USAF Secretary Looks To Implement Lasting Changes

Frank Kendall has spent 15 years fixated on creating a U.S. military able to counter the threat China poses to American security. Now, as he looks to what could be the last several months in his current role, his top concern is far closer to home.

“Overall, I think long-term I’m more worried about resources than anything else,” Kendall tells Aviation Week. “I think we will identify the modernization we need to do. . . . We’ve identified the structural things we need to do, institutional things we need to do, and we’ve got a good start on that. But if we’re going to be successful, we’re going to have to have more resources over time.”

• “We have to modernize at a competitive rate,” Kendall says
• Potential B-21 and CCA increases are on the table

Perhaps no other senior Defense Department official in recent years has had as much of an impact on Pentagon modernization as Kendall. In his roughly seven years as Pentagon acquisition czar during the Obama administration, Kendall oversaw the Lockheed Martin F-35 program as the aircraft became operational, and he tried to tackle the problems that bedeviled the program.

He began initiatives through DARPA to launch the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform to replace the Lockheed Martin F-22, and with current acquisition boss Bill LaPlante, he began the Long-Range Strike Bomber program that has become the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider. Along the way, Kendall literally wrote the book on improving Defense Department acquisition and laid out the now-famous series of “Better Buying Power” approaches to bringing weapons systems to life more quickly.

As Kendall faces what may be his last few months running the Air Force, he has a lot on his plate, including transitioning many of the development efforts he inspired into procurement and eventually operations.

He is taking on the Air Force bureaucracy under a new plan to reshape how the service deploys and overhauls its command structure in a way that has raised concern among critics and lawmakers. To do this, he faces an uphill battle with a Congress that has been slow to approve spending in a politically uncertain election year. It is all necessary, he argues, because China already has moved rapidly.

‘The Threat’

Keynote speeches from new secretaries to a packed ballroom outside of Washington every fall typically follow the same guidelines: rouse the troops and highlight some top priorities. Sometimes, if the crowd is lucky, an aircraft will be given a name. About 10 min. into his September 2021 speech, Kendall made it clear that he was taking a different approach. Although he was new to the role of secretary, his military career as a U.S. Army air defender in what was then West Germany had largely focused on staring down the great power threat of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. Air Force needed to change quickly, he argued, because it could be in danger from the new great power threat. China had been modernizing its military with the specific goal of challenging the U.S. ability to project its power. In making that case, Kendall provided the first hint that China had recently tested the ability to conduct “global strikes from space,” referring to that summer’s test of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, something the government had not announced yet.

“My most fundamental priority is to improve the ability of the Air and Space forces to deter and defeat our pacing threats so that when I leave office we are stronger and will continue to be stronger than those threats well into the future,” he said in the speech.

“To be stronger, we are going to have to change. Our strategic competitors have studied how we fight, and they have taken asymmetric steps to exploit our vulnerabilities and to defeat us,” he continued. “We have to respond with a sense of urgency, but we also have to take the time necessary to make smart choices about our future and our investments.”

China’s investments include rapid advancements in long-range weapon development, including advanced fighter aircraft such as the Chengdu J-20 and air-to-air missiles like the long-range PL-15 that can target American aircraft, even aircraft that typically operate outside of threat zones, such as refueling tankers and command-and-control aircraft. China has rapidly advanced its nuclear and conventional ballistic missile capability, which is focused on taking out forward bases in places such as Guam and Japan. In space, China is developing ways to destroy the large satellites on which the American military relies.

“They’ve stayed on that path, they’ve amplified their investments, they’ve reacted to what we’ve done,” Kendall tells Aviation Week in a recent interview. “I look at the intelligence every day. I’m impressed with their innovation, their creativity, but also their commitment to achieving their objectives.”

Kendall personally briefs members of Congress on classified intelligence showing China’s ability to target the U.S. military in the Pacific as it prepares for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s stated goal of retaking Taiwan by 2027.

“They’re on a path to achieve that objective,” Kendall says. “They have a lot of respect, appropriately, for our capabilities. War is not inevitable, by any means. But they’re trying to achieve the objective of being ready. Whether Xi Jinping would decide then, or anytime, to try to do something like that, I don’t know. My job is trying to make sure the Air Force and Space Force are strong enough to deter him. And if he makes a grave miscalculation to do something like that, that we can defeat him.”

Money Matters

In March 2022, Kendall revealed seven key modernization areas he called operational imperatives designed to address the threat. These included defining the NGAD and B-21 families of systems, shifting moving target indication away from solely an aircraft-provided mission to space, protecting bases better and ensuring that the Air Force is ready to transition to war against a major power.

Budget bickering within Congress, however, meant the Air Force was unable to start work on these goals in earnest until early this year, when the fiscal 2024 appropriations bill was signed and $5 billion was unlocked for the efforts, with another several billion expected in 2025.

The money has helped fund what is emerging as Kendall’s signature program, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), which aims to augment fighters with sophisticated uncrewed systems that can operate in high-threat environments. The service awarded Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. contracts in April for the first increment of the CCA, an award that stood out because it put a key USAF program in the hands of smaller, privately held companies rather than major prime contractors that had lost out on the first round.

The biggest issue now, Kendall repeats, is funding. Despite continuously increasing budgets, the Air Force does not have the resources it requires to do what needs doing, he says, particularly in transitioning current research and development programs to procurement.

The problem is acute in the fiscal 2026 budget planning, and the service is facing choices it may not have considered in previous years. This includes rethinking the NGAD program, including a potential large-scale funding cut to pay other bills.

Juggling Act

The Air Force planned to stagger development of major programs over years, stretching the costly transitions from the development to procurement stages of different programs to avoid too much spending stress. However, reality is playing out differently. Delays and overruns on items such as the Northrop Grumman LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM have come as B-21 procurement ramps up and spending to introduce CCA elements also grows. In addition, the Air Force proposed buying fewer F-35s and Boeing F-15EXs to keep longer-term modernization spending going.

What makes this worse, in Kendall’s view, is the congressional requirement to keep older aircraft flying, particularly those that would be less relevant in a fight in the Indo-Pacific region. While Capitol Hill finally has allowed the Air Force to retire the Fairchild Republic A-10 attack jet, the current draft defense bill calls for blocking attempts to cut noncombat-capable F-22s and older McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagles. Kendall says keeping a squadron of the older F-15Es in service will cost $750 million over five years—money that could be applied elsewhere.

These requirements, coupled with congressionally mandated budget caps, resulted in an Air Force spending plan that is “not executable,” Kendall says.

The Air Force is maintaining its current fleet “at the highest level of risk we think we can accept,” he notes. This includes spending cuts to aircraft maintenance, sustainment, spare parts and training so the service can direct spending to research and development.

“The way we were able to put together a five-year plan and submit it was through taking—what I think ultimately will turn out to be—unacceptable reductions in current force and sustainment,” Kendall says. “The accounts for facilities, the accounts for weapon system sustainment both are lower than I think we can tolerate, and we’ve got to go fix that. That’s what we’re working on in ’26.”

Cold War Lesson

Kendall is trying to navigate the budget challenges by learning from history, including a path taken by one of his heroes, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, who, as undersecretary for research and engineering in the Carter administration, began development of advanced programs such as the stealthy Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and Northrop B-2 Spirit. These began in tight budgets in the post-Vietnam War era and did not seem affordable at the time. But in 1981, Ronald Reagan became president and increased defense spending to counter the Soviet Union, providing the financial horsepower to field the programs Perry had begun.

“I think the current situation is much more analogous to the 1980s,” Kendall says. “With a rising great power challenge that is going to dictate if we want to maintain our role in the world, we have to modernize at a competitive rate. And I don’t want to leave my successors in a position where they don’t have good options if resources become more available than they are today.”

Kendall is pressing ahead with starting production on the B-21 and CCA to provide successors with that option. “I’d much rather have the country in a position where it’s got an open production line and it can increase production relatively easily, relatively quickly, as opposed to having to wait several years for research and development to be done before you can even start production,” he says.

If the U.S. at some point decides to spend more on defense, Kendall expects the B-21 and CCA would see production increases.

He is upbeat that the changes he is putting in place will outlast his days in the Pentagon, even in this period of budget pressures and political turbulence. “I’m not worried about it,” he says. “I’m pretty sure there’s going to be continuity there, and the driver of all this is the threat. Not me.”