’ that the Chinese have bought to attack our air bases. It’s all those other things. So we got different problem there than in other parts of the world because of the distances and so on. But we don’t have any choice. If we’re going to fight forward with our allies, we have got to have aircraft that we buy that are compatible with agile combat appointment. It’s another reason to relook at NGAT. And we’ve got to have the suite of things that are necessary to make that strategy effective.

Ms. Bingen: OK. Last question. You gave a speech this fall, and you talked about the speed of leadership. And, well, it’s interesting to me because you mentioned – and I remember coming into the department and you have all your priorities, and then you realize your day’s filled up by DMAGs, and budget briefings, and PDBs, and all those things that are just the day-to-day business of running the Pentagon. I also recall a conversation I had with you maybe a few years ago – or, a year or so ago. And I could definitely sense a frustration of: I’ve got these operational imperatives. I’m still trying to get them programmed and budgeted, because it just takes a while. You were under multiple CRs. So I guess, what advice do you give your successors coming in? And you’ve said this, we need to move with urgency. Time is not on our side. How do they – how does that speed of leadership, how can we make that really happen for a team that just doesn’t have luxury of time, and they’ve got to get moving day one?

Sec. Kendall: This is a lesson of a lot of years in the Pentagon, 20 roughly. If you – if you let the bureaucracy move at its own pace, it won’t move very fast. And the distinction I made was between the speed of the bureaucracy and the speed of leadership. The speed of leadership means that you pay attention. You have hands-on, frequent reviews of things to ensure they’re moving forward. An awful lot of work in the Pentagon happens the day before the meeting with the boss. And I’ve been guilty of that myself a few times. When we did the reauthorizing for great power, two dozen – 24 decisions, as soon as we did that, I put in place a monthly meeting with myself and the chiefs and all the people responsible for executing those decisions to look at their progress and to knock down any barriers they were encountering.

And some of it is very well-meaning people who, you know, have some area of, you know, responsibility, who – you know, and the Air Force has got a culture of inclusion in terms of decision making that can get in the way of progress. But for very good reasons, they have some reservation about something, or some – you know, something they think should be included that currently isn’t. And get those decisions elevated and made as quickly as you can. And that’s what leadership has to do. If you’re not hands-on involved, you’ll have somebody come brief you six months later and they won’t have done what you asked them to do. They’ll have done something else because they misunderstood, or for whatever reason, right?

You know, I would – I don’t know – I mean, there’s a story about Eisenhower, about how when he got to the White House, he was used to, in the military, if he gave an order something happened. He discovered as he was president that that wasn’t necessarily true. (Laughs.) We’re somewhere in between I think, in the DOD, where, if you give an order something may happen, but it may happen really slowly – (laughs) – or it might not happen at all. So you’ve got to – you got to be hands-on. You got to be involved.

It’s just – I used to – for the first eight years I was in the Pentagon, ’86 to ’94, I was in acquisition office as a deputy director of defense research and engineering, or deputy undersecretary. And I had to train eight new bosses in eight years. Eight new political appointees, right? And my view after that experience was that it takes about a year to train a new political appointee. But that was as long as they stayed. (Laughs.) So people coming in need to realize that they’ve got a lot to learn, that some of the impressions they may have, the assumptions they may be making, aren’t actually valid.

The one about waste, for example, that there’s all this efficiency around waiting to be reaped. That there’s money piled up in corners that we can save, if we just, you know, pay attention to it, things like that. They’re not true. You got a dedicated workforce in the military and the civilian side, very, very professional, very passionate about the mission. They’re working really hard to try to do the right things. And if you start with that assumption, but challenge them. I mean, there are – there are obviously – you know, you’re going to have your own priorities, and so on it. It’ll be interesting to be back in the sideline, watching this from afar, OK?

Ms. Bingen: Well, Secretary Kendall, you’ve been very generous with your time this morning. I want to echo Seth’s thanks to you, that he made at the outset. I mean, you have a career spanning over five decades. You have that unique trifecta of operations, technology, acquisition, and policy. You’re dangerous because you know them all. You’ve been there. (Laughs.) You know how to – you know how to make it all work. You say what you do, you do what you say. And when we think about legacy, it will be strong, steady leadership at pivotal periods, fostering a culture of accountability and modernization, but also just high integrity in everything you do.

Sec. Kendall: Thank you.

Ms. Bingen: So I suspect your successors will continue much of the work that you’ve started to prepare our nation for the challenges ahead. So, sir, thank you very much. And give Secretary Kendall – (applause).

Sec. Kendall: Thank you, Kari. Thanks, everyone.

 (END.)