Frank Kendall, the most consequential Air Force Secretary in years, departed the Pentagon in January at the end of an eventful three-and-a-half-year tenure as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force.
His most important contribution, he thinks: Raising “a sense of urgency” about the need to modernize the Air Force and Space Force to ensure the United States stays ahead of China.
“I feel reasonably good that we’ve made that transition; that there is a growing awareness throughout the department that we have got to be ready for a peer competitor unlike any that we’ve probably ever seen before,” Kendall said. A threat, he added, “that has to be approached with a sense of commitment and urgency across the enterprise.”
In an early January interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine, Kendall’s goal on arrival was to put “meaningful operational capability” into the hands of operators as quickly as possible. He saw “no time to waste” as China’s advances accelerated.
Now, on departure, he reflected on his initiatives of the last few years, beginning with the most ambitious, the launch of a new generation of semi-autonomous uninhabited combat jets dubbed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).
Concept to Reality
Conceived of well before Kendall under various guises, the concept of unmanned “loyal wingman” aircraft accompanying conventionally crewed combat jets has been spoken of for more than a decade. But CCA are not just research projects; the CCA program started on Kendall’s watch and two contractors, Anduril and General Atomics, have contracts to produce aircraft, making this the “most transformative” of the programs launched during Kendall’s tenure, he said.
CCA will give the Air Force “affordable mass”—that is, increase combat capacity at a lower cost, enabling the Air Force to complicate defenses for adversaries and increase operational flexibility for itself. Kendall has projected the Air Force having as many as 500 CCAs by the end of the decade, and expects the program to serve as a template for how future programs could be run.
“We are no longer in an era where we can buy a platform, wait for it to wear out, and then replace it,” Kendall said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event in January. “We’ve got to buy things to stay competitive over time, and that’s going to be a fundamental change in how we resource and plan for the future.”
The Air Force wants the CCA program to be structured so that upgrades can be fielded swiftly, and Kendall hopes future aircraft and weapons can be developed following the same model.
Increment 1 of the CCA program will multiply the number of weapons available to combat pilots, enhancing fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35 which are load-limited because they must carry weapons internally to maintain stealth. These CCAs will operate as weapons trucks that pilots in the stealth jets can direct against adversaries. Kendall has said Increment 1 should cost a third of the price of a crewed F-35.
Kendall said CCA will be “fielded within the next few years,” delivering an “enormous operational payoff.”
The Air Force will fly Increment 1 aircraft “in operational units and … exercises,” he said, and will also participate in experiments with surrogates, such as autonomously flown F-16s as the Air Force develops concepts of operations and tactics for using CCA.
“Increment 2” requirements are still being debated, Kendall said. It might have some additional capabilities, he said, and its cost could rise 20 to 30 percent over Increment 1, but it doesn’t need to be “exquisite.” It’s clear that “you don’t necessarily have to put” all the electronic warfare, targeting sensors, and related capabilities on “every aircraft you put in the sky.”
The beauty of these aircraft is that the adversary will struggle to tell the difference between a CCA and an F-35, so adversaries will have to combat them as if each is a fully loaded crewed fighter.
“I think figuring out Increment 2 and making a decision on that will be an important task for the new administration,” he added.
Space Transformation
Kendall sees enormous potential in space—as well as great risk—and has prioritized the need for offensive weapons.
Counterspace capabilities got “my highest priority for things that, strategically, we need to fund and accelerate,” Kendall said. “It’s number one on my list.” Kendall was short on details for reasons of security. “This is an area where you would prefer not to give your adversary the advantage,” he said. “I’m not giving the adversary any more time.”
The nation needs “an efficient [and] cost-effective way … to deal with the very large numbers of [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] and targeting satellites that our challengers are putting up,” Kendall said. “Individual interceptors launched from Earth or from aircraft is not an effective way to do it.”
Over time, Kendall has become increasingly convinced that the Space Force budget must grow and that the Air Force cannot be the bill-payer, but rather new funds must be directed to USSF. “There’s widespread understanding that the Air Force alone can’t pay for what the Space Force needs,” he said, indicating he is not alone in that view.
The objective he has said for the past year is a lot like what the nation did when it transitioned the U.S. Merchant Marine into a fighting Navy before World War II. “That’s not cheap. It’s a major deal,” he said. “It’s a strategic shift that we have to recognize.”
In a paper Kendall delivered in December to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the Department of the Air Force in 2050, he outlined a “much bigger, much more capable, much more powerful Space Force,” one which would absorb former Air Force missions like ground- and air-moving target indication; jamming; and counterspace. By then, he imagines a Space Force four times its current size, suggesting a force of nearly 40,000 Guardians.
“Trying to do that just out of the [budget of the DAF] … doesn’t work,” he said in the interview. “I think the other services need to be part of it too. We’ve got to look at the total of the DOD budget and the priorities for that overall.”
Roles and Missions
The Army has the mission of defending air bases, but is not investing in that function at a rate to match the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment initiative, which seeks to widely disperse its forces in wartime at many locations. By avoiding large centralized air bases, USAF wants to make it hard for an adversary to quickly wipe out large chunks of the combat force with many long-range, precision missiles.
“We’ve been working well with the Army on this, trying to figure out the best solutions,” Kendall said. “I think we’ve pretty well come to agreement there’s some technical issues we have to work our way through.” He acknowledged that the Army’s Patriot and THAAD systems are too costly and too few in number to tackle the threat as it is now evolving, and said it will require a “very joint approach” to solve the issue.
“If the Army can’t do a better job than we can, maybe we should do it,” he said.
But Kendall said he is “not worried” by the Army investing in long-range strike weapons, even though that’s an Air Force core competency. The Army’s hypersonics program is developing long-range, hypersonic missiles at a nominal cost of $40 million each. That weapon would have the destructive power of a single 2,000-pound bomb, but cost roughly 1,800 times more.
The Key West Agreement of 1948 set the roles and missions of each of the branches to prevent them poaching on each other’s functions. Kendall suggested revisiting that now, nearly 80 years later, would be wise.
“Does it make sense to go back and have another meeting…about roles and missions? I don’t think that’d be a bad thing,” Kendall said. “I think there are a number of issues like that. It’d be worthwhile.”
The NGAD Decision
One program Kendall did not resolve is what to do about the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. Last summer he put a hold on the program and commissioned a high-level panel of experts to consider options ranging from proceeding with a down-select to rebaselining the requirements. The panel made recommendations, but at the end of the review, with a new administration coming to power in Washington, he punted the decision to his successor.
“Anything I did with a couple of months left in office was likely to be reconsidered, anyway,” Kendall reasoned. The next administration should “own” that decision, he said. “This is a tens of billions of dollars commitment, … a multi-decade commitment, so you really want to be sure you’re pursuing the best operational capability with those resources,” he said. Leaving that to the next Secretary “was the right thing to do.”
What prompted the pause was the breathtaking price of NGAD, which Kendall had previously said would cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars per airplane. Other priorities—including “more aggressive counterspace capabilities” and air base protection—need to be weighed against it, he said.
Despite convictions voiced by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, and others that the Air Force should only pursue uncrewed autonomous aircraft, Kendall said the technology is not there yet. There will be a “continuing need for crewed aircraft to have reliable communications and command and control over uncrewed aircraft,” he said at CSIS.
New strategic and tactical transports are another crucial area for modernization, Kendall said. Today’s airlifters and tankers are not survivable against China’s newest long-range air-to-air missiles and a recent analysis of alternatives found “there is definitely a need to improve the survivability of the current fleet,” he said. “That’s something the new team is going to have to take a hard look at.”
Funding, Funding, Funding
Asked about his greatest disappointment during his tenure, Kendall broadly noted the seemingly endless delays in getting defense bills passed by Congress. Continuing resolutions are not a meaningful bandage, he said, because under them, most new starts cannot begin and other programs are held at previous levels of funding.
He praised Congress for some “additional authorities” that would allow some critical new work to proceed. But the time wasted waiting for authorizations can’t be gotten back, he said, and China has no analogous problems slowing down its innovation and advancement.
Does Kendall think his initiatives will survive? He pointed to the common adversary as providing the answer. “The focus on China as the pacing challenge” began under President Donald Trump’s first term, when the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) emphasized an era of great power competition. That phrase was dropped from the Biden administration’s 2022 NDS, but Kendall employed it in driving his 2024 priority, which launched a plan to “reoptimize” the department for “great power competition.”
“I think it will [remain] the central part of the strategy during the second term, just as it was for us in the last four years,” he said.
One could almost hear him saying, as he did to open multiple speeches at AFA events over the course of his tenure, “China, China, China.” Some things are constant.