Danger Zone
“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 are proliferating 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 dialogue really bothers me. … 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 … to get dialogue happening on as many levels and as many places as possible, to gain a greater understanding of each other and hopefully start to appreciate some of the risks, here. … It’s going to be a dangerous time.”
—Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on the perils of a world without multilateral arms control protocols, CSIS interview on the Air Force of 2050 [Jan. 13].
Rehired
“This week I will reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from the military for objecting to the Covid vaccine mandate with full back pay. And I will sign an order to stop our warriors from being subjected to radical political theories and social experiments while on duty. It’s going to end immediately. Our armed forces will be free to focus on their sole mission—defeating America’s enemies.”
—President Donald J. Trump in his inaugural address
[Jan. 20].
The Bots in Control
“Well before 2050, the use of advanced decision and decision support tools will be at the core of a variety of military functions and capabilities. In both the air and space domains, decision dominance will depend on AI technologies. Battle management (BM), the control of forces in planning phases and in dynamic decision-making during execution of military operations, is an obvious application. Using AI to inform planning for the fight and its dynamic execution may be its area of greatest impact. Extraction of target identification and tracking from large multisensor databases is another. Areas of conflict that move at speeds vastly exceeding human decision time constants, such as cyber warfare and electronic warfare, are likely to be dominated by AI technologies that assess events happening at unimaginably fast speeds and unimaginably small dimensions. These technologies will be used to make crucial decisions with no possibility of human intervention.”
—Department of the Air Force Report to congressional committees,“The Department of the Air Force In 2050,” December 2024.
Lost in Translation
“Deterrence” is often translated to a Mandarin word, wēishè, that implies coercion. So I want to be clear: we are not trying to coerce or compel the PRC. That is not our goal, nor our approach. And that’s not the only example of words DOD uses that we’ve learned the PRC can misinterpret.”
—Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks, Jan. 10, on lessons learned from strategic competition with China.
Olympic Airman
“My BMT experience is one I will carry with me for the rest of my life. … The regimen, discipline, teamwork, and resilience needed to get through the past 7½ weeks felt similar to what was needed to make it to and through three Olympic Games and all the challenges I’ve faced along the way.”
—Airman Anita Alvarez, a three-time Olympic artistic swimmer, who graduated boot camp Jan. 9 and will join the Air Force’s World Class Athlete Program [Jan. 9].
Starship
“There’s only one country in the world that can parallel park a 200-foot rocket booster. The Chinese can’t do it. The Russians can’t do it. We do it, and we do it in part because of the great collaboration we have and can have and need to deepen between the private sector where there’s so much innovation and ingenuity in the space of emerging technologies.”
—CIA Director John Ratcliffe at his confirmation hearing, referring to the technical prowess of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which is undergoing flight tests [Jan. 17].
Warrant For Speed
“This focus on great power competition has galvanized us as an Air Force to come together and get things done. I’ve been in the Air Force just about 18 years and I’ve never seen us move this fast on a program.”
—Lt. Col. Justin Ellsworth, career field manager for cyberspace operations officers, on the pace of standing up the return of the Air Force warrant officer program in just 296 days [Dec. 3, 2024].