Air Combat Command’s Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach last winter went from commanding Pacific Air Forces to heading ACC. This conversation is adapted from a conversation with the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What’s on ACC’s plate these days?
A: We’re going to continue to create dilemmas for China. And there’s a lot that goes into that.
So the first question you have to ask yourself is, ‘Why do we even need to have dilemmas for China?’ And for me, it’s clear. They stated what their goals are, especially with respect to Taiwan, and they believe it’s in their national survival’s interests to get control of Taiwan.
We would like to deter that, of course. We believe that there’s stability in the region at the moment. There’s a lot of opportunities for all countries to thrive with that stability, and if China were to pick violence, we all would lose those benefits and the stability in the region. And so we at Air Combat Command would like to develop some dilemmas, so that every day Xi Jinping wakes up and he says, ‘Not today.’
Q: What are you doing to create dilemmas for China and others?
A: One of the things that I say a lot is ‘we’re going to take care of Airmen,’ but oftentimes people think that means we’re going to do things for them. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is coaching them like a sports team coach. … That’s what I’m talking about with taking care of Airmen; making them strong, making them resilient. Because if we do end up having to have this fight, the American people are going to expect for the Airmen of this country to do some horrifically difficult things. And if they’re not resilient, and if they’re not strong, they won’t be able to do it. So we’re going to plan on doing hard things together and we’re going to give opportunities to fail. And then leaders are going to coach and mentor.
The other thing that we need to pay attention to with respect to creating dilemmas is readiness. And one of the things that we say is that the mission of the Air Force is to fly, fight, and win anytime, anywhere. Well, you have to fly often to be ready to be able to win. I’ve advised that fighter pilots as a rule probably ought to fly about three times a week. Those reps and sets give you the opportunity to be proficient and to improve every single day, so that over the course of time, you’re prepared to do any mission that you would be called to do.
Now one thing that’s helping us with that is in about the last 15 or 20 years, our simulators have gotten really good. And sometimes the best training that you get is in the simulator. You still need to get airborne, there’s value in actually flying the aircraft. And so we’re going to emphasize a mix of high-end simulator training and day-to-day training.
And what you’re going to see is some very large exercises as well. There’s the standard Red Flags that we all know, there’s a fairly new exercise we’ve been doing for a few years called Bamboo Eagle, which is incorporated at the end of Red Flag now. And there’s multiple other very large exercises that we intend to do over the next few years that will continue to improve readiness.
Agile combat employment (ACE) is going to continue to be an aspect of our training. It should be foundational and what I’ve directed all the wing commanders in Air Combat Command to do is to incorporate agile combat employment in your day-to-day training. And so that doesn’t mean that you’re doing agile combat employment with the entire unit every single day. But there’s aspects of every wing that do parts and pieces of agile combat employment, so that we make it muscle memory and when you get sent to the Pacific or when you get sent to the Middle East or Europe, you can certainly execute and you’ll be good at it.
Q: Do you foresee any significant changes in how readiness is going to be improved and assessed in the future?
A: Yes and yes. I think that sustainment of the aircraft is foundational. And so we as a service need to commit to aircraft that are ready to fly every day. That requires an immense amount of resources to make sure that our very old fleet can be maintained, and we have to commit to that. And I think our service secretary has done that. He’s beefed up some of our funding for weapons systems sustainment, which I think is incredibly important.
Our maintainers are working incredibly hard to generate those airframes so that they’re ready to fly. You need reps and sets to be ready. Furthermore, you need the training scenarios, and so they should be a building block approach. You do the basics and you expand on those with your day-to-day training, and then those expand into getting out to 1, 2, 3 Level exercises where you’re continuously building the blocks that get you to theater and operational level employment as a part of the training cycle.
I’ve asked our inspector general to revamp the way that we do inspections. So it’s much like “Back to the Future.” The inspection inspects you on what the Air Force expects you to be able to do in accordance with your doc statement. So there’s no excuses, and a lot of them are going to be no-notice inspections, and we’re going to get out there and we’re going to say, “Hey, you’re having an inspection today.” You generate, you deploy, you employ, and you redeploy, and that’s what you’re going to get inspected on.
Then beyond the inspections, during these very large exercises, we will be able to assess in a much clearer form: Are we ready to be able to employ operationally at the theater level? Because we are going to do exercises that are big enough to assess that.
Q: The reduced numbers of Air Force aircraft are impeding the ability to absorb new pilots into flying units, and low sortie rates compound the issue. Can this be resolved?
A: Aircraft availability [is the key], so the ones that you have on the ramp can fly, [so] you don’t have to ‘maintenance cancel’ your sortie, so the sortie that you scheduled, you actually fly. That’s part one.
Part two is maybe more enterprisewide, but be very cautious about what you decide to divest. And that really speaks to the absorption. You’re going to make a new pilot, but then once you’ve made them, they have to go somewhere and fly something. And so that’s important that they have a cockpit to go to. And so capacity, especially of your fighter force, there has to be a cockpit to go to. And if you divest them, even though you’re making more pilots, that’s not good because they have wings but they have nothing to fly and they don’t continue to improve their craft.
Q: One of the hallmarks of Air Force combat capability is to bring the fight to the adversary and operate inside their defended airspace. There’s a discussion these days questioning the importance of sustaining a stand-in force. What’s your view?
A: We need a mix of both. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what it means to be an inside or an outside force. The definition over time has changed, so 20 or 30 years ago, maybe more—50 years ago, there only was inside force, because if you weren’t an inside force, you weren’t creating an effect. In other words, you had to overfly the target to bomb it.
And then with the advent of weapons that you didn’t have to overfly the target—you could stand off and shoot and still hit the target—developed an outside force. And you also had the ability to be an inside force because you had stealth capability and you could fly about the battlespace inside of the enemy’s weapons engagement zones, but they couldn’t find you. That distance is moving out over time. And so where it used to be you had to overfly the target, then maybe it was 20 or 30 miles. It’s not long from now where it could be several hundred miles that you’re going to be an inside force.
So the question that you have to ask yourself when you’re having this internal discussion is, what are you actually trying to do? And so you can achieve your objectives from inside or outside depending on the weapons that you have. If you want to risk putting a human on the inside, you have to make that risk decision. But what if you could achieve the same objective and never put a human at risk? That might be better, especially with our American values, and so it is a mix, and it’s also a balance of the weapons that you can put on your platform. So you may want an aircraft that can operate inside of the weapons engagement zone and shoot. But you also likely want aircraft that don’t need to go inside but can shoot from outside and still achieve the effects that you’re looking for.
Q: Why is munitions modernization so important right now?
A: One of the things that I’m convinced of is that the nation that figures out how to do the long-range kill chain first and more effectively is the nation that’s going to have a great advantage for years to come. How far is the long-range kill chain? It’s at least on the other side of the horizon, which is at least 600 miles.
What I’m talking about is a weapon that’s launched from a platform, and the platform probably can’t see—because the Earth is in the way—the target. But because of all the sensors that you have, you can get the jet to a launch basket, shoot the weapon, and then the weapon gets updates while it’s in flight, and even if the target is moving, we have enough sensors to determine where the target is when the weapon gets there and we can guide it in for the kill.
That is extremely hard to do right now, but we’re working on it. We’re pretty close. You need that long-range weapon. But the first thing you need is the network that supports knowing where the target is and then being able to data link the information of where that target is to the weapon while it’s in flight, and then of course data linking the information to the shooter aircraft, so they know when they’re in the shoot basket to launch that weapon.
Some of the weapons that we’re talking about are Joint-Air-to Surface Missiles and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles. We’ve got the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile coming up. And then also building that network is something that we’re diligently working on.
Q: You’re the overarching provider of combat airpower to all the combatant commands. There are concerns about running out of airpower capacity before combatant command demand is met. Where do we stand on that front today?
A: I’m not sure that we’ll ever not have that dilemma. Airpower is a desired capability that everybody wants. Because it’s asymmetric, with a little bit of airpower, you can create a lot of effects. So I’m not sure that we’ll ever overdeliver to the combatant commanders, but the point that you make about capacity is important for us to remember, because for many years now, the Air Force has been attempting to achieve more missions than we actually have the capacity for. We’ve heard multiple senior leaders in the Air Force say that very thing: the nation has more missions for the United States Air Force than the Air Force has forces. We have to keep that in mind as we move forward as a nation, and we have to ask ourselves what we want to spend our resources on.
Q: Where is Air Combat Command with regard to Agile Combat Employment?
A: The idea behind ACE is to continuously expand the ACE envelope. And what I mean by that is, we’re never going to be there. In other words, we’re not going to arrive and be done with ACE development. We’re going to continue to make ourselves better.
If you’ve read the book “Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek, it’s a great book that talks about never being finished with the game. It always continues as long as you’re still in the game, versus a finite game like a football game, where at the end, when the time runs out, whoever has the most points wins.
That’s what ACE is. We need to continue to get better and better at ACE. And so some of the difficult things about ACE are logistics. When you disperse out to those island airfields, how do you get fuel and weapons and parts and water out there in a contested environment? Well, one of the ways you do that is you pre-position it. We’ve been repositioning things in the Pacific for a couple of years. We need to continue to do that with continued resources.
When you get out of those small airfields, you don’t have enough people to do every job, and so that’s why we’re training Airmen to do multiple jobs when they get out there so that we don’t have an Airman that can do [only] one thing. One Airman can do many things. And so we’ve been doing that for a few years. You also don’t have the same type of leadership that we’ve been accustomed to. So what you end up with is very young NCOs and very young officers at some of those spoke locations, and you put them in charge. We’ve been training them how to do that and giving them opportunities to improve their craft.