Air Force’s new Integrated Capabilities Office eyes study to interdict adversary kill chains

WASHINGTON — As the Air Force works to implement the new Integrated Capabilities Office (ICO), a first effort “likely” will be a study to look at how to counter adversary efforts to create “long-range kill chains” to attack US forces, according to the top official charged with fleshing out the new office.

Tim Grayson, special assistant to Secretary Frank Kendall, told the Mitchell Institute today that the idea of such a study — aimed at finding ways to negate an adversary’s command and control, offensive systems and operations for long-distance strike — is still “sort of preliminary.”

That said, he elaborated that one of the outgrowths of any such study could be the establishment of a new, informal group modeled on its opposite counterpart, the current and also informal Joint Long-Range Kill Chain Organization, known as JLO —  which is working across services and Defense Department entities to figure out a holistic approach to building an integrated set of US military capabilities to attack adversaries deep within their own territory.

Countering enemy long-range kill chains is “another one of these massive system-of-systems problems,” Grayson explained. For example, he said the Air Force will need to figure out “how we bring together things like EW [electronic warfare] capability, cyber capabilities, other things that would could be employed to break a bad guy’s attempts to create these kill chains.” (In May a senior Indo-Pacific Command official said that breaking China’s kill chain was a top priority, as Beijing’s progress in strengthening it since 2019 has been “breathtaking.”)

However, he stressed that there is “no intent to go stand up a formal office structure for counter-kill chain.”

These types of multifaceted threats, Grayson argued, cannot be best addressed by the old Pentagon model of formal Joint Program Offices working to set and implement formal requirements. Rather, they’re better suited to collaborative models that bring all stakeholders together, including everyone from technologists to intelligence officers to operators to acquisition personnel on an informal basis to hammer out cross-cutting solutions.

“It really is a one team, one fight, kind of model,” he said.

Grayson, who heads up the effort to translate Kendall’s seven “operational imperatives” into Air Force actions and capabilities development, said the concept of groups like the JLO and the potential “JCLO” is in a way modeled on how the service is making those imperatives real.

“The magic of the [operational imperatives process] has been bringing operators and capability developers together,” he said. “What happened with JLO is [that] under the operational imperative structure, we already had people focused on solving these particular problems — it’s the same product team model, people who understand the operational need, people who understand all these myriad complex technical parts — and very quickly realized a lot of the people that need this and have things to bring to the table are not Department of the Air Force.”

It is important to recognize, Grayson said, that “JLO isn’t really an office. The whole nature of its impact has been the fact that it has been so grassroots and informal. So, no one ordered the creation of a JLO. It happened because really great human beings decided to work together.”

At the same time, he said, as the JLO has proven its effectiveness, “it has taken on some degree of formality, but I would say in a good way. It’s gotten enough recognition that it’s getting some top cover without being absorbed into a large, formal structure. We’re trying to keep it that way.”

As for the operational imperative writ large, Grayson said that after finally getting the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2024 appropriations from Congress, work continues on studies. He noted that “things are looking actually pretty good right now from an [operational imperative] perspective” for the FY26 budget, “which we just completed.”

He further asserted that the service has “pretty successful with these operational imperatives” designed to ensure that the Air Force can prevail in the “great power competition” with China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. “We’ve been doing a lot of work to make sure we can keep the modernization activities [for great power competition] going the way we have under the operational barriers.”

The new ICO will continue work on the operational imperatives “in a slightly more formal structure,” Grayson explained, although the office itself will have no budgetary power or ability to force solutions.

“At the end of the day, it’s going to have both incredible power and no power at all. There are no formal authorities. It can’t move people’s cheese, can’t move budget, can’t generate requirements, can’t do any of that. The the power that ICO will have will come from its position and and insights and influence,” he said.