Air Force Chief: Modernization Is Critical to Maintaining Superiority
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall cites AI, automation and cyber resilience as key modernization components to outpace China by 2050.

To stay competitive with adversaries like China, the Department of the Air Force (DAF) needs to modernize to bolster agility and cyber resilience, Secretary Frank Kendall said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday.
“Constrained budgets, reluctance to retire obsolete platforms, reluctance to embrace new technologies and exploit them fully, reluctance to limit our overseas commitments: All these things can have a negative impact on our ability to get to where we’re going to need to be, to be competitive with China in particular,” Kendall added.
Kendall, a Biden administration nominee who will depart his position next week, explained that the newly public Department of the Air Force in 2050 plan lays out the components needed to embrace emerging faster technology and aid warfighters in their decision-making.
“Decisions will not be made at human speed. They’re going to be made at machine speed and humans will have to oversee them,” Kendall said Monday. “We will remain consistent with our values. But time is the most fundamental parameter in the battlefield.”
The Air Force roadmap, published at the end of last year, highlights areas where the service anticipates needing significant technological leaps to maintain its dominance in air and space.
“China is doing everything it can to exploit the opportunities that emerging technologies are providing to field forces designed to defeat the United States in the Western Pacific, especially in space and in the air,” Kendall wrote. “The Air Force and Space Force will not be competitive unless we make substantial improvements in how these forces are equipped, trained and operated.”
In the wake of Chinese attacks on American systems, Kendall said Monday that the Air Force needs to strengthen offensive cyber capabilities and boost cyber resiliency in the face of attacks.
“Cyber [is] one of the areas we’re trying to increase emphasis on now at the Department of the Air Force,” Kendall said. “We’ve got to be resilient. We also need the capability to do cyber attacks against our adversaries as part of our suite of capabilities.”
The Air Force 2050 plan notes that information dominance is critical to DAF superiority in the great power competition. Integrated systems depend on fast-pacing technology, the report predicts, and the future depends on agile battle management in the kinetic and cyber domains.
“The entirety of this networked suite of capabilities must be cyber secure. Cyber elements of the Air Force will expand to multiples of their current size in the order of battle to execute the missions of defending Air Force networks and attacking adversary networks,” Kendall wrote in the report. ”The elevation of the cyber units in the Air Force to a command that reports to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force under the reoptimizing for great power competition decisions are part of this process.”
Kendall said that AI and automation are critical to the Air Force and Space Force of the future. Unmanned air systems will be part of a “mix of capabilities for a long time,” and DAF will foster systems that are “highly automated” and “highly autonomous at long range,” he added.
“Obviously, there’s no question that various forms of AI are going to continue to grow,” Kendall said Monday. “But in 2025 the degree of automation we’re going to require and have available to us, I think, is going to be very, very high.”
The future of warfare, the roadmap outlines, relies on these technologies.
“The only open questions about autonomy are how fast it will mature and what form it will take,” Kendall wrote in the report. “The direction is quite clear at this point. By 2050, we can reasonably expect autonomous vehicle operation to be the norm, in all domains.”
Kendall said that modern warfare demands modernized unmanned systems throughout DAF.
“The work we’ve begun with [collaborative combat aircraft] will continue and become a much bigger part of the force by 2025,” said Kendall. “There’s no question that various forms of AI are going to continue to grow.”
Kendall warned that effective and efficient modernization will not rely solely on budget cuts. DAF has evolving operational needs that require resources, he added.
“The big emphasis early on was, for me, was modernization and what we called operational imperatives. That was really about the communities that just do requirements and acquisition, but the whole Air Force is affected by the RE optimizing power competition set of decisions, and they’re about 80% implemented,” Kendall said.
This is a carousel with manually rotating slides. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate or jump to a slide with the slide dots
-
DLA's Modernization Saves $23M, CIO Says
DLA saves millions as it modernizes to improve user experience, data integration and application access to better support the warfighter.
3m read -
Boosting Cyber Resiliency in the Financial Sector
Leaders from CFPB and Rubrik discuss how they’re bolstering cyber resiliency to secure the financial sector and its critical assets.
32m watch -
AFCEA West: Modernizing Communications Can Boost Navy's Cost Efficiency
Updating or replacing legacy voice and data systems can save military services money while modernizing operations.
15m watch Partner Content -
Opinion: The DeepSeek Saga Analyzed as a Cognitive Weapon
The DeepSeek large language model serves as a live case study in information warfare. Here's an analysis on how the story became a weapon.
6m read