Adapting at Scale: A Conversation with Major General Kunkel, Air Force Director for Force Design, Integration, and Wargaming

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Major General Joseph Kunkel, the Air Force’s director for force design, integration, and wargaming, will discuss why the Air Force needs to rapidly evolve its capabilities and how it can generate, in the near-term and beyond, combat-effective, agile, and adaptive airpower at scale.

Major General Kunkel will join Hudson Institute Senior Fellows Dan Patt and Timothy A. Walton for a fireside chat. Major General Kunkel will then take questions from the audience.

A light breakfast will be served starting at 9:00 a.m.

Episode Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Timothy Walton:

Well, good morning and welcome to the Hudson Institute. I’m Timothy Walton. I’m a senior fellow in our Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, and I’m really grateful that all of you have taken the time to join us for this conversation on adapting the Air Force. As many of you know, the Air Force is the oldest, smallest, and least ready it’s been in its history.

Its geriatric fleet of aircraft, some of which are over 50 years old, continues to get smaller, and its units have been flying fewer flight hours, many of them, than units. . . About half as many flight hours as many of its units did during the Cold War, which in turn is resulting in many of these units becoming increasingly less capable for a major conflict. This unfortunate state of affairs is taking place during a period of time where the nation is asking more of the Air Force in terms of ongoing operations around the world.

And also, if there were a major conflict, the nation counts on the Air Force to rapidly project power to deny the aims of adversary aggression initially, and also to be able to bring enormous lethal capacity to bear to be able to sustain and protract a conflict. Yet, the Air Force is also facing another major challenge, and that constitutes the People’s Liberation Army, which has developed not only an increasingly advanced, large, and capable force that’s ready for many operations, but it’s also developed an anti-Air Force in many ways.

It’s developed a capability to attack our aircraft on the ground, to destroy our aircraft in the air, and then also to be able to push back our aircraft and force them to stand back in ways that make them less efficient or productive at the campaign level, and also make them less effective and lethal. As the Trump administration and Congress consider how to buttress the lethality and readiness of the US military, additional investment in the Air Force should be atop of the list.

We need more Air Force and we need more funding going to the Air Force. We also need a more ready Air Force, but we also need a different Air Force. We need a different Force Design that allows us to overcome some of the threats I laid out and gives US leaders the optionality and advantage to be able to deter a conflict and to be able to defeat our enemies if necessary.

To discuss all this and more, we’re joined by my colleague Dr. Dan Patt, who’s been highly influential in shaping some of the Department of Defense’s thinking regarding how to address some of its most consequential scenarios and informing DoD and Congressional deliberations on how to actually resource things and get things done in terms of reforms. And then of course, our distinguished guest, Major General Joseph Kunkel.

He’s the Air Force’s Director of Force Design Integration and Wargaming. General Kunkel is responsible for the Air Force’s future Force Design, and he brings to his experience his role as an F-15 and F-22 fighter pilot, an illustrious history of command of units in the Southwest Asia area and the Pacific and in the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and then also decorations, including the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Thank you all for joining us, and thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. I’m going to sit down, and then my plan is for Dan and I to have a conversation with General Kunkel, and then I’ll open up the floor to all of your questions. And to start, as I sit down, General Kunkel, could you talk about how we got here as an Air Force, the Air Force’s current predicament, and then what are some of the major changes or major factors that are compelling some of these changes?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Happy to do so. First off, I want to say thanks Tim and Dan for hosting us and the Hudson Institute. You guys have been great partners for the Air Force in helping us tell our story, so appreciate it. And thank you for everyone here. We are in a very interesting time for the Air Force. I feel like we’re in a great time for the Air Force with a solid foundation and a coherent warfighting message, and I’m happy to be able to tell that story today.

When I think about where we are and where we’re going forward, I got to rewind the tape back to the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. And frankly, I was driving into work one day and I was thinking about where we were back in those days. I was a kid growing up in small town Nebraska reading Air Force Magazine and seeing these pictures of the brand new F-15E Strike. Even going, wow, wouldn’t it be great to fly that thing?

But as I reflect on that time period now, there was a tremendous amount of self-reflection going on. We’d just come out of the Vietnam War. And if you think about the aircraft that we had in the Vietnam War, we had the F-4. The F-4 was designed for carrier fleet defense. Yet in Vietnam, it was doing close air support. And we had the F-105 Thunderchief, and the F-105 was designed in the Cold War to do a low altitude supersonic nuclear bombing.

And in Vietnam, it was doing suppression of enemy air defenses. It’s like, wow, that’s interesting. And so these folks got home from the Vietnam War and they’re like, wow, we just fought this war. The tactical battles went reasonably well, but we’re saying we had a strategic loss. So what did we do? What did we do back then? Well, we had a bunch of folks, like the folks sitting in this room, go, well, hey, where do we need to focus?

And at the time, it was the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the Russian bear was scary, and they had the tanks that were going to come across the full gap, and we really had to prepare for that and we didn’t know what to do. So we made a major shift in how our Air Force was designed, and we introduced game-changing capabilities like low-altitude navigation, night low-altitude navigation, infrared targeting, stealth, precision weapons.

The capabilities that came out of that time were the F-15E, the F-22, the F-35, the B-2, laser guided bombs, JDAMs, GPS guided weapons, TV guided weapons, all these things, precision warfare. That all came out of that focus on, wow, here’s who we are. We got to change. We built something else. And folks like me for the last 30 years, I didn’t know it back in 1990 when I joined the Air Force, I did not know that I was coming into this fantastic new Air Force full of new capabilities that were going to be dominant on the battlefield.

I didn’t know back then that I would ride that dominant Air Force in multiple conflicts all over the world and it would be incredible, but I did. And so here we are 30 years later going, wow, we just got done with 30 years of war in the Middle East, and now we are looking at adversaries that have completely changed. They’ve seen the cards that we’ve played, and they’re like, well, yeah, here’s a different card.

I’m going to show you a different hand that is countering what you’re doing. And so we’re looking at this from the perspective of the things that we did before are perhaps not the things that we need to do in the future, and that’s where this New Force Design comes in the picture. We’ve thought that, hey, the Air Force was created perfectly in 1947, and all we got to do is rebuild it over and over and over and everything’s going to be good.

But I feel like we’re in this place where, well, our analysis says that that’s not the case. There’s an impetus for change, and I think it’s a generational impetus for change that we’re in the middle of.

Dr. Dan Patt:

Yeah, let’s get a little bit more specific. So this is the big picture, the changing strategic environment. What is that going to mean for how the Air Force looks and how does that. . .

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Frankly, there’s been a journey for the last 10 plus years on a New Force Design. And where we started on this 10 years ago was, well, hey, we probably just need to look at new fighters. We’ve always had fighters, so let’s look at new fighters. We’ve always had bombers, so let’s look at new bombers. And those things have done reasonably well. But when we do the analysis, what we find is just reinventing the Air Force doesn’t win. Just building a new Air Force doesn’t win.

And so when I came into the job, I was like, hey, we’ve got to take a completely different approach to this. And I was inspired by some of the work that the Hudson Institute did and frankly, some of the work that you did where we talked about a universal set of attributes for capabilities versus tailored attributes based on the threat. And so I took that tailored attributes based on the threat, which is something that we haven’t really done before.

I’ll get into a little bit of detail here, but the thoughts of tailored attributes based on the threat, you’ve really got to define the threat, how the threat has changed, and what the threat is doing to you and how it’s impacting you differently. And when we broke down this threat and we decomposed it, we’re like, all right, how is the threat impacting U.S. Air Force operations?

Well, it’s affecting us in two ways. One, the threat is impacting us in our ability to operate in the air domain. So there’s places where the threat is really low and it’s like we can build capabilities like KC-135s and they’ll survive in that low threat environment. But then as you start rationing up the threat, there’s areas where the threat’s a little bit higher. And KC-135s on their own, they’re not going to be survivable.

If they get shot, they’re going to get shot down. We build capabilities like F-15s and F-16s and things that have countermeasures that can defeat shots endgame in the air, and then there’s even threat’s going even higher. There’s this threat to our operations in the air where we have a hard time operating with some of these fourth-gen capabilities, so we built fifth-generation capabilities.

And all those capabilities where we really considered what the threat could do to us in the air, we didn’t really consider what the threat could do to us on the ground and how we generate combat power. And I think Tim said it in your opening remarks. It’s like, how is the threat impacting our ability to generate combat power from the ground? Because all these air operations, they depend on capabilities that join combat power from the ground.

If you build a matrix of how the threat impacts you on the air and how the threat could impact you on your ground, you really have this understanding of how the threat impacts your operations. And then we use that as the first step. All right, if we know this is how the threat impacts us, we want to be able to operate everywhere. I think our taxpayers and our nation and frankly, the joint force and our partners and allies expect us to be able to operate everywhere.

So what does it take to operate from this really, really high ground threat and into this really high air threat? That’s a different set of attributes for those types of capabilities than what it takes to operate from a low ground threat into a high air threat. And so we developed these capability attributes, and you may have seen them. We called this really, really high ground threat and high air threat, we called that Mission Area 1.

And we developed capabilities that could operate from high ground threat into high air threat. And we developed capabilities that we call Mission Area 2, and those could generate combat power from low ground threat into high air threat. Now, what those things look like is the Mission Area 1 things, they probably look asymmetric. The Mission Area 2 things probably look a lot like our long-range bombers and standoff stuff.

And then we thought there needed to be something else to operate in this middle tier, and that’s our Mission Area 3, which is core capabilities that can operate in most areas of the world. I’ll stop there, then we can continue the conversation from there.

Dr. Dan Patt:

You teed up the historical analogy of how we got to this Air Force of 1990 that the whole world saw in Desert Storm. And now you’ve pointed out the world has changed, the threats are different. You’ve laid out a schematic of what these three elements of this Force Design could be. In as much as technology enabled that Air Force in 1990, there’s a different set of technologies and capabilities that presumably are enabling this.

I think a lot of us are looking at changes in sensing and ubiquitous communication, the role of software, how we see autonomy playing out. People are looking at the conflict in Ukraine and we’re seeing everybody has precision strike. What do you see as some of the tech enablers or the roles of how technology is a part of this three-part Force Design that you just laid out?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Many of the things that you talked about, autonomy, artificial intelligence, all-domain sensing, those types of things, they’re really, really important, right? But I would suggest that the way we integrate them is more important. And I would suggest that in that Air Force of the ‘80s and ‘90s, frankly Reagan’s Air Force, combat success was based on platform integration.

And it’s like if you have great platforms and you have a bunch of great platforms, they can go in a war. I would suggest that the way we are thinking about it now is combat success is going to be related to the level of system integration you can have and how you integrate capabilities together. And so how you integrate autonomy with some of the sensing, those are the things that we’re finding as game changers.

Dr. Dan Patt:

Yeah, so that feels like much more of a kill chain or mission thread centric view, and presumably that’s going to go along with new concepts of employment and new operational concepts that have to be developed as well.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, that’s right. And I tell you, when you look at those sets of capabilities, the asymmetric capabilities, the long-range capabilities, and the core capabilities, this combined arms approach, which the Air Force has done in the past and we’re returning to those roots, what we’ve found is when you integrate those together, the magic happens when you weave those things together into what we’re calling a mission fabric.

And this mission fabric where you combine everything together, that’s where you start seeing the whirlwind capabilities. What we found is in the early days of this Force Design, there were some folks that were like, what if we just become an all-long-range force? And so we’re like, okay, let’s try it. Let’s see what all-long-range force looks like. And turns out, an all-long-range force loses because what it can’t do is it can’t apply constant pressure to the adversary.

It’s pulsed. It’s episodic. It doesn’t have high tempo. And then we looked at these asymmetric things and we’re like, what if we try these asymmetric things alone? Well, if you use those things alone, they also lose. And then we looked at these core, what if we just rebuild the Air Force and the way it always was and we used those alone, that also loses.

And what we found is what we’ve done in recent wargames and analysis, it’s actually really quite interesting and exciting for me, because what we’re finding is when you combine these things together in a mission thread or a kill chain-like fashion in a new warfighting concept, that we’re actually winning. And that’s really, really exciting to me.

Timothy Walton:

Could you expand a little bit on, I guess, how are you reaching some of these conclusions? You’ve mentioned this analytic matrix, wargaming, but just a bit more on what’s the analytic basis for this New Force Design, or the analytic process more than the basis?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Okay, yeah, that’s a great question. Where you need to start. . . Well, one, all you’re trying to do is you’re trying to gain confidence, right? If you’re trying to gain confidence, then the predictions that you made are actually right. And you want them to actually have campaign outcomes, winning versus losing. This individual one-on-one fight between an F-15 and a J-20 or an F-22 and a J-20, that’s interesting, but it’s not really compelling. It’s got to be in the context of the whole fight.

So we do that mission-level analysis, that small one v. one thing, and then we combine that into campaign analysis, and then we go into wargaming. Now, what we’ve done that’s different is we’re introducing a concept we’re calling Agile Wargame and Advanced Wargame. And that is quickly iterating our wargame to understand campaign results based on analysis that we can do very quickly now, that we can do quicker than we ever have, that you have run times between options that are faster than they’ve been.

So this new way of wargaming is we’re given an option, very quickly adjudicate what happened, and then try something else, and then see how that does, adjudicate it, and then try something else. And so we’ve been able through very quick iteration to understand what wins and what doesn’t win. So that modeling and simulation, the analysis, the wargaming has been very important for us as we iterate to this place where we find war winning capabilities.

Timothy Walton:

That’s really promising because I imagine you can get at some of the interdependencies within the force, the force integration, how do you need to make that possible, how elements of the force are interdependent, maybe what are the weakest links you need to shore up, which might not be at the platform level in many cases.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

But at the system level, those weaknesses don’t show up until you look at the system.

Timothy Walton:

I haven’t heard you mention joint contributions, right?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Oh yeah.

Timothy Walton:

How are you trying to bring some of those into your analysis, either Army, Air Defense Artillery, counterspace, bulk fuels from DOA or Military Sealift Command?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

I don’t want to speak for the other services, but I will tell you that the joint connection is strong. And in fact, yesterday I was talking to my joint partners in the Navy as well as the Marine Corps about how this all fits together. And what I think you’ll see very soon is, and this is something we’re working on, is a new joint concept. We’ve got the joint warfighting concept, but I think along the lines of an air-land battle, there might be a new air-space sea battle.

Too early to say for sure what that is and what it’s going to look like. But I will tell you, when we look at these capabilities in this combined arms approach, the Navy, when I introduced this concept of, hey, we’ve got missionary one capabilities, missionary two capabilities, missionary three capabilities, the Navy was like, that’s us. We have the same problems. The adversary impacts us in the same ways. Let’s see if this concept works for us. And in fact, we’re coming up with the same results. It’s really quite interesting. It’s promising.

Timothy Walton:

So hopefully get us beyond, to be honest, with the joint warfighting concept, which has been maybe a bit amorphous and hasn’t translated into something.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

There’s a level of abstraction. You want to get to yourself to actually you’re doing something that’s concrete. And I think that’s where the individual services can build on the joint warfighting concept, pick it up and take it a step further with maybe some of these inter-service joint type agreements.

Dr. Dan Patt:

So speaking of concrete, we’ve talked about a Force Design. You’ve whet our appetite about what sounds like a really promising analysis. You’ve given us this theoretical framework, but how does this get into real units assigned to things, shifts in investment priorities, presumably there’s new capability that needs to be acquired.

You mentioned integration. There’s a lot of human work and engineering work involved with that. There’s probably infrastructure considerations for all of this. How does this get translated into seeing an Air Force that has this Force Design operational, and what are the interactions and stakeholders involved with that? And where are we in that journey?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, we’re on a good path. And just in the bureaucratic processes inside the Pentagon, what we’re seeing is this concept called Force Design Integration, which is how do you integrate Force Design into the corporate process? How do you integrate it into the requirements process? How do you integrate it into the analytic process? And that’s where we’re going with that.

But I think to your specific question on how do you get more concrete and go from these capability attributes to actual systems, it’s an assessment of gaps. So it’s an assessment of gaps on those three areas that we have. And these asymmetric things, these are things that the Air Force hasn’t done before. And frankly, they’re emerging and nascent for other services as well.

But we’re looking at the gaps for asymmetric capabilities and we are finding some really interesting things. No one has approached this asymmetric work from the perspective of an airman, from the mind of an airman. And I think that’s what’s unique and that’s what you’ll see from us. For instance, air superiority. How do we do air superiority now? We do it with F-22s and AMRAAMs, right?

There may be opportunities with some of these other capabilities that you achieve air superiority in fundamentally different ways. So that assessment of gaps on that asymmetric capabilities, that’s one way. There’s also gaps in our long range capabilities as well. Some of the things that we’ve talked about like the space-based sensing, the data networks that go through it, the battle management capabilities, and then finally, weapons.

We’re developing the weapons that utilize these capabilities that are going to put us in a fundamentally different place than we’ve been. Those are some big ones. Those are some gaps that we have that we are actively working on and we’re pursuing, and the future’s right there. I also think there’s gaps in some of our core capabilities. You’re looking at a force, as you said, was older than it’s ever been.

I don’t like to use the word geriatric, but perhaps some people might. But it’s a force that has been rode hard for the last 50 years. And in Nebraska terms, it’s been put out wet for the last 50 years, and there’s a lot of stuff there that needs replacing. I think what you’ll find is we’ll have investments in all those areas. That’s where we need to go.

Timothy Walton:

I didn’t hear you mention infrastructure logistics, just to be a bit critical, but it sounds like your Force Design might have a different approach to employ the force and needs more distribution, mix it forward, intermediate. How are you thinking about pulling some of those investments in the mix? And historically, they’ve been ones that we’ve under-invested in to be able to buy the platforms themselves.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

You’re absolutely right. When that infrastructure and logistics, what we’ve generally thought of is infrastructure and logistics, it’s all in sanctuary. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s in sanctuary. It’s right next to the swimming pool. Where we got to think about it in the future is that it’s targeted just like everything else is targeted. So you’ve got to build it differently.

So you think about those different capability groupings that we have, the sustainment, the logistics, the posture, the infrastructure to support them will be different and different than what we’ve seen before. One thing I’ve been saying is we’ve been talking about logistics under attack, and what does logistics under attack look like? Well, here’s what I would like to start saying is we’ve got to keep our logistics free from attack.

And how do we do that? And that means doing things differently. For these things that are forward and need to be postured forward, the logistics behind that and how you sustain that and how you replenish capabilities looks different. For some of the long-range capabilities, we’ve got to look at sustainment differently.

In the wargames that we’ve done and in wargames that have been done and analysis that’s been done elsewhere, the weapons inventory becomes an issue. It’s always an issue. So how do you replenish weapons, stocks, those types of things, those are things that we’re looking at specifically for that logistic sustainment infrastructure.

Timothy Walton:

It’s really promising. I wanted to open up the floor to questions from the audience. But before doing so, had a question on concerns. You’ve released your nascent One Force Design and the Air Force is starting to pursue this. It’s naturally classified because we don’t want adversaries to fully understand elements of that, I think we rightfully so, and that leads in many cases to misconceptions of what that Force Design could be. I’ve heard at least two chief charges that I’ll array against you.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

All right, let’s hear it.

Timothy Walton:

One is that the Air Force is surrendering your superiority, and second that you’re shifting to a heavily standoff or all standoff force. So wanted to give you a chance to address these concerns. And Dan, I think you had another one on your mind as well, right?

Dr. Dan Patt:

Yeah, yeah. I’ll tee it up afterwards.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Okay. Well, let me address the latter and then I’ll address the former. As far as this long-range thing, what we have found, if you go to an all long-range force, it doesn’t win. You’ve got to be forward in order to sustain the tempo that’s required to bring the adversary to his knees. So an all long-range force, I mean, it sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? You sit in Topeka, Kansas. You press a red button. The war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all done at long-range.

It doesn’t win because it just can’t sustain the tempo of the fight. So in the combined arms approach we’re taking, you have long-range capabilities and they’re important. And when I say it doesn’t win, it doesn’t win by itself. When you combine it into this mission fabric where you have combined arms working together, long-range fires are extremely important. They’re absolutely game-changing. They’re going to help us out.

They’re going to be able to deliver a massive punch to the adversary, but they’re probably not going to do it at the tempo that’s required to keep the adversary on its knees all the time. You need something else. You need something inside. You need something inside that can generate tempo, tempo and mass. And that’s what we found, and that’s where the Force Design goes with this combined arms approach. It’s like we’ve got to generate tempo and mass.

It’s probably not going to be as big. And then we’ve also got to have long-range stuff that isn’t at the right tempo. I will adamantly say we are not transitioning to this all long-range force because alone that just doesn’t work. We will transition to elements of a long-range force. So we need to. That’s where the threats go, and that’s where we need to go. To this thought on air superiority, the joint force expects the United States Air Force to provide air superiority to allow freedom of maneuver.

That’s what this is all about. Air superiority allows the joint force freedom of maneuver. Our Force Design doesn’t walk away from air superiority, it strengthens air superiority. But what you’ll see is you’ll see us achieving air superiority in different ways. Again, to the days of, hey, the air superiority can only be achieved with an F-22 and AMRAAM. I’m a huge F-22 fan obviously, but where we are going in our Force Design is we’re actually getting stronger.

We’re achieving air superiority, not in one way, but in multiple ways. And we’re still finding it’s absolutely critical. So air superiority will always be part of what the Air Force delivers to the joint force. It just may look a little different.

Timothy Walton:

That’s great to hear. It requires, I guess, a certain level of nuance in terms of understanding of the Force Design that could be challenging, but it sounds like you’re upholding I think those principle commitments.

Dr. Dan Patt:

Related question is one of priorities and investments. I mean, no matter what, the Air Force is going to have air bases, it’s going to have tankers, it’s going to have bombers, and these are all things that need to be defended. I need to invest in that. And no matter what, there’s a logistics train associated with all of this. If I want to project long-range fires, there’s logistics associated with that.

How do you think about balancing those things which you need to do, defend things, logistics and the tooth-to-tail associated that, with the offensive capability, the punch that delivers that air superiority or the punch that delivers that penalty to the adversary? How do you think about that offense-defense balance across that investment?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah. The interesting thing is it’s a package, right? You can’t do one without the other. When the threat environment has changed to the point where you are under threat no matter where you are, you got to think about them as a package deal. And it goes back to this thought on a system of systems. We used to not consider this logistics and sustainment as part of the package. We didn’t consider air base defense as part of the package.

We didn’t think about survival tanking as part of the package because that stuff wasn’t our threat. Now it’s under threat, so it’s got to be part of the package. You can’t just buy this brand new widget that provides a kinetic effect to an adversary unless you buy the rest of the package. Because if you don’t buy that rest of the package, this isn’t going to get there. Does that make sense?

Dr. Dan Patt:

It does. It does.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

That’s the way we’re thinking about it. Of course, that requires resources. But I will tell you, the Air Force has always provided unique options to policymakers. And frankly, the Air Force has been leaned upon to provide relatively easy options for policymakers because we can get places quickly. We don’t find ourselves entrenched when we do get there, and we can make adversaries submit to our will.

Dr. Dan Patt:

But just to put a finer point on my understanding, as you described this matrix, it sounded like some of what you’re talking about, operating in these high air threat environments even up to the point of it’s also a high ground threat environment involve finding creative ways where you’re getting more offense per defensive investment. So maybe it’s still a package deal. And I have to think about that for each of those elements. But maybe it feels like you’re finding places in the operational concept and technology trade space where you’re able to get more offense per dollar.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, that’s right. And I will tell you that there’s this thought that we need to invest in more defense. We need to invest in more defense. And my counter that is no, we actually need to invest in more offense. We need to invest in more offense, and we need to make sure that those offensive capabilities inherently have survivability built into them. And I think some of these capabilities that can operate in this high ground threat density can generate combat power while they’re under attack.

You got to think about it differently. I don’t want to get ourselves into too much of roaming in a classified discussion, but you got to think about how you keep those things survivable in a different way, and that’s where the thought of an operational concept might help you out.

Dr. Dan Patt:

Yeah, makes sense.

Timothy Walton:

And it sounds like this disaggregation of the Force Design as opposed to like a one size fits all approach allows you to be able to fight the force differently, in turn have different levels of requirements. And I would offer that’s probably going to be increasingly important as China develops longer range capabilities.

They’re already quite long range, but as the H-20 gets fielded, more GF-27s, et cetera, we’re going to need to think about, we’re going to come under attack. But what are the sophisticated approaches we take to be able to sustain operations under attack? Some of it’s probably going to be investment in some selective hardening logistics, defensive capacity, but it’s also I think. . .

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Things you haven’t even thought of.

Timothy Walton:

Yes. But I think this disaggregation you’re pursuing allows you to be able to generate, as Dan put it, more offense per dollar in some parts of the force.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, listen, so the Air Force of the future is not going to be one that’s operating from sanctuary. We are going to be contested everywhere. And frankly, we’re contested everywhere right now. So this thought that we have to operate under the threat of attack is something that’s going to be with us forever. Let’s just talk about Agile Combat Employment or ACE.

Some people are like, hey, is ACE dead? Well, no, ACE is not dead because we are going to be under attack and our forces must have the capability to maneuver to defend themselves in order to generate combat power. So this concept of maneuvering to survive and generate combat power is something that’s going to be with us I think forever.

Timothy Walton:

Thank you. Wanted to open up the floor to questions from the audience. I’d ask if you could please state your name, your affiliation, and ask a question. So here from the center, please.

Audrey Decker:

Hi. Thanks so much for doing this. Audrey Decker with Defense One. I’m curious, just Secretary Hegseth has ordered all of the services to look at their spending and take about an 8 percent cut of current program so it can be redirected to other things. I’m just curious, in light of this New Force Design, what might you think could get cut that might not support the New Force Design or where you see areas that could be redirected to other priorities that might not fit this future vision?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, thanks, Audrey. That’s a fantastic question. Our investments and our Force Design is completely in line with where the administration is going and with Secretary Hegseth’s priorities. His priorities of rebuilding the military, we’re right there. Restoring the warrior ethos, we’re right there. Reestablishing the strategic deterrence, we are right there in the middle of that. But when you look at some capabilities in the Air Force, the Air Force has depended. . .

The nation depends on the Air Force to do three basic things: to provide a strategic deterrent, to defend the homeland, and then to project power. And so the way that the Air Force is approaching this 8 percent drill is, all right, what are the things that are related to homeland defense, strategic deterrence, and projecting power? And then if we have capabilities that aren’t related to that, that’s where we’re taking a serious eye.

Now, let’s be frank, the Air Force has gotten, the Air Force has gotten older. And as you look at where the Air Force has gone, we’ve protected core, which is homeland defense, strategic deterrence, and power projection. So there’s not many places where we can go for these things. So an 8 percent cut to the Air Force, it’s going to be painful. It’s going to look really, really bad.

But I think there’s hope there in that this 8 percent cut drill, I don’t think this is a. . . And the president has said this and Secretary Hegseth has said this, this is not a cut into the DoD budget. This is, hey, let’s figure out where we need to reprioritize capabilities, reprioritize top line, and reprioritize investments. And when you look at it from that perspective, the Air Force, it’s going to do really, really well in the future, I think.

Because like I said earlier, the Air Force provides policymakers significant options. We always have. We always will. And when you look at the future fight, the role of the Air Force is increasing, it’s not decreasing. It’s increasing. For this future fight, we’re going to be a big part of that. So no easy solutions in that space.

Timothy Walton:

It sounds like ideally maybe the additional top line could be directed towards the Air Force One, but then also you’re generating a New Force Design that’s going to give the new leaders options, I think, to be able to invest in some of those new promising areas.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

That’s right. Yeah. When you look at the secretary’s priorities and you look at our Force Design, you’re like, there’s a match, there’s a match, there’s a match.

Timothy Walton:

Next question, please. In the back.

Stephen Losey:

Hi, there. Stephen Losey with Defense News. Thank you for doing this. Wanted to ask you about Next Generation Air Dominance and how that’s factoring in. And in particular, there’s a lot of unknown unknowns about where NGAD is going to go with Secretary Kendall punting the decision, even though the study from the Air Force concluded NGAD is needed. So how are you factoring in potential different paths for what NGAD might end up looking like very different scenarios for the Air Force and as well as things like collaborative combat aircraft as well?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

The fight looks fundamentally different with NGAD and without NGAD. And I won’t go into the details on how the fight looks different, but the fight looks much better when NGAD’s in it. But I think what the analysis we did really highlighted to us is the conversation that Dan and I were having, which is it’s a package deal. So NGAD requires survivable tankers. NGAD requires survivable bases where you can generate combat power from.

So those are other investments that we need to make to have NGAD. NGAD remains an important part of our Force Design and it fundamentally changes the character of the fight in a really, really good way for the joint force. I mean, it’s a joint force capability. So I think at the end of the day, what we’ll find is we’ll make a decision on how the joint force wants to fight.

If the joint force wants to fight with an NGAD and air superiority in these really, really tough places to achieve it, then we’ll pursue NGAD. Frankly, it’ll be less operational risk. The NGAD provides dominant capabilities. If we choose not to as a nation to pursue NGAD, then that fight is going to just look a little bit different, and we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives.

Stephen Losey:

Can I ask a follow-up question? Yeah, follow-up question. You mentioned survivable tankers as an element that is important there. Some of the work on NGAS is. . . The schedule has slid a little bit. If an NGAS tanker ends up getting significantly delayed or curtailed in some way, how does that impact your analyses on the future Force?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, we are more focused on survivable air refueling. We’re approaching this from the kill chain perspective, this systems approach that we’ve been talking about. We’re looking at adversary kill chains, and on an adversary kill chain that starts with, hey, we’ve got to find out where everybody is, and then we’ve got to direct the forces to where they are, and then we’ve got to do some type of battle management and then we’ve got to guide a weapon.

There are many attack surfaces that we can attack to bring survivable air refueling. The enemy’s got a lot of attack surfaces. NGAS might be part of the solution, but there are other places along this kill chain that we can attack the adversary. And that’s the approach. We’re taking it from a systems approach. That’s what you need to do.

Stephen Losey:

Thank you.

Timothy Walton:

Another question towards the front.

Kaly McKenna:

Thank you. Hi, General. Kaly McKenna from Beacon Global Strategies. My question is about how you talked about Force Design Integration and talking about the requirements and the corporate process and everything that goes involved into that. In terms of acquisition reform and changes in that respect, especially I’ve heard nuances, conversations about removing the JCIDS process. So I’m curious, what do you see needed to acquire this Future Force that the Air Force needs?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, so you’re seeing a strategic environment that is rapidly changing and a threat picture that is rapidly changing. And I would contend that the PPBE process where frankly the last administration came in, the ‘24 budget was the first budget that was able to be impacted on that last administration. That last administration’s out, and we haven’t even seen the results of that first budget. That is not how you respond with agility to a threat that’s changing.

So there are changes that are going to be required to how we procure, how we fund, how we resource capabilities. We need to have much more flexibility there. We need to adapt. We need stuff that’s adaptable, and we need the foundational processes that can procure those things to be adaptable as well. I also think that you’re thinking, what are the next offsets?

Where I think one of the next offsets is is this thought of the innovation pipeline, and very rapidly assessing what the adversary is doing, making a change, and then fielding that change capability in a rapid manner. So that innovation pipeline to constantly adjust to what the adversary is doing, that’s where we need to go. I’m confident of it. We’re seeing that play out in Ukraine right now where what was good two months ago is not good today.

We’ve got to make changes in our processes, which is going to require some changes to the law, to get ourselves to be more adaptable, in the words of General Allvin, our Chief of Staff, to solve for agility. So those are the changes that are required. What that means for specific changes to the JCIDS process or requirements process, I won’t go into in this form.

I think we have a colleague who might have some thoughts on that, but I do know that we’ve got to be more agile. We’ve got to be able to iterate on capabilities, and we can’t be tied to a certain capability or a certain program for years and years and years and years and years, which is where we’ve been in the past. Agile, open, that’s where we need to be.

Timothy Walton:

Dan, just for the benefit of the audience, you’re holding a report though in your hand. What were some of the top conclusions there

Dr. Dan Patt:

That these things that JCIDS stood up to help the DoD achieve drive jointness, drive integration of capability, drive adaptation to a changing threat and implement strategy, that the process has realized isn’t very effective at doing those things. And the report walks through that argument and basically supports I think many of the same observations the General just made about about this need for agility and problem solving.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Flexibility, fast, speed, all those things. Those are going to be the things that we need for the future.

Timothy Walton:

Question. Third row. Sorry. Please.

Kelly Grieco:

Hi. Thank you. Kelly Grieco from the Stimson Center, and I wanted to ask a question about Mission Area 1, and you were speaking about this asymmetric force and being in this high threat environment and that it would find new ways to gain air superiority, which sounds great. I would imagine those will be temporally limited in time and space.

One of the things I’m wondering about is would that asymmetric Mission Area 1 also be charged with contesting airspace at other times? So when you don’t have a window of air superiority, you would marshal these kinds of capabilities and an air mindedness to contest airspace, denying the adversary air superiority?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, I think you’re hitting on all the right things, and these asymmetric capabilities allow us to be places where we wouldn’t otherwise be and allow us to be persistent in those locations of particular high threat density. And so you can imagine that perhaps a legacy would be, hey, we do pulses and we achieve air superiority at times and places of our choosing.

With some of the asymmetric capabilities, what we’re finding is you can deny the adversary freedom of maneuver in the air domain. And that’s what our joint force wants. What we can’t have is we can’t have the adversary free to roam around and free to have their own near superiority. We got to deny them from doing that. From our analysis that we’ve seen so far is those capabilities are strong at that and it’s a gap we’ve had and something they can fill.

Timothy Walton:

Question in the front here, please.

Dean Peters :

Thank you. Hi, Dean Peters from JetZero. I wanted to touch on sustainability because it was mentioned in the opening remarks and you talked about the package deal. You don’t get the air superiority without the logistics. As you are wargaming this and thinking it through, are you looking at improving existing platforms or leveraging new technologies? And if you are looking at leveraging new technologies, especially from a sustainability standpoint, where do you get your inputs from?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

That’s a fantastic question. When you think about the sustainment architectures that we built in the past, the thought was that they were going to be in sanctuary. So you could afford to build a piece of aircraft ground equipment that weighed 10,000 pounds and wouldn’t fit on a C-130. You could afford to do those types of things. You could afford to have low observable restoration timelines on your aircraft that lasted multiple days and required climate controlled facilities.

In a new environment where that whole thing is going to be under threat, we’ve got to think about it differently. And so we have been leveraging new technologies to think about how we do those. In the field of low observable maintenance, we’ve made a significant amount of progress. And I think you’ll see the same in some of these. . . And I will tell you, some of it’s not like the sexy cool stuff.

It’s like the basics. It’s like bomb loaders, missile loaders, and refueling trucks, and electric carts, and air conditioning carts. They’ve got to be made differently so that they’re agile, maneuverable. They can maneuver to defend themselves. You can maneuver them so they can be defended, those types of things. That’s what we’re thinking about. We’re also tracing this all the way back into how you deliver fuel and then how you build weapons.

So yeah, the integration of new technologies is there. I’ll also say the resupply and how you resupply capabilities and material is an area where we’re focused. And there’s a significant amount of innovation there and there’s also a significant amount of venture capital in those areas. So we’re looking at all those things as areas where we can improve this sustainment and logistics architecture for new area where it’s going to be under attack.

Timothy Walton:

Thank you. Questions? Question here in the center, please?

Paul Matier:

Thanks, General. Appreciate you being here today. My name is Paul Matier from Lockheed Martin. My question concerns the initiative formerly known as Iron Dome, which I understand has been renamed to Golden Dome. The space layer and the surface launch, THADs, and Patriot PAC-3s and such are sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room on the conversation.

But I would argue there’s a pretty decent argument for the air layer playing a big part in Golden Dome. The Israelis proved that out twice in 2024, complex aerial attacks, missiles, drones, et cetera. Can you comment a little bit on how the air layer contributes to Golden Dome and if you have to change any of your Force Design thinking because of the Iron Golden Dome Initiative? Thank you.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

When we built this Force Design, it was, hey, what are the enduring requirements of the Air Force? What does the nation expect of us? And it was homeland defense and strategic deterrent and power projection. And so this thought of a Golden Dome that protects the homeland that is completely in line with the Force Design and how we do that is completely in line.

But I would suggest that the threat and the number of threats and how the threats are being presented presents new challenges, but it also offers opportunities for some of the things that you’re talking about, some of the capabilities, the traditional capabilities that we would call Mission Area 3. When you think about how the Air Force, I’m sorry, the nation has defended itself, we defend ourselves as far away from our borders as possible.

And when we build this Golden Dome, we can’t think of this Golden Dome as this thing that stops at the border. And where we’ll use this air layer is in the countering of adversary bombers that are approaching our borders and shooting missiles from those borders. So that combined arms approach that we took in our Force Design, it’s equally applicable to this Golden Dome concept where there’s going to be a combined arms requirement for that to counter the different threats that we’re going to see.

I will say that the sense is a big part of it, the effectors or what you’re talking about are a big part of it, but this battle management of the whole thing is also a big part of it. I know that Air Force is right in the middle of that with the DAF BATTLE NETWORK, but important part.

Timothy Walton:

Question towards the back. If you can just wait for the microphone, please.

Joe Merrill:

You haven’t really said much about the impact of AI. . .

Timothy Walton:

If you can just identify yourself, sorry.

Joe Merrill:

I’m Joe Merrill with OpenTeams. You haven’t said much about the impact of AI mostly on long-range. Are there systems and platforms and things that become obsolete as AI makes things smarter, smaller, and more powerful?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, I think AI can obviously help in miniaturization. One of the major areas where I think artificial intelligence will help us is in decision-making, that’s in battle management and those types of things, and understanding risk calculus and that. I think it’ll help us in autonomy. Some of the limitations of humans are that we can’t fly on these super long endurance flights without a bathroom and a pizza oven and the things that keep a human alive.

So there are opportunities there where AI can be introduced and some capabilities to achieve even longer endurance flights or longer range weapons. Those are some of the areas we’re looking at. But I do think the area that is ripe for exploitation for artificial intelligence is decision-making and how we do battle management.

Timothy Walton:

Question towards the back, please.

Will Heflin:

All right, Will Heflin with Epirus. I’m curious, as we’ve seen incursions at multiple bases across the US in recent years by unmanned aircraft systems how the Air Force is thinking about base survivability and platform protection against UAS threats.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, it goes straight to this thought that we are contested everywhere, and base survivability is something we’ve got to do. It’s a layer defense that goes from the small UAS threat, which frankly, it can provide some disaster effects, all the way up to high-end hypersonic weapons. There’s that entire space that you’ve got to defend from, as well as cyber in other domains.

So the Air Force is approaching it from that perspective, from a all-domain full-threat envelope, and you’ll see us field capabilities in the near future to counter those things. That does bring up this thought of air base defense. Is that an Air Force mission or an Army mission? No, traditionally it’s been an Army mission. Well, it may be time to rethink that as we look at where we are with air base defense and how critical it is to our missions and how we contribute to the joint force. I think you’ll see us way deeper into that.

Timothy Walton:

I had a question on the allies and partners. How are you considering their role potentially in the Force Design?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yeah, so just along with this as a joint concept, it’s also an ally-partner concept, and the combined arms approach where you have asymmetric capabilities and more traditional capabilities and maybe some long-range capabilities. Typically, what we say to our allies and partners is, hey, you can join us, but what we need you to do is we need you to go buy Squadron F-35s.

So go talk to the Joint Program Office and we need you to invest billions and billions of dollars a year and we’ll give you Squadron F-35s. And for some nations, that’s like the entirety of their national treasure. What this Force Design does for us is. . . To explain it in deterrence terms, it provides horizontal deterrence options for us. And that for a lower price point, we can get more allies and partners into the fight with us.

That’s one of the strengths of the United States is that whenever we fight, we don’t fight alone. Russia fights alone. China fights alone. The United States, we fight with our allies and partners. And if we can make that group of allies and partners bigger because of the offerings of capabilities that we have to something that they can actually afford, that’s going to help us out. It’s going to help us out. It’s going to help them out. The opportunities there are immense, and I’m really proud of the work particularly in that area.

Timothy Walton:

Great. Excellent.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

It also helps us take advantage of the defense industrial bases of other nations as well. That’s something that’s an untapped resource in some ways now.

Dr. Dan Patt:

So as we close, any closing remarks for us?

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Sure. Hey, I do want to just once again, thanks so much for the dialogue. Thanks for having us here today. We’re really in exciting times. The Air Force is right on the edge of just fantastic new capabilities that we’ll be fielding here shortly, and you guys will all see those. For a person that grew up in the Air Force, it’s just really, really neat to see. And I’ve got one more goal in my career, and that goal is to ensure that the airmen of the future, they have the same war-winning awesome capabilities that I enjoyed for my entire 30-year career.

And so if we can put them on that right step, if we can put the Air Force on the right step. So 30 years from now, there’s a new set of people in this same room and they’re talking about that Force Design of the past and the Force Design of the future, they go, wow, those guys back in 2025, man, they were thinking hard about this and they really set us up. They gave us the war-winning capabilities that dominated our adversaries for 30 years.

And that’s frankly the inspirational message that I want to leave you with. But it’s also, it’s where my heart is being an airman for 30 plus years. I care about this service, I care about this nation, and I think we’re on the right track.

Dr. Dan Patt:

Sounds compelling.

Timothy Walton:

General Kunkel, thank you very much.

Major General Joseph Kunkel:

Yes, thank you.