The U.S. Air Force and Space Force face a tough race for technological superiority with China, which continues to modernize its air and space forces to project power in the Indo-Pacific region, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said this week.
“It’s quite clear to me that China’s developing the capability to try to prevent the U.S. from intervening in the Western Pacific in particular … And they embarked upon a modernization program focused on attacking what they saw as some of our vulnerabilities,” Kendall said during an Atlantic Council webinar.
In 2022, the service branch introduced seven operational imperatives that provide a vision for optimizing the U.S. Air and Space Forces with effective capabilities to prevail in this era of strategic competition, especially against China.
According to Kendall, the first and most critical step to achieving that aim is “getting the services joint automated command and control right.”
“We had to get that right,” Kendall said. “Networking of various elements of our force structure is critical to our operational success. And with emerging digital capabilities we were able to move information around making good operational decisions, which is a key to success across all domains, particularly in air and space.”
In addition, Kendall explained that the services needed to move to more resilient systems. The department relies upon a wide range of supporting information systems and facilities, in the continental U.S. and overseas to mobilize, deploy, and support the Air and Space Forces in a major conflict. All of these dependencies can be targeted by a wide variety of threats, including cyber threats.
“We had systems that were obsolete and aging out,” Kendall said, adding that the department had to analyze its host of systems and determine which were or weren’t “hardened to threats.”
“And this means implementing and deploying systems that would be more resilient against adversary targets,” he said.
However, these efforts require funding, and continuous infighting over budgets in Congress complicates the department’s efforts to stay ahead technologically of its adversaries, Kendall explained.
“We’re waiting now, we’ve been waiting for quite some time. And unfortunately, we’re in a political environment where a continuing resolution is uncertain, so we’re maybe waiting for longer even than we already have,” he said.
