Chauncy McIntosh, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and general manager of the F-35 Lightning II program, shares a special message with the winners of the U.S. Space Force’s 2024 Polaris Award winners, who are being honored at the 2025 AFA Warfare Symposium.
Many U.S. troops stationed in South Korea with their families—including at Osan Air Base—will begin serving 36-month tours, up from 24 months, starting with service members arriving in October.
Unaccompanied service members will still serve 12-month tours, and more isolated bases like Kunsan Air Base will not be affected.
“The reasons for this change are to improve operational continuity, enhance mission readiness and provide greater stability for service members and their families,” a U.S. Forces Korea spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Longer assignments reduce turnover, allowing for more experienced personnel to remain in critical roles, leading to increased effectiveness in USFK mission.”
The Department of Defense is rolling out the new policy in phases, beginning with the start of fiscal 2026 on Oct. 1, 2025, with full implementation expected by October 2027. Service members already stationed in the country will not be impacted. The change will apply only to command-sponsored, accompanied troops.
“It enhances mission effectiveness by providing greater stability, improving unit cohesion, and strengthening relationships between service members, their families, and the local community,” the spokesperson added. “By fostering a more stable and supportive environment, the extended tour length contributes to overall readiness and operational success.”
Troops who prefer a two-year tour with their families may be able to have their services request waivers for a shorter stay in Korea, according to a memo released earlier this month.
Tour length for troops is typically determined based on guidelines that consider factors such as the assignment location’s quality of life, including weather, family support, isolation, and the country’s economic and security conditions.
A 36-month deployment for accompanied personnel is common for locations where living conditions are comparable to U.S. standards; bases in the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, and Japan all have such tours.
More than 28,500 troops are deployed in South Korea, with a significant portion at Camp Humphreys. The base, which supports nearly 40,000 service members and their families, civilian employees, and contractors, hosts U.S. Forces Korea headquarters and a few Air Force units.
The biggest U.S. Air Force base in the country is Osan Air Base, located 40 miles south of Seoul. Osan has around 3,700 Airmen assigned to the 51st Fighter Wing, along with nearly 2,000 personnel in various tenant units. The base offers command sponsorship, with about 2,000 family members living with stationed Airmen.
Osan, the closest American air base to North Korea, is even busier than normal right now due to a yearlong test of an expanded F-16 fighter presence. Last year, the 36th Fighter Squadron received nine F-16s and around 150 Airmen, including pilots, engineers, and support staff, from Kunsan Air Base, boosting its fleet to create a so-called “Super Squadron.”
Officials are evaluating the impact on sortie generation, maintenance, and manpower to assess enhanced combat effectiveness. It is unclear if the shift could be made permanent.
Kunsan is more isolated than Osan, located more than 120 miles south of Seoul in a rural area. The base does not offer command sponsorship positions, meaning the longer tours will not affect Airmen there. It hosts the 8th Fighter Wing and about 2,800 military and civilian personnel, the typical assignment at Kunsan is a one-year unaccompanied tour, with most Airmen living in barracks.
Less than 18 months after telling Guardians to quit using ChatGPT and other emerging artificial intelligence tools while the service examined the risks and opportunities they posed, a Space Force leader said Feb. 26 the service has “done so much” to explore and expand AI adoption.
Seth Whitworth, acting deputy to the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Cyber and Data described the progress during Booz Allen’s Space + AI Summit in Arlington, Va., as industry speakers touted AI’s potential benefits for domain awareness and command and control.
The Space Force ordered its AI pause in September 2023, alarmed that Guardians were using unproven generative AI tools without rigorous testing and proof that the tools were safe and reliable.
“There was a whole lot of unknowns, and we were championing ourselves as the innovation service,” Whitworth said. “There was fear that data would leak or we didn’t know those pieces, and so we said, ‘Take a strategic pause.’ We have done so much since that first memo went out.”
By June 2024, the Air Force Research Laboratory released its own generative AI chatbot, NIPRGPT, built for Airmen and Guardians to experiment with. Whitworth said his team hosted a “generative AI challenge” to identify more potential uses.
“We learned a whole lot along the way,” Whitworth said. “We were able to work with the Department of the Air Force and Department of Defense to re-establish some of those guidelines and ensure that we were moving forward in a secure way that didn’t hamper innovation.”
Guardians gravitated to the tool, seeing AI chatbots and assistants as helpful for everyday, non-operational tasks, like writing performance reviews and other reports, Whitworth said. Such back office functions have long been seen as ripe for automation, freeing operators to focus on sophisticated higher-level tasks.
But the volumes of data generated by sensors in space is such that automation is hard to ignore. Satellites generate imagery, signals intelligence, orbital data, and more, and with thousands of satellites and tens of thousands of bits of debris circling the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, the need to collect, collate, and analyze data continues to grow exponentially, experts say.
“In the age of proliferation, especially with Guardians, one satellite to many [personnel] just doesn’t work,” said Nate Hamet, CEO of Quindar, a satellite operations company. “As we proliferate, how many people can we actually assign to dozens, hundreds of satellites, or where satellites are actually sending us information about what’s wrong and moving more of the anomaly prediction on board, at the edge, onto the spacecraft.”
Whitworth envisions a single operator aided by AI controlling multiple satellites. “I think back to Lt. Whitworth, who operated a satellite, and it was me to one satellite, and my partner next to me to one satellite. We operated that satellite individually. And that made sense at the time, because DOD had the largest constellation on orbit, and we were doing just fine. That very quickly exponentially changed as more commercial providers started launching more equipment, and the DOD itself pivoted to more resilient and proliferated architectures. No longer can I have one Guardian flying one satellite. There’s going to just be too many satellites, not enough Guardians.”
Indeed, the Space Force has already started automated satellite operations through its Space Rapid Capabilities Office, which is acquiring software for its Rapid and Resilient Command and Control system, and experimenting with it on test satellites in orbit, officials said in December 2024.
Whitworth cautioned that discussions and analysis are still ongoing about which satellite operations can be automated and what level of trust can be placed in the technology.
Building trust must happen gradually, said Dave Prakash, Booz Allen director of AI governance; if the Space Force can’t trust the technology, the whole process will break down, he added.
“It’s not about moving fast and just hoping nothing goes wrong,” Parkash said. “It’s not about being paralyzed … so that Guardians are now burdened with ‘not only do I have to use AI, but I have to do the manual process and double check it.’ [If that’s the case], I’m not actually making any labor savings. It’s actually this third option, where AI is a seat belt, not a speed bump, to accelerate delivering of AI for mission critical applications.”
Despite these hurdles, the challenges posed by growing complexity and data volumes make AI an attractive solution for mastering information from space, said Booz Allen executive Pat Biltgen.
“I think there’s a possibility that this domain could be enhanced by AI,” Biltgen said. “I think there’s promises that if you combine generative AI technologies that are grounded in physics, they can help solve this one Guardian, one satellite problem.”
The Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter would make it easier to win the most stressing combined-arms conflicts, the Air Force’s future force designer said. Wargaming has also shown that a mixture of standoff, stand-in and “asymmetric” approaches are needed to prevail in a future fight, not simply rebuilding the Air Force of today, he said.
Based on extensive wargaming, “The fight looks fundamentally different with NGAD than without NGAD,” said Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, director of force design, integration, and wargaming, deputy chief of staff for Air Force futures, in a seminar at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.
“I won’t go into the details on how the fight looks different, but the fight looks much better when NGAD is in it,” Kunkel said.
“NGAD remains an important part of our force design, and it fundamentally changes the character of the fight in a really, really good way for the Joint Force. I mean, it’s a Joint Force capability.”
The decision to buy the system will likely be a pan-service decision, he said.
“If the Joint Force wants to fight with an NGAD” to achieve air superiority “in these really, really tough places, to achieve it, then we’ll pursue and …it’ll be, frankly…less operational risk” and provide “dominant capability” versus other approaches.
However, “if we choose not to–as a nation–to pursue NGAD, then that fight can just look a little bit different…and we may not be able to pursue or achieve all of our policy objectives.”
Kunkel also noted that NGAD is one element of a “package deal,” in that it also “requires survivable tankers [and] survivable bases where you can generate combat power. So those are other investments that we need to make” if NGAD is to work.
A winner of the NGAD contract was supposed to be chosen by the end of 2024, but former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall left it to the incoming Trump Administration to decide whether to award a contract or re-think the program. Kendall “paused” NGAD last summer because he said it wasn’t clear if its requirements still matched the threat, and its high cost threatened to crowd out other spending priorities. Since that decision was made the unnamed NGAD competitors have been on Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction (TMRR) contracts, which allow them to keep their design teams together and refine their approaches.
Kendall said that a special blue-ribbon team he empaneled to scrutinize NGAD—comprised of former Air Force chiefs of staff and stealth experts—determined that the program is needed and should go ahead as structured. Kendall said alternatives that have been looked at include an F-35-like multirole fighter optimized to manage a number of autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
The future Air Force is being designed to attack an enemy’s kill chains, Kunkel said. That means targeting the enemy’s ability to “find out where everybody is…and direct the forces to where they are, and then…some type of battle management…and then [they’ve] got to guide a weapon.”
Though NGAD requires a survivable tanker—the Next-Generation aerial Refueling System, or NGAS—“The enemy’s got a lot of attack surfaces,” and the NGAD/NGAS approach will be important for some of them, “but there are other places along this kill chain that we can attack the adversary, and that’s the approach we’re taking. We’re taking it from a systems approach.”
Kunkel said the other services are finding that Joint solutions are the only ones that work under anticipated conditions.
When comparing approaches, “the Navy was like, ‘that’s us. We have the same problems,’” Kunkel said, and where once there was an “air/sea battle” strategy teamup between the Air Force and Navy, “there might be a new ‘air/space/sea battle’” concept taking shape.
Kenkel said the “journey” toward a new future force design has been underway for ten years. Initially, the idea was, “We’ve always had fighters, so let’s look at new fighters. We’ve always had bombers, so let’s look at new bombers. And those things have done reasonably well, but when we do the analysis, what we find is, ‘just reinvent the Air Force’ doesn’t win.”
The Air Force looked at a stand-off force—attacking an enemy only from range—a stand-in force, and an “asymmetric” force that exclusively targets enemy single points of failure and vulnerabilities.
He dismissed speculation that the Air Force is abandoning the stand-in fight and retreating to a stand-off force.
“An all-long-range force…sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” he said. “You sit in Topeka, Kansas, you press a red button, the war gets fought. Nobody gets hurt. It’s all done at long range.” But, “It doesn’t win because it just can’t sustain the tempo of the fight,” Kunkel said. He added that “when I say it doesn’t win, it doesn’t win by itself.”
Long-range fires “are extremely important. They’re absolutely game changing. They’re going to help us out. They’re going to be able to deliver a massive punch to the adversary, but they’re probably not going to do it at the tempo that’s required to keep the adversary…on its knees all the time. You need something else. You need something inside….that can generate tempo and mass. And that’s what we found, and that’s where the force design goes with this, you know, combined arms approach…We’ve got to generate tempo and mass.”
“So…I will adamantly say we are not transitioning to this all-long-range force, because alone, that just doesn’t work.”
He said the new force design “doesn’t walk away from air superiority, it strengthens air superiority. But what you’ll see is, you’ll see us achieving air superiority in different ways,” and not simply with F-22s and AMRAAM missiles, or NGAD. It will be achieved “in multiple ways”–which Kunkel wouldn’t divulge—“and we’re finding this is absolutely critical.”
Although he couldn’t get into the asymmetric capabilities the Air Force is pursuing, they “allow us to be places where we wouldn’t otherwise be, and allow us to be persistent in those locations of particular…high threat density.”
The Air Force has said it can no longer achieve air supremacy across an entire theater against a peer adversary, and Kunkel said in the new approach, “we do pulses and,…achieve air superiority at times and places of our choosing with some of the asymmetric capabilities.”
He offered that “what we’re finding is you can deny the adversary freedom of maneuver in the air domain, and that’s what our Joint Force wants. What we can’t have is, we can’t have the adversary free to roam around, free to have their own air superiority. We’ve got to deny them from doing that.” Analysis has shown adversaries “are strong at that, and it’s a gap we’ve had, and something they can fill.”
Kunkel said “the magic happens when you weave those things together into what we’re calling a ‘mission fabric.’…where you combine everything together, that’s where you start seeing…in a mission thread or a kill chain-like fashion, in a new war fighting concept–that we’re actually winning, and that’s what’s really, really exciting.”
He said the Air Force is using an approach called Agile Wargame and Advanced Wargame, wherein “we are…quickly iterating our wargame to understand campaign results based on analysis that we can do very quickly…quicker than we ever have.” It permits running a wargame very quickly, “adjudicate what happened, and then try something else. And then, you know, see how that does, adjudicate it, and then try something else. And so we’ve been able to [in] very quick iterations, understand what wins and what doesn’t win.”
The new approach gets the Air Force “to this place where we find more winning capabilities. That’s really promising,” Kunkel said.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated Feb. 27 with a statement from the Space Development Agency.
The Space Force is investing heavily in satellite laser communications before fully proving the technology works, the Government Accountability Office warned in a report published Feb. 26.
The service’s Space Development Agency is building a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit that will transmit data to each other and to ground and air receivers via laser, which experts say is far faster and more secure than traditional radio frequency systems.
But while SDA has only conducted a few initial trials and not met its originally planned demonstration goals, it has awarded contracts for hundreds of new satellites. That could lead to more delays and costs if SDA needs to adjust its equipment requirements on the fly and contractors have to redo their designs, the government watchdog warned.
“Without demonstrating key laser communications technology capabilities, or [minimum viable products], SDA is risking not being able to leverage past experiences into the investments either under contract or planned for in the future,” GAO wrote. “These investments are substantial—nearly $35 billion.”
SDA’s goal is what it calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture: at least 300-500 satellites that provide missile warning and tracking, communication, and navigation services for troops everywhere. But PWSA does not work without laser communications, which can transmit data 10 to 40 times faster than radio frequencies using a beam of light about 1,000 times narrower, which makes it much more difficult for adversaries to intercept.
Lasers will also make possible a mesh network where the rest of the constellation can adapt and reconfigure to route data efficiently even if one or more satellites is disrupted by systems failure or adversary disruption—it’s a key reason officials have called the PWSA the “backbone” of the Pentagon’s combined joint all-domain command and control effort to connect sensors and shooters around the globe within seconds.
But laser communications are difficult: satellites in low-Earth orbit move 17,000 miles per hour, so they have small time windows to find each other, point lasers, and maintain that laser link. Mechanical vibrations can throw off the beam, as can atmospheric conditions during space-to-surface transmissions.
GAO identified eight capabilities that SDA wants from the optical communications terminals that went on Tranche 0—a demonstration tranche—of satellites to form the PWSA. They include establishing links between OCTs built by the same vendor in the same orbital plane, between OCTs built by different vendors in different orbital planes, and linking with ground stations.
Checking off those capabilities will help inform development of more advanced capabilities in later tranches. The problem is that SDA is already investing in the next tranches without checking off the initial capability goals. As of December, GAO found that only two of the four Tranche 0 contractors had demonstrated a total of three of the eight capabilities.
That list grew in January, when York Space Systems announced one of its data transport satellites had established a laser communication link with a missile warning/tracking satellite built by another vendor, SpaceX. But there are still gaps when it comes to demonstrating links from space to ground and between OCTs in different orbital planes.
The stymied progress led SDA to make what GAO called “substantial” changes to its Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 goals, with further changes on the horizon, which could lead to confusion about what standard is most current.
SDA however, said some of the goals identified were “baseline,” while others were more ambitious. The more ambitious goals were dropped.
SDA wants to use a spiral development cycle where a minimum viable product and capability informs the next phase of development, but the agency has not yet demonstrated the minimum capability of a laser-based mesh network planned for Tranche 0, GAO noted.
That hasn’t stopped SDA from awarding contracts for two subsequent tranches worth about $9.5 billion, “inconsistent with the leading practice of demonstrating the MVP before moving to the next Iteration.”
Past government watchdog reports have shown that using immature technologies in defense acquisition programs faced delays and cost overruns.
“While SDA has taken considerable steps to prioritize speed, this has had consequences,” GAO wrote. SDA is also not sufficiently communicating key test schedules or performance information to stakeholders, contractors and test officials told GAO.
The office recommended the SDA demonstrate the minimum viable product for laser communications in space in Tranche 0 and incorporate lessons learned before making launch decisions about Tranche 1 satellites; repeat the process before Tranche 2 and 3; and better communicate test plans, timelines and results to relevant stakeholders.
The Defense Department agreed with GAO’s recommendations, but it insisted SDA had met its revised minimum viable product for Tranche 0, which is to demonstrate the feasibility of developing a proliferated architecture, rather than the capability itself.
“In Tranche 1, SDA is on track to leverage in-plane optical links to operate a fully functional system and continue work toward demonstrating the full range of laser communications to enable delivery of critical warfighting capabilities,” an agency official stated.
Yet the GAO argued that revising the minimum viable product is “at odds with the leading practices for iterative development.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or perhaps even President Donald Trump will have the final say on a way forward for the Air Force’s Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, the nominee to serve as the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian said at his confirmation hearing.
Stephen Feinberg, nominated to be Deputy Secretary of Defense, also acknowledged the Air Force’s diminishing capabilities and promised lawmakers he would take a close look at next steps for the service, to include a more robust pursuit of hypersonic weapons and divestment of older aircraft systems.
Feinberg is a billionaire and the co-chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm which invests in defense contractors.
Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for his thoughts on a manned sixth-generation fighter—such as NGAD—Feinberg noted that “it’s a controversial issue, and I know there’s views on both sides.
“I want to get in there, if I’m fortunate enough to be confirmed, [and] look at all the classified information,” he added. “And ultimately, that decision could be made by the secretary or the president, even, and I’ll see if I can add some value to it.”
Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall paused the NGAD program last summer for additional analysis, saying it wasn’t clear that the program’s requirements had kept pace with technological change and its affordability was of concern. Eventually Kendall deferred the decision to the new Trump administration, saying it should decide because it would have to live with the choice.
The topic of NGAD came up once again when Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) asked Feinberg if the Trump administration would take steps to reverse the aging and downsizing of the Air Force, noting the service plans to retire hundreds more planes than it will procure in the coming years.
“This will further exacerbate the Air Force’s current state of being the oldest, smallest and least ready, perhaps, in its history,” Peters said. At the same time, Hegseth has asked every Pentagon organization to identify 8 percent in “offsets” to shift money toward Trump administration priorities, and manned fighters were not among the programs exempted from that, while surface ships and submarines were.
“I think it sends a conflicting message on the future of the Air Force fighter planes and missions,” Peters said. ” … Can you help give this committee some reassurance that the leaders at OSD understand the need to continue investment in next-generation tactical fighters so that we can improve readiness and, in the process, surpass our adversaries?”
“It’s a really tough question,” Feinberg replied. “Some believe that we can go straight to full autonomous systems, we don’t need a next generation fighter, and we could use the F-35, updated,” to meet the needs of national strategy.
“Others feel we really need the next-generation fighter, despite its expense and difficulty,” he said, before reiterating that he has not received classified briefings on NGAD or China’s fifth-generation fighter the J-20 and that “ultimately, that might be the secretary’s or the president’s decision.”
Feinberg’s comments throw into sharp relief just how weighty that decision will be. In written testimony, Feinberg repeated that after getting classified briefings, he will pursue “a balanced and affordable plan.”
In his opening statement, Feinberg laid out in broad strokes his views on the Pentagon and the defense industrial base: “We really need to plug these shortages, focus on our priorities, get rid of legacy programs, be very disciplined, and while at the same time focusing on the economics. If we do that, given America’s great innovative capability and entrepreneurship, we will defeat China.”
Pressed by Democratic lawmakers on Hegseth’s 8 percent “offset” and major planned personnel cuts, Feinberg largely demurred, saying many of the personnel reductions are “are still to come” and he does not yet know what role Hegseth will ask him to play in implementing cuts or offsets.
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) pressed Feinberg hard for his commitment to nuclear modernization. After he first called the effort “one of our very top priorities,” Fischer pushed him to say “there’s nothing that could be more important than our nuclear modernization.”
“One reason why I hesitated on this: modernization is key. We also need hypersonics. Because if our enemy can carry nuclear capability on things faster than ours, it’s a big problem,” he said.
At a different point in the hearing, Feinberg added that “we have to develop hypersonics. We can’t allow the Chinese to be faster than us, both in their weaponry and aircraft.”
Nuclear modernization, however, is still crucial as the U.S. faces “two peer competitors” in nuclear weapons and that the existing force structure was crafted “before Russia and China modernized, before they expanded their arsenals,” Feinberg said.
In written testimony, Feinberg acknowledged that the Air Force is the “oldest and smallest” it has ever been and argued the solution is to “invest in a family of medium- and long-range penetrating airframes coupled with modern munitions, human-machine teaming, and a hardened warfighting network.”
He said he thinks the Air Force has “taken meaningful steps in that direction,” but there remains the “tension between near-term readiness and readiness for the future fight” due to fiscal realities.
Feinberg also acknowledged in the written testimony that the demands on the Air Force “exceed its capacity to fulfill them.” He said he believes USAF “accepted risk in modernization accounts to fund minimum-essential readiness,” while adversaries are advancing their own capabilities.
Asked if he supports the stated requirement to acquire 72 new fighters for the Air Force annually to maintain force structure, Feinberg said the service needs “a mix of fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft to balance capability and affordability.”
Feinberg also said in oral testimony that “clearly we need to develop autonomy; autonomy in significant numbers, with a centralized command—effectively a brain—and we have to make the right decision on whether we need to build the next generation aircraft where we can rely on autonomy.”
The “first priority” for President Donald Trump defense team to deliver “peace through strength” should be a major cash infusion to revitalize the Air Force and ensure the Space Force can deliver for all the other military branches, according to a new report from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
The cost to deliver on that promise: $45 billion, according to retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula and retired Col. Mark A. Gunzinger, who co-authored the study. “We’re providing a recovery plan,” said Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute. “There are a lot of people out there saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we can’t do that. It’s too expensive.’ Well, the only thing more expensive than a first-rate Air Force is a second-rate Air Force.”
Or, as Gunzinger put it, “I’ll tell you something that’s going to be far more costly, and that’s losing a war with China, or God forbid, sometime in the future with Russia.”
Deptula and Gunzinger say those scenarios could be possible if the Air Force is allowed to continue its steady declines and the Space Force is not allowed to grow as is needed to deter war in the future.
New Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has expressed interest in making major shifts in resources, and new leaders in the Pentagon—and in Congress—have urged investing tens of billions of dollars to enhance U.S. military readiness. The report aims to inform those discussions with insight, illustrations, and recommended solutions.
“President Trump has stated that he wants to have ‘Peace through strength,’” said the Mitchell Institute’s Heather Penney, a former F-16 pilot. “These investments are essential to ensuring that our military as a whole—across all the services—is the strongest, most lethal Department of Defense that we’ve had in the last 30 years.”
Penney said the Air Force has been “coasting off a force structure with that was purchased in the 1980s,” and that today’s force, the smallest and oldest in history, now needs a major refresh, with new technology, new equipment, and more investment in day to day readiness. Those comments echo those of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, who wrote last month that “America needs more Air Force.”
The Space Force’s challenges are different, and not well understood by a public that still isn’t fully cognizant that it has a military branch focused on space. Indeed, Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said in December that the Space Force may need an “advocacy blitz to increase our budget to field timely counter-space capabilities.”
The Mitchell Institute is granular in its detail, laying out detailed recommendations that amount to $43 billion to $47 billion annually in additional spending:
The Space Force needs sustained annual growth, increasing at a proposed rate of 15-18 percent initially, and then tapering to 10-13 percent in ensuing years. By 2030, the service’s budget should be $60 billion, or about double its current size, the report says, recommending:
Deptula and Gunzinger encouraged new Pentagon leaders, along with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, to disrupt conventional military thinking by applying “cost-per-effect” analysis across the services to compare the relative value of investments. This approach shifts the focus from the cost to develop a weapon system, as is traditionally done, to instead consider the cost of accomplish a given mission, such as long-range strike. For example, developing and acquiring a number of long-range missile might cost less than developing and acquring a bomber aircraft in terms of acquisition costs. But when it comes to destroying target sets in a fight with an adversary, those single-use missiles might cost far more than a reusable bomber dropping less costly ordnance.
“Those kinds of cross-capability portfolio, cross-service analyses are not being done by the Department of Defense,” said Gunzinger, a former deputy undersecretary of defense. “Everything is stovepiped.”
The result is service by service direction, he said. “‘Air Force, you want to buy more fighters? What are you going to cut in your fighter force? You want to buy more bombers, what are you going to cut in your bomber force?’ We need to minimize risk across the department as a whole by doing those cross-cutting, cross-service, cross-domain, cost-per-effect analyses.”
The Pentagon’s Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) is already well situated to perform that kind of analysis, Gunzinger said.
Since becoming Defense Secretary, Hegseth has already indicated an interest in realigning funding and changing priorities. In mid-February, he directed the military services and other defense organizations to identify some $50 billion in potential cuts that can be reoriented to Trump administration priorities. Some of those new priorities are clear, such as the “Iron Dome for America” missile defense initiative and the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which he specifically exempted from any cuts.
But the administration has held back on other details of the 2026 defense budget request, which is now under review, and will be for weeks to come. Lawmakers in Congress are anxious for their cut at the administration’s plan. How those plans will unfold is still to be determined, but for now, a road map detailing how best to strengthen the Air Force and Space Force offers insight to a defense team trying to make a difference quickly.
“The administration changed. We’re going to have a new Air Force Secretary,” Gunzinger said. “But the threat hasn’t changed.”
The Air Force and Space Force are currently on track to meet their fiscal 2025 recruiting goals, the Department of the Air Force’s top recruiting official said, keeping up a hot streak after several challenging years.
“All components [of the Air Force] and the Space Force are either on or ahead of their curve for where we should be this time in the year,” Brig. Gen. Christopher R. Amrhein, the commander of the Air Force Accessions Center and the Air Force Recruiting Service, told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
“Recruiting is on a very solid footing. I think it’s probably a little premature for me to slap the table and say we got ’25, but I will tell you that it’s all trending in the right direction,” he added.
Last September, the Air Force Recruiting Service announced it was increasing its goals for 2025: 32,500 recruits for the Active-Duty Air Force, 7,600 for the Air Force Reserve, 8,679 for the Air National Guard, and 800 for the Space Force.
Amrhein told reporters in September that the Active-Duty component goals were “ambitious.” And that goal was later increased to 33,100 enlisted accessions for the Active component.
“It’s not uncommon to have mid-year increases, but that’s pretty substantial,” he said in a recent interview.
Just a few years ago, the Air Force—along with the other military branches—was in a recruiting slump that saw the service eke out its 2022 goals and miss its Active-Duty goal for the first time in years in 2023.
Over the last 18 months, however, trends have been positive. In fiscal 2024, the Air Force Active-Duty goal was 27,100 recruits, an objective it exceeded when 27,139 new Airmen were shipped to Basic Military Training. Other components also saw gains last year: the Air National Guard saw a 37 percent increase in accessions, for example.
“It’s a mix of training, it’s a mix of being innovative in our outreach and social media, and then it’s also a bit of resourcing,” Amrhein said.
For example, to help boost the number of recruits this year, the service additional 277 extra recruiters, Amrhein said, and that many of these were able to join the ranks at start of this fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2024.
“That’s pretty fast,” Amrhein said. “We’re almost through getting all 277 of them onboarded and out to the field.”
He also credited increased outreach with outside organizations and increased collaboration with the broader Air Force enterprise, which has enabled the recruiters to draw on support from local bases and commands.
“It’s not just community outreach, but it’s synchronized community outreach … not only at the local level, kind of the wing level, but at the [major command] level, and even at the Headquarters Air Force level,” Amrhein said.
Amrhein, as commander of the recently established Air Force Accessions Center and the Air Force Recruiting Service, is in charge of enlisted accessions for both the Air Force and Space Force, as well as Officer Training School and the new Warrant Officer Training School. He also oversees the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), the service’s largest source of commissioned officers, and the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), a youth development program that does not incur a military obligation but which many high schoolers go through on their way to joining the Air Force.
“There’s no one silver bullet, but the fact that I think we’ve honed in on the right ingredients, and they’re all working,” Amrhein said. “They’re coming together in an excellent form. Reach and familiarity is still our number one strategic issue to work through: the familiarity of the Air Force and Space Force missions. And now, having ROTC under the command, we can expand that under one unified voice of outreach, one unified voice of the opportunities that are there to serve our nation.”
The Air Force has expanded the number of people in its Delayed Entry Program (DEP), which allows people to enlist in the U.S. military while delaying Active-Duty. More than 13,000 people are in that pipeline, the largest amount since November 2015, according to the service.
“The DEP has been on an upward trend, but it continues to go up, “Amrhein said.
The 800 Space Force recruits for 2025 pales in comparison to the Air Force, but those efforts have had a major impact since there are approximately 9,800 Active-Duty Guardians. While the Air Force Recruiting Service is in charge of Space Force recruiting, Amrhein said it is working on “standing up a dedicated Space Force recruiting element that will grow into a squadron” within the command so Guardians can recruit the next generation of their ranks.
“Right now, they are building out actual Guardian recruiters and I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to also look at, ‘What is the future? How do we do we do talent management for the Space Force any differently?’” Amrhein said.
The Space Force’s smaller recruiting goal shouldn’t bely its importance, he said.
“Yes, it’s smaller in numbers, but if you miss by one, it hurts a lot more, and so we have to keep laser focus on that right now,” Amrhein said.
Lt. Gen. John Daniel Caine—President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—is poised to become the first Air National Guardsman elevated to the nation’s highest uniformed role.
Caine’s Guard status is one of several ways he is an unusual, though not quite unprecedented, pick for CJCS. He is retired, he was never a four-star general, and he never held one of the major roles typically required for Chairman, meaning Trump must grant him a waiver to take on the job.
Still, it seems likely the Senate will approve his nomination and make him the 22nd Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which reorganized the senior military leadership of the U.S., the Chairman must be a four-star general or admiral selected from among the Vice Chairman, the service chiefs, or the Combatant Commanders. That provision was included in part to ensure that a candidate had the necessary cross-service seasoning and diplomatic skills that come with speaking for the entire U.S. military, often with foreign leaders.
However, the law also included a provision giving the president latitude to choose someone who does not meet that criteria, saying he or she can “waive” the requirements “if the President determines such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Similarly, while Caine, 56, retired at the end of 2024, he would not be the first general recalled to service. President George W. Bush recalled Gen. Peter Schoomaker from retirement to serve as Army Chief of Staff in 2003.
And other officers have made an unexpected jump from three stars to on the Joint Chiefs, albeit never in the top job: Lt. Gen. Edward C. Meyer was a surprising choice to get a fourth star and become Army Chief of Staff in 1979.
A former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee staff told Air & Space Forces Magazine that he sees Caine as likely to be approved by lawmakers.
“The pattern is clear, to me, that they’ll probably let [the president] have the man he wants as his closest military advisor,” he said.
In 1990, along with his economics degree from Virginia Military Institute, Caine earned a commission through the AFROTC and won a coveted spot in the Euro-NATO undergraduate pilot training program.
Before completing pilot training, though, Caine worried that he might become a “banked pilot”—one sent to a non-flying job as the Air Force downsized—he said last month on the “Afterburn” podcast. So he applied to 85 Guard units and was picked up by the 174th Fighter Wing in Syracuse, N.Y. He later served with the D.C. Air Guard. He deployed several times to the Middle East, flying with Operations Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom, and helped lead the “Scud Hunt” operation in Iraq.
Of his 2,800 flying hours, more than 100 were in combat.
Caine was one of the commanders of the operation to defend Washington, D.C. in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. He later worked at the Air Guard Test Center in Arizona, saying the mission was “getting combat capability to the Guard in the field right now,” such as night vision goggles, targeting pods, datalinks, and large bombs.
Beyond his time as a pilot, Caine’s military career has included a vast array of experience.
From 2005-2006, he served as a White House fellow with the Department of Agriculture, where much of his time was spent in the government response to Hurricane Katrina.
He then moved to the position of Policy Director for Counterterrorism on the White House Homeland Security Council through 2008, describing the job as coordinating interagency efforts against terrorism.
He then served a stint as commander of a Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, but moved back and forth between Special Operations and the D.C. Guard for a number of years.
He also worked in Special Operations Command for a number of years, serving as Assistant to the SOCOM Vice Commander and Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command. From 2018-2019, he was Deputy Commanding General of U.S. Central Command’s Special Ops Component and Deputy Commanding Officer of Special Operations Joint Task Force in Iraq, concurrently.
It was during that time that President Trump met Caine, in 2018 during Operation Inherent Resolve—the campaign against the Islamic State group. Trump said he came away from the encounter impressed that Caine believed the conflict could be resolved quickly by observing less restraint in air attacks.
Caine’s career then took him into highly secretive jobs, where he worked as the Director of Special Programs at the Pentagon’s Special Access Programs Office, and later as the Pentagon’s liaison to the CIA, his last government posting.
Privately, Caine, whose official biography describes him as a “serial entrepreneur and investor,” co-founded a regional airline and other businesses. After retirement, he joined Shield Capital, a firm that works in cybersecurity.
Air Force personnel that have served with and under Caine describe him as “thoughtful,” “pragmatic” and occasionally, “a hard ass,” enforcing high standards among the troops. “He doesn’t rattle,” said one. “He can navigate complex tasks.”
One pilot called Caine “apolitical” and said his nontraditional career “will serve him well” if he is confirmed.
He “will not come in with a bias” regarding the services, the pilot said, having developed strong appreciation for all service contributions during his special operations experiences.