By the year 2050, the Department of the Air Force should see a much larger Space Force; large numbers of combat drones; a growing shift to standoff strike; and stealthy transports, Secretary Frank Kendall said Jan. 13.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies just a few days before leaving office, Kendall used his last think tank appearance to discuss a report mandated by Congress in late 2023 directing the department to consider its force design through 2050.
The resulting document, completed in December but not publicized until now, doesn’t lay out aircraft quantities, readiness goals, or many other specifics—that would be “almost impossible to do with any kind of accuracy,” given the many variables in politics, technology, international alliances and strategic shifts that may lie ahead, Kendall said.
Instead, the report focuses on the general direction the department should go and the challenges it will face along the way.
“China, China, China remains a problem,” Kendall said, quoting his own oft-repeated mantra. “Russia doesn’t go away as a serious threat.”
Kendall also said he expects that the missions of the Air Force and Space Force “don’t fundamentally change, but both services need to go through a transformation.”
For starters, Kendall said, “we’re going to need a much bigger, much more capable, much more powerful Space Force,” which the report says should be three or four times USSF’s current size of roughly 9,400 uniformed personnel. He repeated an analogy used often by Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman that USSF must transition from a merchant marine to a Navy, capable of projecting power in a contested domain.
Later in the day, at a farewell for Kendall and Air Force undersecretary Melissa Dalton, top Space Force officers suggested that transition is on a good track, with more funds tabbed for the service in the Pentagon’s fiscal 2026 budget request. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Dalton “fought hard” to secure substantial budget increases.
“Their deliberate campaign enabled our team to successfully advocate for $87 billion of additional topline. While it is up to the next administration to determine where the ’26 budget will land, you have a compelling foundation for them to consider,” Guetlein said.
There has been “pretty good progress” in maturing how the Space Force the develops and requires distributed, resilient architectures of satellites, Kendall said at CSIS. But the work ahead will focus on counter-space capabilities—and that will require significant investment.
In an early January interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine, Kendall said there’s “a widespread understanding that the Air Force alone can’t pay for what the Space Force needs.” Becoming the “navy” described in the merchant marine analogy is “not cheap,” he said. “It’s a major deal. It’s a strategic shift that we have to recognize.”
“We’ve got to look at the total of the DOD budget and the priorities for that overall,” Kendall said. “I can’t see any logic that would support trying to fund the new Space Force that we need … solely out of the Air Force. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
He also said it is nonsensical to simply assign the services roughly equal shares of the defense budget.
“If you approach the DOD budget on the point of view of fairness between the services, you’re making a fundamental mistake,” he said. “That’s not the metric we should be looking at. We should be looking at, what does the country need to defend itself, and then allocating resources according to that, and who gets what share should not really be part of the equation.”
At CSIS, Kendall said the Space Force will rely on heavily automated and autonomous capabilities in the years ahead for space situational awareness, targeting, and missile warning and tracking. Communications will “heavily leverage commercial partners,” and the need for resilient position, navigation and timing—“GPS and other systems like it”—will be of paramount importance, given how much both the military and civil society rely on that capability.
In the 2050 report, Kendall predicted that the cost of access to space will continue to fall for both the U.S. and its adversaries, and space capabilities will “proliferate,” he said. This will create opportunities for the Space Force to put things in space more quickly and reliably and more responsively—potentially even keeping some capabilities in storage ready to go in case of a contingency.
Long-Range Strike
Strategically, Kendall said the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and the B-21—the Air Force’s two modernization programs for its legs of the nuclear triad—will remain foundational to U.S. national security through 2050, and he suggested shifting the conventional force to emphasize the long-range strike of bombers may be in the offing.
“The Air Force is very heavily dependent on relatively short-range aircraft—fighters—and has a relatively small inventory of longer-range strike platform—bombers,” Kendall said. “I think that balance needs to shift.”
He reiterated previous comments to Air & Space Forces Magazine about potentially increasing the production rate of the B-21, but he also said “you can talk about possibly another [strategic] platform, or other platforms, in addition to the B-21 being in the mix” by the middle of the century.
Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin has previously suggested new long-range strike systems might make it unnecessary to go beyond the currently planned fleet of 100 B-21s.
Conversely, the precision and range of adversary weapons will continue to grow too. Kendall suggested ”intercontinental effects are going to be conventional,” which poses “a really big problem,” particularly for the Navy.
While Air Force bases “may be attackable,” land cannot be sunk, Kendall noted. As such, the Navy faces a “steep challenge,” while the Air Force will be “the centerpiece of resilient U.S. power projection in the future.”
Despite the increasing challenge of fighting in contested airspace, and the safety of forward air bases, Kendall also said it will always be necessary to forward deploy aircraft and capabilities.
“We’re going to continue our system of alliances around the world, and we need to be there with our partners and our allies. So there have to be aircraft that can operate from those kinds of environments, be survivable, and deliver the effects that we need forward with our partners,” he said.
Tactical Forces
Much remains uncertain about the future of the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, and Kendall has punted a decision on its fate to his successors in the new Trump administration. Still, he claimed the concept is “very valid,” and that while Collaborative Combat Aircraft and autonomous drones will become a greater part of the force by 2050, there will still “a continuing need for crewed aircraft to have reliable communications and command and control over uncrewed aircraft.”
Getting rid of pilots altogether “is an incredibly difficult, emotional thing,” Kendall said, given their centrality to the “history and legacy of the Air Force.”
Mobility Forces
The aerial tanker fleet is increasingly “vulnerable to very long range—even ultra-long range—counter-air systems,” Kendall said, insisting that “we have got to address that survivability issue.” It’s one of the reasons that missions like intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and command, control and communications are shifting to space, though there will always be some need for aircraft, Kendall said.
“We have to rethink how we provide mobility to the force and how we ensure survivability,” he said, “and that may require completely new designs.”
Stealth is a major consideration for the Next-Generation Air refueling System, but there has been “no final decision on that. That’s part of the suite of decisions the Trump administration will have to make. But the need for survivability is obvious, and it’s going to continue, in general, a very fundamental in warfare about increased range in which people can deliver effects,” Kendall said.
Budget Dangers
Given all the improvements and changes Kendall is forecasting by 2050, the department will need a corresponding increase in resources, Kendall said.
“The picture that we lay out in the report lays out an optimistic … scenario for us getting the funding we need to have the Air Force and Space Force,” and lays out what will happen if those resources are provided.
Yet the report also outlines the challenges in the way of those changes that have nothing to do with adversaries: “constrained budgets, reluctance to retire obsolete platforms; reluctance to embrace new technologies and exploit them fully; reluctance to limit our overseas commitments,” Kendall said. “All these things can have a negative impact on our ability to get to where we’re going … to be competitive with China in particular.”
He also emphasized that habits like continuing to buy already-obsolete systems must be overcome.
“We are no longer in an era where we can … buy a platform, wait for it to wear out, and then replace it,” he said. “We’ve got to buy things to stay competitive over time, and that’s going to be a fundamental change in how we how we resource and plan for the future.”
For example, he said, “We keep buying C-130s. Can we please stop buying C-130s? We’ve got enough.”