Kendall: USAF ‘Not as Ready as We Need to Be’ for China Challenge
Aug. 31, 2023 | By Greg Hadley
The U.S. could find itself in a near-peer conflict with an adversary like China and Russia “tomorrow,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a livestreamed Facebook event—and the department is “not as [ready] as we could be, by a significant margin.”
“I’ve spent a lot of the first two years in office worried about our modernization programs—what do we need to buy for the next generation of capability,” Kendall said during a “Coffee Talk” with Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass. “We’ve been able to get a lot of that into our budget, but that’s not here yet.”
But, Kendall added, “The threat is here already. And so we’ve got to think about: Are we organized to deal with that threat? Are we training to deal with that threat? Are we prepared in terms of how we structure a lot of different functions within the Department of the Air Force, for both the Air Force and Space Force, so that we could deal with that threat? If we were asked tomorrow to go to war against a great power, either Russia or China, would we be really ready to do that? And I think the answer is not as much as we could be, by a significant margin. And we’ve got to start spending a lot of time thinking about that and figuring out what we’re going to do about it.”
Given his past as Pentagon’s acquisition czar, Kendall’s time as Secretary of the Air Force has often been defined by the systems the Air Force and Space Force are developing to combat China, deemed America’s “pacing challenge” in the National Defense Strategy. The seven Operational Imperatives he has pushed mostly deal with developing, acquiring, and fielding new platforms.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/kendall-air-force-china-reoptimize/
