Gen. James Cartwright, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said Thursday at AFA’s Symposium in Orlando, Fla. that accessing data, discovering it, getting it to those who need it and ridding ourselves of the “ownership idea” is crucial. He went on: “The reality here is whether you’re on the ground or in the air, you step across the line of departure where you light the burners—shit happens. You’ve got to be able to respond. Waiting for five to 10 years is unacceptable in the world we live in.” He spoke of the need to figure out how to move data around and to build and integrate organizations without losing the service’s ethos. “We as Strategic Command have built a distributed organization along functional lines,” he said. “What is absolutely essential to me is to marry up the United States Air Force as they network to gather their air operations centers because without those air operations centers our functionally distributed nodes have no way to connect to the fight.”
China thinks it will be able to invade Taiwan by 2027 and has developed a technology edge in many key areas—but it is artificial intelligence that may be the decisive factor should conflict erupt, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said.