The Trump Administration: Facing the Challenge of Enhancing the Ready Force in the Short to Midterm

President Trump has announced that there will be a shipbuilding office in the White House and a new F-47 for the Air Force. While adding longer-term platforms to the force has its place, the critical need now is the ramp up the readiness and the capabilities of the “fight tonight force.”

This means enhancing supply chains and the provision of parts and supplies for the force are a crucial investment in the near term. With the forces emphasizing force distribution, the challenge for global logistics, indeed contested logistics, requires much more investment and attention to force sustainability.

The force we will have a decade out is already 80% here. And the United States and its allies can find ways to leverage the current force to enable it to become more survivable and lethal.

And doing so will unleash the power of new technologies which are ready and available to be integrated into an evolving force, not defined by future systems in 2035 but deployed in the near term.

The payload revolution associated with the kill web provides significant ways to enhance the lethality and survivability of our current forces.

Starving our “fight tonight” force to pay for future platforms will not in any way meet the challenges in the world we face today and into the near future.

While we have heard much about the “warrior ethos,” we have heard much less about how to reinforce the relationship between the globally dispersed and deployed U.S. military working with partners and allies. Secretary of State Rubio has underscored that “Making American Great Again” is not about “America alone.” There is no area what that is more necessary than for the U.S. military working with allies and partners dealing with the multi-polar authoritarian world.

As we address how to make the “fight tonight” force more capable in the near to mid-term, a significant part of being able to do so revolves around shared technologies, and evolving concepts of operations with allied and partner militaries.

I am launching a new series to address elements of how to ramp up the capabilities of the “fight tonight” force in the near to mid-term. This is not a platform-centric perspective for it is about leveraging what we have to build out force enablers that enable joint and coalition multi-domain operations.

It is about thinking asymmetrically with regard to how we can outfox and outthink our adversaries. It is about embracing new technologies which warfighters can rapidly integrate and learn to shape more effective concepts of operations.

It is about unleashing capabilities inherent in our force which have been largely ignored through underfunding of support for the ready force, for under funding and underutilizing new approaches to training, by antiquated acquisition approaches, and risk averse approaches to force innovation.

In this series, I will be doing interviews, adding some thoughts and essays along with my collaborators, to address concrete challenges and ways to ramp up the capability of the ready force in the near to mid-term.

What companies are able to do so?

Which force elements can lead the way?

How can the manned force be leveraged to enable a contribution by uncrewed assets, appropriate to the tasks envisaged?

How can we leverage our C2 advantages to enable a more distributed force to be empowered to act effectively?

How can we build up weapons capability and modify this force to deliver more cost-effective means?

How can we leverage the innovation spirit I have found at places like MAWTS-1 and at the MISR school at NAWDC to generate more rapid and decisive change in the ready force?

These are just some of the types of questions we need to address, rather than waiting around for the new platforms of 2035 and beyond.

Our adversaries are not waiting.

I am publishing a book next week by my former boss, Secretary Michael W. Wynne. The Secretary throughout his time in the Pentagon always underscored his basic perspective on avoiding the “fair fight.”

This is how he put in a 2011 speech:

My push to maintain the technology lead in our Asymmetric Advantage was not appreciated by the department leadership…  We see glimpses of the real future through the Integrated Air Defense Systems; and the well designed competitor aircraft that are being offered on the market. We see the emergence of national strategic Naval assets that may begin to encroach on our mission space. We see the continued development of missiles that are designed to reach out and touch our shores; and as well the boundaries of our allies.

I can remember well, that in the Pentagon they have a radio rodeo; not with horses but with talk show hosts. We were in line rotating through the various station hosts, some of whom were live, but many were in effect taping for some later time. In front of me about two interviews was Rumsfeld; and I overheard and so might more dimly recall his exchange; but I remember the essence.

He was asked why we needed the defense equipment when the likelihood of an invasion was so unlikely. His response designed my Mission Statement when I was confirmed to be Secretary of the Air Force. He said, “Our Freedoms have great reach; but once the President can not exercise a Sovereign Option because he could be dissuaded or deterred; all of us will lose a little of our Freedom as American Citizens.”

This translates into the following; the Defense the Country desired was not just to defend our shores; but also to be strong enough to allow our President to exercise restraint if it was his choice.

This was a profound moment for me as I knew it, but I did not know it.

I had lived it during my international travels both in uniform and out.

My mission statement became that “The Mission of the United States Air Force was to deliver sovereign options for the defense of America and its global interests–to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.”

Further, this led to the argument to continue the investment in exploiting our Asymmetric Advantage of Air Dominance when I expressed a doctrine: If you ever find yourself in a fair fight; it is because of bad planning.  Planning is not just Tactical; but might also be Strategic, such as the QDR.”

How do we enable our “fight tonight force” to not be in a fair fight?

How do we empower the force we have to turn the tables on our adversaries?

Featured image is AI generated.