AURORA, Colo.—How Airmen and Guardians prepare for and perform operations may be very different, but the Air Force and Space Force’s models for generating those forces aren’t all that dissimilar in their focus on readiness and teamwork, leaders said March 5 at the AFA Warfare Symposium.
It also doesn’t hurt that their names are nearly identical—Air Force Force Generation (AFFORGEN) and Space Force Generation (SPAFORGEN).
“What we’re really talking about here is readiness, and readiness is one of those things that we have to take a look at,” said Maj. Gen. Akshai M. Gandhi, assistant deputy chief of staff for operations in the Air Force, during a panel discussion.
The AFFORGEN cycle covers 24 months, broken down into six-month phases of “reset,” “prepare,” “ready,” and “available to commit.” SPAFORGEN started with a six-month cycle, split into three phases of unequal length called “prepare,” “ready,” and “commit.”
On top of that, the Air Force is feeding Air Task Forces into AFFORGEN, with the goal of eventually moving to full Combat Wings consisting of hundreds of Airmen. The Space Force, on the other hand, has organized into Combat Squadrons consisting of a just a few dozen Guardians that cycle through SPAFORGEN.
And of course, while most Airmen are deploying downrange somewhere around the world, most Guardians perform their missions “deployed in place” at home bases inside the U.S.
The two models have “very different cycles, very different histories,” said Tobias Naegele, Editor-in-Chief of Air & Space Forces Magazine, who moderated the panel. While the Air Force is transitioning away from years of crowdsourcing deployments to large central bases in the Middle East, the Space Force is trying to prepare Guardians for a potential high-end fight after years of operating satellites in an uncontested environment.
Yet Lt. Gen. David N. Miller Jr., head of Space Operations Command, said there are also correlations.
“As different as the models may be, there’s different terms, there’s a lot of commonality in the models,” he said. “You’ve got to be threat-informed. You got to be tied into the operational planning requirements, and have your mission-essential tasks, and you’ve got to be synchronized as a team and presented as an entire unit as opposed to piecemeal. You can’t part time warfare. It’s a full-time thing.”
Both generals stressed the importance of training in their cycles. For the Air Force, that includes advanced training across units in the “prepare” phase, followed by large-scale exercises and certification tests in the “ready” phase. For the Space Force, it means taking time away from day-to-day ops for advanced training during the “prepare” phase, culminating in a “FLASHPOINT” exercise to test mission planning and tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Then, when it comes time, the leaders say both models allow Airmen and Guardians to jump into the fight and work as a team right away, without a “getting to know you” period.
Both models are still in their infancy—the Space Force realigned its units across mission areas under SPAFORGEN in July 2024, and the Air Force has been slowly implementing AFFORGEN with bigger and bigger teams, with the goal of entire Combat Wings starting the cycle in 2027.
Both leaders said they are not locked in to the models.
“We’re not waiting for perfect. For too long, paralysis has prevented us from moving forward on things that we know are requirements that we have to do in order to meet the joint warfighting requirements,” Miller said. “So we have always said we’re going to iterate to excellence.”
Already, he noted, the Space Force has adjusted SPAFORGEN based on feedback received so that starting in June, the cycle will be eight months—one month for “prepare,” two months for “ready,” and five months for “commit.”
For the Air Force, it has been an ongoing progression from Expeditionary Air Base teams to Air Task Forces to Combat Wings, a process that has been confusing at times but is necessary given the realities of the world, said Gandhi.
“We can’t get from point A to point B overnight,” he said. “There’s no pause button that we can hit while we retool and re-engineer everything that we’ve got. You know, the enemy gets a vote. They’re going to be doing what they do. So we’re taking this in phases, and just like the Space Force, we’re not waiting for perfect. We’re taking incremental steps to move toward the eventual goal of a Combat Wing.”
While the models aren’t perfected and there are tweaks still to come, Gandhi claimed there is already “proof in the pudding” showing they work: considering how the Air Force and Space Force helped to defeat Iran’s attacks on Israel last year.
Iran’s attack in April “was right at one of those key points where theoretically we would be the weakest, because we’re rotating forces in and out of theater,” Gandhi said. “So the folks who accomplished that truly remarkable feat had barely been on the ground for maybe a week.”
But because some of the Airmen involved had organized into an expeditionary air base, they had the understanding, training, and confidence “so when they hit the ground in crisis, they excel,” he said.
Similarly, the Space Force used its model to refine tactics, train on procedures, and get prepared before Iran’s October attack, Miller said.
“If we didn’t have a force generation model designed to do this now, all we would have been doing was what I did back when I was on crew, which was processing the launch events as quickly as we could,” Miller said.
“Scrambling,” Naegele said.
“Exactly,” Miller replied.