The Air Force’s ambitious effort to overhaul its organization, deployment model, and training to better prepare for great power competition with China was just six months old when Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin returned from Exercise Bamboo Eagle on the West Coast in August. He took time for an interview with Pentagon Editor Chris Gordon soon after. It has been edited for space and clarity.
Q. Bamboo Eagle was tied to Red Flag, but it’s also very different. Can you explain?
A: Red Flag, if you go back in history, is designed to ensure our tactical dominance and … enhance tactical competency. [Bamboo Eagle] is really having more of the Air Force involved. … We had over 1,000 joint members … over 150 aircraft. And we went to 10 different locations. … The Airmen who weren’t necessarily climbing aboard the cockpits or maintaining those aircraft were getting a better understanding of the expectations of what it’s going to be like to fight in that [contested] environment. By having them actually deploy to these simulated hubs and spokes, we were designing it to have them understand what it would be like to have to operate under the threat of attack. …
It is simulating Agile Combat Employment, which is well beyond just the pilots and the cockpits. It is the entire apparatus.
Q. What else were you looking at there?
A: We are also looking at developing these units of action … deployable combat wings, and severing them from our air base wings. We are expecting our wing commanders to be able to do more than just be the senior tactical experts who know how to take a wing forward and execute the air tasking order. We’re expecting them to develop the competencies to be able to do the joint warfighting functions, including movement and maneuver, and protection for their forces to move within and throughout an [area of responsibility], sometimes with connectivity to senior leadership and sometimes without.
We had two wings [at Bamboo Eagle completing] their certification phase for AFFORGEN [the Air Force’s new force generation model]. They’re going to certify to go deploy over the Middle East, but in that AFFORGEN cycle we are training them to be ready for the high-end fight as well. We have the 9th Reconnaissance Wing and the 23rd Wing. … The 9th is a reconnaissance wing, but underneath the reconnaissance wing’s command echelon, the mission-generation force elements, the squadron equivalents … [of aircraft such as] F-15s, F-35s, and F-22s, those wing commanders do not have those at their normal bases. That’s not what we expect wing commanders to do anymore. So we’re evolving them to include their combat air base squadrons underneath them. Now they have to understand how to operate, survive, and support different types of combat capability. So that’s another area where it’s beyond just Red Flag Plus.
Q: The Air Force recently got an order to deploy and fight tonight. The Secretary of Defense ordered F-22s to the Middle East on Aug. 2. They were off from Alaska and, in a couple of days, were in the Middle East, to bases that we’re familiar with. But what Bamboo Eagle aimed to do is to prepare units to go somewhere you’re not used to operating from?
A: The F-22 deployment is a great example of being able to rapidly deploy anywhere in the globe and deliver combat power. In this particular case, it was to established infrastructure that was close enough to where we may want to employ them so that they could get there relatively quickly. If you’re going to a place that is not fully established, we have to lift and shift the entire wing apparatus. So that is a mindset shift, … that you actually have to be able to go between the hub and the spokes. … It was really getting back to the basics of going to a place or places where you did not have mature infrastructure and still be able to make your first pulsed go. It’s a significant shift, and the Airmen saw it.
Q: For Bamboo Eagle, some Airmen were not in their comfort zone?
A: We’re developing a new skill set. I don’t want people to be comfortable because that means we’re probably not changing fast enough, but they are understanding how to do different functions rather than just being the senior tactical experts.
Q: What did the Airmen tell you?
A: I know it sounds pollyannaish, maybe, but there was an excitement that Airmen are embracing this, and here’s why: … These guys do great things. But when you have people understanding that you rely on me and I rely on you to do an overall mission, that’s purpose-filled service that they’re embracing. They get it, that ‘I’m doing something different. … I get to be part of this in which I know that the success is dependent upon me.’ …
REFORPAC next summer is going to be even on a larger scale. … We’re understanding better how the training events need to be improved, what other sites we might need when we start trying to scale this to an entire Air Force. That’s where I think we have a lot of learning to do. That’s how it gets scaled faster.
Q: It’s now been a year since the first Expeditionary Air Bases, or XABs, deployed in the Middle East. What were some lessons learned in CENTCOM?
A: We’ve seen a couple of different examples of the very concept of going from many bases aggregating and falling in on one site to actually more unit cohesion leading up to it. XABs were step one, the ATFs [Air Task Forces] are step two, the deployable combat wings are sort of the final instantiation of that. But the XABs paid off last October when they went over there, because the first XAB went over Oct. 1. The units over there in AFCENT [Air Forces Central] … had already done the pre-deployment site survey, had gone over there, had done those things, and that familiarity, that understanding, that already gave them a leg up [before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7]. So that was the first inclination that we’re doing things better. …
The next real big step … is going to be these deployable combat wings—getting that severability between the air base wing and deployable combat wing. Because another part of this is the dissolving of operations and maintenance groups. … If we want the wing commanders to not really focus on the tactical and we want to let the tactical be really run at the squadron command level, we need a lot of leadership understanding of how to do all the warfighting functions that the wing is going to need to do. [Today], those who have that expertise reside in the groups. We’re about the only service that has two levels of O-6 command, right? Perhaps unintentionally, what we’ve been doing is stunting the growth of our young officers who we want to go out there and execute mission command, because they’ve got an O-6 group command and then an O-6 wing command [over them].
[We need to] give the squadron commanders room to breathe, grow, and train because we’re going to expect them to execute out in that environment. You’re going to see that come to fore in many of our wings this next summer. We’re already picking our commanders that are going to be commanding next summer, and so we’re going through now which of the wings are going to transition by next summer, to have both the deployable combat wing and an air base wing construct on the base.
Q: Which of the re-optimization initiatives is still the furthest away in terms of implementation?
A: I would say—for the vision that I have, at least—is a final answer on Integrated Capabilities Command, because it involves moving people. … It’s going to be maybe the longest pole in the tent for a permanent solution. However, we can’t wait for the functionality to start. So we are now … making the congressional notifications for doing as much in place as we can. There will be a core element that starts doing some of the functions of the Integrated Capabilities Command, and the Airmen at the major commands are being identified [who] will cut over … [and] change their patch. … I do believe that there is value in proximity. … If I’m Major Allvin, and I am now assigned to work for Integrated Capabilities Command, but I’m still at [Joint-Base] Langley-[Eustis, Va.], or Barksdale [Air Force Base, La.], or Scott [Air Force Base, Ill.], there’s a little bit of tension, either real or perceived. … I might be in the same vicinity as my other, former four-star commander. … Once we have everyone all in one spot, that’s probably going to be the ultimate solution.
Q: ACC will be in charge of readiness. So what does “readiness” mean to you?
A: People say, well, ‘It’s readiness versus modernization.’ I don’t see that. I see readiness today versus readiness tomorrow. Because it’s not an either or. Readiness means the ability, when called upon, to effectively execute the missions that are expected of you in the context of when you are being asked. And so if we say we’re going to focus it all on our ability to execute all those things that we anticipate happening in the next one to two years, we’ll be ready to do that. That’s a form of readiness. But if, at the same time, we forego the investments and the development of the force that we believe, as we see the arc of technology, the pace of the threat, etc.—if we don’t account for that—then that is killing future readiness. It’s just the ability to marshal the forces that have the capabilities and the competencies required to execute the missions that were asked.
Q: How do these changes reflect great power competition with China?
A: One of the things that’s becoming more clear to me is that, in the absence of a pacing threat like the Soviet Union, a very well-meaning United States Air Force has moved forward and modernized, but in a way where it has strengthened our functional areas sometimes at the expense of … a coherent force design. What did our Air Force do when Saddam [Hussein] attacked [Kuwait in 1990]? Well, in the Cold War, we were used to projecting power as wings, from fixed infrastructure. … We practiced REFORGER, we’ll go beat them to Fulda Gap. So when Saddam attacked, we did the same thing, except we didn’t have any forward infrastructure. So we built it. It took us six months. Desert Shield took six months, but we built it. That was us taking our old Cold War Air Force and saying, that’s what you want us to do.
Q: And then?
A: In the 2000s, the joint force didn’t need the air campaign that we did in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. They didn’t need us to go and roll back the [integrated air and missile defense], establish and maintain air superiority, prep the battlespace through interdiction. …
What did the joint force need of its Air Force? Unblinking ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] on call, the “Golden Hour”[for rapid casualty evacuation]. They needed bits and pieces of our Air Force. So we focused on that bit and piece, that bit and piece, and that bit and piece. And then so we started developing functionally … to solve for efficiency, bureaucratically, if you will. Management headquarters was bad because it was bloated. So what did we do? Well, we sort of took the same functions and we put them out to the Majcoms. …
So you can see not with malice, but the way that the Air Force evolved … we didn’t stay with a coherent single force design, because we didn’t have a threat against which to galvanize. … And so that’s really the [reason for] this re-optimization … to bring back one Air Force, larger-scale exercises. Rather than inspect on task, we inspect on mission. One force design, integrated capabilities that fit together, … the way we project power, not crowdsourcing the fight, but going as units, developing Airmen with one person involved with policy. It’s about bringing back one Air Force.
Q: How does that translate to weapons and platforms?
A: Think systems over platforms. … Because if you buy a platform, I want that platform to do this, and then you put [that platform] into a system—I need a radar, I need an EW suite, I need navigation, I need weapons integration. There it is, and you put it there, and, oh, by the way, you design it specifically, which means it might have to have bespoke support equipment. … Then build this other one over here and you’ve got the same thing. Now you’re spending all your money trying to put these together. … Whatever platform you’re going to build, it’s got to integrate … so that when the system gets upgraded, [that happens] at the speed of software, and everything gets upgraded with it. … That’s the environment we’re adapting to.
Q: Are Airmen getting the message?
A: I came back from that day at Bamboo Eagle pretty energized because we sit here in the Pentagon and we think we’re working … but to get out there and to see that the Airmen are using the language and embracing it was very encouraging.