Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall speaks with students and guests during the Senior Leader Orientation Course at Joint Base Andrews, Md., July 24, 2023. The course provides training for newly selected brigadier generals and senior executive service members. (U.S. Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich)
WASHINGTON — If the Trump administration wants the Pentagon to save money and operate more efficiently, it needs to be ready go to the mat with Congress to make force structure decisions that could be unpopular with Capitol Hill, the Air Force’s top civilian said today.
“Every single thing you want to cut [is something] somebody cares about a lot and is going to fight you in the Congress to keep you from cutting it,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall during a during a fireside chat at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Here’s an efficiency for you, can we please stop buying C-130s? We’ve got enough.”
Kendall, who will depart from the service next week after decades in government service that included posts as the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, capped off his tenure with a new report released today that lays out a broad vision of what the Air and Space Force should look like in 2050 to contend with Chinese and Russian military threats — a future that will necessitate “a lot more resources,” Kendall said.
That’s a vision that could be at odds with the remit of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s pet project to help the Trump administration rid the US government of at least $1 trillion in wasteful spending. Asked about DOGE, Kendall responded that while all government officials look to maximize the return they are getting for their dollars, making a sizable dent to costs is sometimes easier said than done.
“It’s really hard to get those efficiencies. It’s not easy. And people come in from industry,” including those with extensive experience successfully restructuring companies in the commercial world, but “do not have any understanding of what it takes to do the same sort of thing in the government,” he said.
If the next administration is serious about cutting away bloat, the Air Force can’t be forced to hang on to “increasingly obsolete, legacy force structure” and needs to be willing to make “major strategic tradeoffs,” Kendall said.
And although the outgoing secretary never suggested downsizing its footprint abroad or uttered the dreaded words “Base Realignment and Closure” — the department’s term for the process used to shut down US bases — he noted that recent visits to Air Force bases in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific raised questions about whether the service was optimally postured for the current threat environment.
“If China’s the pacing challenge, are we really postured the right way to deal with that? A lot of where we are in the world is a legacy of past activities or involvement that we’ve had,” he said. “The United States has taken on global obligations and supported those obligations with a lot of cost structure associated with those deployments. I think we need to rethink that. I think we need to think about whether the way we’re spending money, the way we’re using force structure, is consistent with our strategy.”
But while every administration tries to tackle those issues, sweeping changes to the Air Force’s force posture and infrastructure cannot be enacted without help from lawmakers. Even reducing bureaucratic overhead is “hard, tedious, difficult work” that requires the cooperation of Congress to roll back statutes that have been added in annual defense policy bills over decades, he said.
“Ultimately, it’s hard to cut force structure. It’s hard to cut the civil workforce. And there are a lot of rules in place to make a limit how much how you can do that,” Kendall said. “When I when I took this job, [Sen.] Jack Reed, who was then the chairman of the [Senate] Armed Services Committee — a classmate of mine from West Point, [and a] good friend — said, ‘Frank, you’re going to learn how much everybody loves their C-130s.’”
Another unique challenge for Defense Department efficiency efforts is its aging IT infrastructure, which is refreshed much less often than the commercial sector, making it less able to capitalize on advances in automation, software and other IT systems that would cut down on grunt work.
“If you want to make your factory more efficient, you’re going to have to buy some modern machinery. If you want to make our government more efficient, you gotta buy some modern IT,” Kendall said. But while the commercial world can make investments in IT as needed to see a boost in productivity and efficiency, the Air Force has to weigh those expenditures against other major spending priorities such as airplanes, weapons and training bills.
“We want to buy aircraft and other things, so we tend to get by with what we have. So you have to shift priorities, or you have to add more resources if you’re going to do those sort of things,” he said.
A ‘Much More Powerful’ Space Force
The need for a bigger, badder Space Force has been one of Kendall’s key talking points over the past six months, and he once again came out swinging for the service’s evolution.
“We’re going to need a much bigger, much more capable, much more powerful, Space Force, he said, adding that the service must evolve from “essentially a merchant marine to having a Navy, an armed force.”
In particular, Kendall reiterated his belief that the Space Force needs to substantially up its “counterspace” game to take out Chinese space capabilities — including saying for what appears to be the first time in public that the service’s future arsenal will include “orbital weapons.” Up to now, DoD and service leaders have been unwilling to admit that weapons in space are being developed, instead using ambiguous terms such as “on orbit capabilities” or “space fires.”
“We need a cost effective mix of terrestrial orbital weapons and orbital weapons. … So the counter space piece, we’re going to have to expand substantially there with a range of capabilities,” he said.
Theresa Hitchens contributed to this report
