The Air Force is a massive institution in a state of perpetual change, its many pieces operating in unison and yet moving to their own unique rhythms. A continuous flow of new Airmen cycle into service—bright, eager, hopeful. Last year’s models, now seasoned, move up a notch, the assembly line continuing as members are routed up, and out, over the course of 15 or 20 or 30 years.
But though the Air Force churns out Airmen with precision, it is not simply a machine. It is in its own way a family, and the connections that span the generations, both by blood and the unique relationships that grow out of shared service, add a human dimension that informs and softens the perpetual motion machine.
Gen. Michael E. Ryan, Chief of Staff of the Air Force from 1997-2001, is the only Air Chief to succeed his father in that job. “They’ll never make that mistake again,” he says now, but not because of any rule. The odds of an Airmen following his or her father into service remain higher than for the civilian population at large, but surviving to four stars is itself a rarity and to be in the right place at the right time to become Chief is as much luck as it is talent.
More common are the connections Chiefs have with other leaders who came before them, whether they served together in combat or on staffs. Assignment as a general’s aide is not a guarantee of future stars, but such exposure to the inner workings of the service can be foundational for future success. Was it a coincidence that Gen. David L. Goldfein served under Ryan as an aide a couple of decades before he became Chief himself? Hardly. Though Ryan and Goldfein hailed from different family lines, their intertwined bonds of service are just as unbreakable.
Part 3 of a 4-Part Series
Gen. Michael E. Ryan, CSAF No. 16 (1997-2001)
Like Father, Like Son
As America rolled toward the end of the second millennium and the year 2000—Y2K, as it was dubbed—President Bill Clinton was in his second four-year term as President, Rep. Newt Gingrich was in his second two-year term as Speaker of the House, and the Defense Department was in trouble. Eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Americans were more interested in the new “dot-com” boom than national defense. The post-Cold War drawdown that began in 1991 had twisted military personnel policy such that it seemed the armed forces were more focused on getting people out of uniform than in recruiting members to join or stay in.
The Air Force suffered a 20 percent cut in the six years from 1991 to 1997, a loss of $18.3 billion a year. The fighter force shed 1,800 jets in that time, a 40 percent reduction since 1987. The missions, however, continued: Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995, not to mention Operations Northern and Southern Watch, no-fly-zone enforcement over northern and southern Iraq, which demanded continuous U.S. Air Force presence.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, nearly three years into his own four-year tour, was in a bind. He believed the cuts to the Air Force were dangerous to U.S. national security, but couldn’t seem to convince the people who mattered—in particular, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen—that he was not some Chicken Little warning that the sky was falling. Worse, he was also butting heads with Cohen over personnel matters in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where a truck bombing in 1996 had killed 19 U.S. Airmen and wounded 400 American and allied military and civilian personnel.
Congress and the public wanted accountability, and Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine who had crossed party lines to join the Clinton administration, was willing to pin the blame on the one-star commander on the scene, Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier. Fogleman was not. In July 1997, Fogleman elected to retire early. “My stock in trade after 34 years of service is my military judgment and advice,” Fogleman wrote to Airmen that July 30. Now, he wrote, “I may be out of step with the times and some of the thinking of the establishment.”
Enter Gen. Michael E. Ryan. While not a stranger to Washington—Ryan had been a military assistant to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Larry Welch (CSAF No. 12) and for two Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili—but he was returning after three and a half years in Europe, during which he had led the U.S. air campaign that forced an end to the Bosnian civil war and led to the Dayton Peace Accords.
“Being an Airman is being part of a team.
“So in my mind, it’s about being a trusted, trusted member of a team. That’s what being an Airman is about. And it always has to be that way because you’re never going to do it alone. You’re always going to have to do it with others, and you’re going to have to trust them and they need to trust you. You’re always going to have a wingman no matter what your job is. That’s what it means to me.”
In Bosnia, Ryan had been left largely to his own devices. “No one told me what to do. No one told me to put a work plan together called [Operation] Deliberate Force,” he said. “I just did that on my own. No one tasked me to do that. And I picked every … aimpoint that we used in that war to avoid civilian casualties because we couldn’t be seen as being as bloodthirsty and as committing atrocities, as the participants in that war had been [doing] to each other. In Srebrenica, they killed maybe 6,000 Muslims. There was a horrible war. And how do you stop a war? How do you end a war? We were able to do it by taking away the Bosnian Serbs’ capability to fight.”
Bosnia, Ryan said, was his greatest legacy. But he himself had descended from a unique Air Force legacy, having spent his entire life within the bubble of the Air Force as the son of a decorated bomber pilot, Gen. John D. Ryan (CSAF No. 7). The elder Ryan became Chief in 1969 when Mike was a young captain flying F-4s at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.
Now for the first and only time in the history of the U.S. armed forces, the son of a former service chief had advanced to reach the same position. What he inherited, though, was an Air Force in crisis.
“I found my Air Force in free fall,” Ryan said in a recent interview. “There was no safety net. We didn’t have a stopgap. There was nothing that was going to keep it from continuing to fall. We had become victims of our own success, in a way: We had gone and done the Gulf War, we had done Bosnia, touted as the war that was won by air alone.”
In the wake of those conflicts, American air power was so overwhelmingly powerful and effective, its technology so obviously superior, the nation was taking that capability for granted.
“We were faced with, ‘where’s the peace dividend here?’ And ‘where’s the threat for the future?’”
That future looked busy to Ryan. Southern Europe, where the former Yugoslavian states were still jockeying for control of border lands and where ethnic tensions that had been held in check for decades under decades of communist rule, continued to unravel in violence. The Middle East, where Operations Northern and Southern Watch continued unabated, with no end in sight, and where Iran continued to pose a meddlesome threat requiring continuous U.S. military presence in the region.
Many also saw another potential threat rising on the far side of the world. While Britain had turned Hong Kong into an elite island city-state, an international economic powerhouse, time was running out on a 99-year agreement that allowed British rule. On July 1, 1997, weeks before Fogleman retired and just months before Ryan took over as CSAF, the United Kingdom completed the ceremonial transfer of power in Hong Kong, returning sovereignty to China after a century and a half of British rule. Now, just eight years removed from the Tiananmen Square massacre where China’s People’s Liberation Army had brutally crushed a civilian protest, China was taking possession of a vital connection to world financial markets. Hong Kong’s ticket to modernize its economy, and it pledged to uphold a “One Country, Two Systems” policy that would protect Hong Kong’s independence.
But China was not Ryan’s worry. His eyes were set firmly closer to home.
“I was terribly worried about how to protect the Air Force,” Ryan recalls now. “How do we stabilize this thing so it can’t just keep being eaten away?”
Every element of the Air Force was under attack. “Pieces grabbed. Every piece of your force structure questioned,” Ryan recalled. Questions flew: “Why do you need that?” The entire service was on the defensive, Ryan described. “It was—it was awful.”
From the outside, the Air Force seemed not to have any difficulty. There were plenty of planes—even if those planes weren’t all interchangeable. The Air Force lacked a simple force structure that could be explained in building block form, like the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The Army had divisions, which were not all equivalent, but at least sounded as if they could be somewhat interchangeable. The Navy had carrier battle groups and a rotational model that resulted in predictable deployment and maintenance cycles. The Marine Corps had Marine Expeditionary Forces, which worked similarly to the Navy model.
But the Air Force had been built around its bases, its forces tailorable to mission needs. So as demand rose and the service shrank, cracks were beginning to show. Readiness and morale began to slide, right along with the declining budget.
Ryan noted how the Air Force built stand-in forces for those times when the Navy could not provide aircraft carrier presence in the Persian Gulf. This was the Air Force being expeditionary in its own right, as it had been in World War I, in south Asia in World War II, and in the Middle East since Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
“I said, ‘What if we took our Air Force and cut it up in a way that we could form these AEFs—Air Expeditionary Forces?’” Ryan said. If that concept were applied not just for gap-fillers, but for all operations, he thought, it would benefit the Air Force in myriad ways. “We could put some stability into our operations, we could say this is what the Air Force is made of—10 AEFs—and that’s something we can build a force structure against.”
Brig. Gen. Charles F. Wald was Ryan’s special assistant for the upcoming quarterly defense review, and he asked Wald to work out how to make the concept work. The model Wald’s team built meant the AEF could be used to size the force, Ryan said. “We used it as a force structuring tool, too, not just a tool to put stability into the rotations, but as a tool to say, ‘This is how many F-22 squadrons we need.’”
When then Air Force was ordered to cut the original F-22 planned purchase from 750, Ryan said, the Air Force used its 10 AEF model to rationalize a new figure: Every AEF needed at least one squadron of F-22s, and every squadron needed 24 planes; add in 25 percent more for training, a percentage for attrition, testing, and so on, and the requirement came out to 381.
The AEFs did not exist in a vacuum. The National Defense Strategy required a force able to fight two major regional contingencies at approximately the same time. The Navy drew the line at 11 carrier battle groups “and anyone who ever questioned that, they’d say, ‘No, we have to have 11 carrier battle groups,’ and no one would take that on.”
Ryan believed the AEF construct “would have legs” and survive because “it was designed to be able to handle an op tempo that was constant, because you could put two AEFs online at any one time, and that was plenty for what was going on. And if you had the big one, we’d go back to mobilize, just like for every other war we’d ever had.”
Defining an AEF for outsiders was never as simple as defining a carrier battle group, however. A carrier battle group could be seen in a photograph, and that image could be held in the mind’s eye. When the Air Force laid out its AEFs, however, it lacked that visual element. Instead, it was a complicated list: combat, mobility, and “low-density/high-demand” forces, delineated as wings, air groups, and squadrons, drawn from the Active, Reserve, and Guard components, and organized by date ranges. A separate list included support forces, organized by duty location. To show all the pieces of all 10 AEFs required two-and-a-half printed magazine pages in Air Force Magazine’s Almanac; even then, one needed to view all three pages to understand the contents of a single AEF.
Ryan’s AEF settled on deployment rotations of 90 to 120 days, another element that outsiders found difficult to fathom. The Navy and Marine Corps used six-month rotations. But the Air Force had set out to ensure units maintained proficiency in the full range of missions each one might face. That drove the decision for short rotations. “We thought we could keep proficiencies up if we had shorter deployments,” Ryan insisted. “You have readiness requirements you lose when you’re deployed. You don’t do certain things because of the kind of missions you’re force into when deployed, so you can lose your proficiency after 120 days if you haven’t shot a missile, or refueled, or any number of kinds of things you’re required to [be able] to do.”
But short cycles became unsustainable after 9/11, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially when the Army found itself forced to extend some deployments to 15 months, and to impose stop-loss orders that kept deployed Soldiers on Active duty beyond their enlistment dates. Would Ryan do things differently if he could go back and get a do-over? He’s not sure. He sees the argument for six-month deployments, as well as the benefits of 120. “What kinds of deployments are you going on? What kind of a beast are we feeding?”
The AEF construct survived the transition to Ryan’s successor as CSAF, Gen. John P. Jumper, but began to come apart under his successor, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz. Today, the Air Force is trying to establish a new means of presenting forces. The “force generation” model introduced late last year by CSAF No. 22 Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. establishes four six-month stages—commit, reset, prepare, and ready—for every unit, underscoring that the requirement Ryan identified for stabilizing the force in the late 1990s endures, even if the solution has remained elusive over the quarter century since he became Chief.
The undoing of the AEF may have been its flexibility, Ryan suggests. “Flexibility is the enemy of stability,” he said. “And unfortunately, air power is very flexible.”
Protecting the People
Ryan had more on his plate than combat rotations and deployments. The situation in the former Yugoslavia was still troubling, and the Air Force was on continuous duty there, as well as in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the military was facing other problems.
The Clinton administration had capped military pay growth below wage inflation in 1993. By 1997, the caps had opened up a 9 percent gap between military and civilian pay, according to RAND Corp. estimates at the time. This came on top of an estimated 12 percent gap that had grown since the 1980s. RAND and others questioned whether that gap really applied to the full force, or only to certain service members, but there was no escaping that military pay had fallen behind—and that recruiting and retention were beginning to demonstrate that fact. Another change Congress made in the 1980s was also coming into focus. Lawmakers had changed the formula for military retirement in 1987, but many in the military did not begin to recognize the difference until the late 1990s.
“Recruitment and retention were a big issue when I came on board,” Ryan said. “We had never advertised before that.”
Pilot retention was also a problem. “During the drawdown we had made a huge mistake: We had tried to throttle up and down the number of pilots that we would put out in a year. … But we had no way of predicting the run on our force that came from the airlines. Or how much our young force would decide after X amount of time they wanted out. Or what kind of payback we’d get from any of our” incentive programs. “But never pull it back,” Ryan said. “Because when you pull it back, you lose the instructor pilots, you lose range capability, you lose airplanes.”
But then, Ryan added a wrinkle. Those who agreed to let the Air Force train them to be pilots also agreed to stay in the service for 10 years. “My personnel guys said, ‘No—we can’t do that!’ But I said, ‘Yes, 10 years, you go to pilot training, you give us 10 years back.’”
The increased commitment had no impact on the take rate, Ryan said. But 15 years later, the Air Force is still struggling to retain enough mid-career pilots. Why? “That goes back to that stability issue,” Ryan said. “If the family is unhappy because they don’t have that stability, then it’s very hard to keep the member.”
Having tried advertising for new recruits, Ryan was now interested in leveraging that kind of marketing power for retention. “I looked around and I said, ‘We don’t have a rallying symbol in the Air Force, we don’t have a symbol.’ I mean, the Marines have their eagle, globe, and anchor, and the Army has their star, and the Navy’s got a lot of anchors. Well, we don’t have anything.”
Ryan hired some “Fifth Avenue guys” from New York and took their renderings to a Corona meeting of the Air Force’s four-star leadership. “There was one that stood out above the others,” Ryan said. “And that’s the one we have today.” But it wasn’t really that simple. He launched the symbol in a guerilla marketing campaign, using it as an unofficial logo in Air Force ads and waiting to see if it caught on organically. “I said go put it on a couple of water towers, put in on the front gate in a couple of places, but don’t force it. … And it caught on big time.”
Ryan said on issues of style, rather than substance, it’s better to let people buy in than to force change. In the end, it was Ryan’s successor, Jumper, who made it the Air Force’s official logo. But by then it was already widely recognized and accepted.
Not taking credit and letting things percolate is also reflected in Ryan’s approach to Corona meetings. All Chiefs have experience in Coronas before they are running them. When they finally are in charge, they have a very good idea of what they think is going to work. “First thing is: You’re not the smartest person in the room, and if you think you are, you’re not going to learn anything.”
“Make sure you include everybody’s opinion, and listen to them because someone in there has got a better idea than you do—or can take your idea and make it even better,” Ryan said. “When you go into executive session at Corona, that’s an important meeting. People can say what they need to say and give their honest opinions without fear of being chastised. I had some wonderful, cooperative four-stars that were my guys. They helped me a lot. … I didn’t have a maverick in the group in the sense of a guy who was fighting where we wanted to go. And we had some that had a lot of opinions and a few that had a bit of an ego, but everyone of them in the end were on the team. Everyone of them was an Airman. A team player.”
Ryan had a lot to live up to as the second Ryan to become Air Force Chief. His father had been a highly decorated bomber pilot in World War II, with two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart for being wounded on an antiaircraft fire on a bomber mission. “He was a hero in my eyes, not just because he was my dad, but because of his background. He took me up in a B-26 when I was about 10 years old, and he was a commander at Carswell Air Force Base, Texas. And from then on, I wanted to fly airplanes.”
The elder Ryan impressed his son with his “ethical quality that was unquestionable … and I vowed that I would try and live up to that too. Integrity ought to be your watchword, because if you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. You’ve got to admit when you’re wrong, and you’ve got to stand up and say so when something is your fault.”
When Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady was shot down in Bosnia, Ryan said, it was his fault. “I put them in a position where they were vulnerable,” he said. “So Scott got shot down because of me.”
A few years later, another Airman was shot down, this time in Serbia. The pilot, then-Lt. Col. David L. Goldfein, had been an aide to Ryan earlier in his career, and Goldfein’s brother Col. Stephen Goldfein was Ryan’s aide at the time. Ryan said the day “Fingers” Goldfein was shot down was his worst day as Chief. When he finally got word that Goldfein had been rescued, he called Stephen. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” Ryan told his executive aide. “The good news is we got your brother back. The bad news is the Goldfein family owes the Air Force one F-16.”
Gen. David L. Goldfein, CSAF No. 21 (2016-2020)
The ‘Joint’ Chief
By September 2015, everyone knew that year’s “AFA”—the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md.—would be Gen. Mark A. Welsh III’s last as Air Force Chief of Staff. He’d been in the job since 2012, and his four-year tour would be up the following summer.
On the eve of the conference, news outlets speculated about two ground-breaking options for his relief: Gen. Lori J. Robinson, then commander of Pacific Air Forces, and Gen. Darren W. McDew, who had only recently taken charge of U.S. Transportation Command. Absent from that conjecture: Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein.
Junior to both Robinson and McDew, Goldfein had survived a missile strike that downed his F-16 over Serbia, leaving him stranded in hostile territory until he could be rescued. “Intercepting an enemy missile with my airplane was not my best mission,” he said. Surviving and then thriving as his career advanced belied the notion that the Air Force suffered from a zero-defect mentality. In the wake of losing his airplane, Goldfein had not only survived, but thrived.
“Beginning as a young captain in Desert Storm, I had not missed a single fight in my career,” Goldfein said. That included two years as the Air and Space Component Commander for Central Command from 2011 to 2013. Even so, Goldfein didn’t see himself as a serious candidate for Chief until Welsh let him know he was a serious contender, a wake-up call that forced him to start thinking seriously about how he would approach the role if he was indeed the choice.
“That was really when I started thinking seriously about, OK, what are my gifts?” he said. “I think every leader brings certain gifts and strengths to the table and certainly an equal number of weaknesses. So what are my strengths? And as I thought about it, it became clear to me that what I knew, perhaps as well as anybody else in the Air Force, was the business of joint warfighting.”
Goldfein had flown in every Air Force combat operation since Desert Storm and in the prior seven years had stepped through a series of preparatory jobs: Deputy Director of Programs on the Air Staff, Director of Operations at Air Combat Command, Commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, and Director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Now he awoke to a possibility he hadn’t really seen coming.
Once selected, Goldfein went to Welsh with a plea: “I need some time with a small transition team to really put some serious thought into where I want to focus so I can hit the ground running on Day One,” Goldfein said. “You know, that’s tough conversation. What I was really asking him was, ‘Hey, Chief, I want you to work like a dog until the end without a Vice.’”
Welsh agreed, cutting Goldfein loose with a small team to develop his plan. That team included then-Brig. Gen. Alexus G. “Grinch” Grynkewich (now the three-star commander of 9th Air Force and the Combined Forces Air Component Commander at U.S. Central Command). He wanted focus—“big, audacious, and achievable” ideas to shape the coming four years.
“Where I focused was joint warfighting excellence: How do I take the service from where it is to a point where I can hand it off as a more capable joint teammate?” he said. For the next four years, everything he could control—and there were, of course, plenty of issues he could not control—had to “make us better joint warfighters.”
Three areas would get his particular focus: First, reinvigorating the fighting formation of the Air Force, in particular empowering squadron leaders; second, joint development; and third, digitizing and connecting joint warfighters, a concept that became multi-domain command and control, and then, as he was reaching the end of his tour, joint all-domain command and control (JADC2).
Of the three, it is the third one—helping to convince the other services that his concept joint command and control concepts not only made sense but were critical—that will likely be his long-term legacy. “When we started the conversation, it was a question of whether we really needed to do this,” Goldfein said. “What took four years was building trust amongst the services that this wasn’t the money grab.”
The challenge was that all the services were already operating in multiple domains. “Think about it: If you’re the Chief of Naval Operations, you’ve invested billions in command and control to connect what you believe is an all-domain force that operates from subsurface submarines to the surface and to the air. So you’re already a multi-domain force, and you build C2 to connect your forces at sea. If you’re the Chief of Staff of the Army, you’ve invested billions of dollars to connect your Soldiers, and you’re transitioning your Army into the digital world. And along comes this Air Force guy that says, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea: Scrap all those investments you’ve made and let me come in and solve this for the world.’ That is a nonstarter.”
Goldfein knew the Air Force had expertise the other services could leverage. Going back to 1947, Congress had identified command and control as an initial Air Force mission. “But if we were to approach it so that it could be interpreted as a money grab, it would be dead on arrival,” Goldfein said. He spent the next four years “squinting with his ears,” he said, listening and learning about the challenges each service chief saw in his particular domain. The Army chiefs saw the issue as one of scale and speed. While the Air Force sought to connect a few thousand airplanes, the Army needed to connect a million Soldiers; and as USAF tried to operate at the speed of sound, the Army needed to keep up only with the speed of traffic.
“We had to educate ourselves,” Goldfein said. “If we’re going to offer solutions to the Army, we better understand ground maneuver. If we’re going to offer solutions to the world’s greatest Navy, we better understand submarine operations.”
Slowly the multi-domain phrase caught on. The Army and Navy began to adopt the language. The question had changed. Instead of ‘Why do we do this?’ Goldfein said, it was, “How do we get after this as a team?”
386
Not everything went so well. Goldfein inherited a force in decline, one too small to meet its many requirements. The nuclear force was decrepit, he had a new tanker that wasn’t performing, his fighter force was aging out faster than he could acquire replacements. When Congress asked for an objective assessment to define the Air Force the nation needed, Goldfein and then-Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson responded with a clear flight plan: 386 operational squadrons, a 20 percent increase over the existing force.
The plan was laid out at AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber Conference in 2018, halfway through Goldfein’s tenure, and the Air Force celebrated by giving the press and others coffee mugs emblazoned with the number 386. “There was classified assessment and intelligence analysis that went into this,” Goldfein said. “This was 386 squadrons that directly aligned with the national security and national defense strategy and combatant commander demand, given classified operational war plans.”
Some greeted the disclosure of this plan as the beginning of a new campaign to grow the Air Force. Goldfein did not. “We did all the analysis, and you could back it up with data to say you could meet the need at moderate risk with 386. Anything below that, you just increased risk. So now, do we keep banging the drum and say 386, when we’re actually at 320? That didn’t make much sense.”
Goldfein saw the analysis as a worthwhile, but academic exercise, because he couldn’t imagine that Congress would fund 66 more squadrons and all the people, weapons, and support that would require.
A generation before, at the end of the Cold War, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell presented his Base Force, the blueprint for a scaled down, peacetime U.S. military in a unipolar world. All of the services would be cut deeply, and all of the services accepted their fate. Whatever pushback occurred, only the Marine Corps managed to take their fight public, resisting the call to shrink the Corps to just 159,000 Marines. Then-Commandant Gen. Carl Mundy, a buzz-cut, square-jawed Marine straight from central casting, launched a sort of insurgency, telling every audience possible that yes, he could cut the Corps to 159,000—but then pivoting to say that to meet the nation’s security requirements, 174,000 Marines was the number needed. Mundy repeated his case at every opportunity for a year and ultimately won the argument.
Could Goldfein not have followed that model to achieve his needed 386 squadrons?
“The big difference between us and the Marine Corps [in 1992] was that the Commandant already had 174,000 Marines,” Goldfein said. The two services were approaching a similar value statement, but from opposing directions.
The Marines were drawing down from a force greater than 200,000 and hoped to be spared the deep cut to 159,000; by contrast, Goldfein’s force was already undersized. Rather than seeking to foreshorten a drawdown, he would have been asking for a budget increase measured in the tens of billions. That was beyond imagination.
Still, “386 was a helpful metric for me because I could then articulate where I thought we were risk-wise, in various scenarios, whether in the tank or at the White House,” Goldfein said. With that, he said, he could “now articulate what I thought was the amount of risk was, and I could do it with a lot greater granularity, based on where we were versus where the moderate risk level was. It was a very helpful benchmark in some of those discussions.”
Goldfein saw risk every place he turned. But he also saw opportunities, seizing them—at some cost.
When the Air Force took a cut to help fund fourth-generation Navy F/A-18 purchases, he later got a chance to claw some of that back. But Defense Department leadership were offering a choice. He could have the money to fund new-build F-15s, built in the same Boeing Co. plant in St. Louis where the F/A-18s were made, but not for additional Lockheed F-35s.
“My first response was, ‘I’m not going to spend a penny of fifth-generation money against a fourth-generation asset. That’s a red line,’” Goldfein recalled. “And then I said, second, that ‘there can be no trading of aircraft, because where we are headed is fifth- and sixth-generation. But I do have a capacity challenge, and I can’t allow the Air Force to lose $7 billion in assets.’”
Goldfein took the deal, accepting a future that would include dozens—and possibly up to 200—new-build F-15EX fighters. If it was the will of the Department of Defense and the Congress that the Air Force purchase F-15s, Goldfein said, “then we’re going to look at these airplanes and we’re going go take a look at the fleet, and then determine the best option.”
What the Air Force found, he said, was that the Pacific’s long ranges made the new-build F-15EXs attractive because—as good as the F-35 is—it can’t match the F-15 for range and payload. “In a Pacific scenario, when we played various force elements together, the combination” proved attractive, he said.
New advances promised by the F-15EX also helped change his perception. “Stealth is not the only spectrum,” he said. “Radar is not the only spectrum where you have to hide. And so the more we looked at the options, the better the F-15EX looked from a joint warfighting perspective.”
Now Goldfein’s focus on jointness came into play. “I was confident I was making the Air Force a better joint warfighter and joint warfighting service by entering the F-15EX,” he said.
“The Air Force Chief [is] the only Chief of a service that’s a garage startup. … you know, Orville and Wilbur, bicycle mechanics, tinkering in a garage? And, of course, the rest is history. I was the Chief of a service that has a very technical edge to it. And today, we’re a hardware company, but the future is in software. And we, as a service, need to be the thought leaders for the Department of Defense, on how we apply the military instrument of power in a digital age. … This goes to the essence of what it is to be an Airman: An Airman is an innovator. The nation has always looked to its Air Force, pushing the edges of technology. … We don’t think outside the box, we try to throw away the box, we try to look for completely new ways of using existing technology and applying new technology. That, to me, is the essence of an Airman. It’s what we do for the nation.”
He also had a problem. The first was that he was breaking a line held by every Chief before him for nearly two decades, that the Air Force should not “buy new old airplanes.” Second, the real skinny on why this made sense couldn’t be shared in the open. The real advantages could only be shared in classified settings, Goldfein said, meaning Goldfein struggled to tell that story publicly, while generally holding his own in private.
Goldfein’s tenure included four wildcards. The first, was his nomination to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford’s term as Chairman neared its end, Goldfein seemed the hands-on favorite to succeed him. Having positioned himself as a joint warfighting advocate, focused on projects and programs that made the joint team stronger, he was a natural. No Airman had been Chairman since Gen. Richard B. Myers from 2001 to 2005, and in the 15 years since, the position had been held by two Soldiers, two Marines, and one Navy Admiral.
Goldfein had the endorsement of Defense Secretary James Mattis, himself a retired Marine general. But by then, [President Donald J. ]Trump was feuding openly with Mattis, questioning his loyalty and challenging his independence. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, a burly New Englander, was less joint in focus but held some special appeal to the President. Whether it was his Princeton pedigree, his New England roots, his substantial presence, or merely the fact that he wasn’t Mattis’ choice is unclear. But Trump nixed Goldfein for Milley, regardless. Goldfein has no regrets.
“I’ve never looked back for a second on the decision to make Mark Milley the Chairman,” he said. “Hey, he’s a friend. He’s a great officer, we served together as Chiefs, we served together in Afghanistan when he was there, and I was the CFACC.” The President interviewed both—chose one. “He chose the individual he had really good chemistry with. … It’s not personal. It’s professional.”
Space Wars
This was 2019, debate about forming a stand-alone military branch focused on space was underway. Goldfein was opposed at the start. He saw a seamlessness in the integration of air and space within his force, and “I was worried that in the business of separating the services, we would separate that jointness,” he said. “I was worried about us, you know, losing some of our edge and the integration of air and space.”
He imagined turf wars ahead, because he’d been around the Pentagon to know well enough that when something is new, “First thing you build is a castle, then you dig a moat, and then you fill it with dragons. Because you’ve got to protect your resources,” he acknowledged. But then Goldfein went to Maxwell Air Force Base and Air University. He met with a group of Schriever Fellows, “our smartest space officers.”
Goldfein was trying to sell them on his operational integration concept. “I was watching their body language, and could see: They ain’t buying it,” he admitted. “So I finally just stopped, and did what Chiefs really ought to do, which is to listen.”
By the time the conversation was over, Goldfein said, “I was convinced. I said, ‘Show of hands: How many of you think we need a separate service for space?’ Every hand went up. You know, when you’re the Chief and your Airmen are telling you something, you better listen.” Goldfein set out to learn more. I visited every space base, I went and I read, I listened, I watched, I spoke to industry leaders, I went to NASA.
“I had two fundamental questions I was asking myself: Can we as a service culturally embrace space superiority with the same passion that we historically have embraced air superiority? And, who can move space for the nation faster in the business of joint warfighting?—Me, as a service Chief that does leaflets to nukes and everything in between, and operates in all the domains? Or a service Chief that is singularly focused on advancing space for the nation?”—In the end, he said, “I came to my own personal conclusion that the President got this one right.”
There were still risk, he thought. If the Air Force and Space Force got this right, the two would co-exist as close and effective partners, independent masters of their individual domains, yet at the same time interdependent on each other and tightly integrated to maximize their joint effect.
He took to sharing a photograph of himself holding his two granddaughters, each two years old at the time. “I said, ‘Hey, meet my granddaughters, Eva and Rae. They don’t know this, but they are members of the Class of 2040 at the Air Force Academy. And one of them—I’ll let them choose—will join the Air Force and one will join the Space Force. And when they walk across that stage in 2040, the class of 2020 will be graded.”
The test, would be what the two services had forged over the prior 20 years. “Did we build two services that were focused and built on a foundation of trust and confidence in each other, able to work as a joint team for air and space operations, as both supported and supporting commanders?” he asked “Or did we build castles, moats, and dragons?”
Goldfein bet his tenure on tearing down castles, slaying dragons, and breaching moats. He sees just one good option for the future. Slay the dragons—or fail.