"Frank Kendall, who grew up on an apple farm and then rose to the pinnacle of the U.S. military, has preached the need for better preparation for the next big fight.
Weapons in space. Fighter jets powered by artificial intelligence.
As the Biden administration comes to a close, one of its legacies will be kicking off the transformation of the nearly 80-year-old U.S. Air Force under the orchestration of its secretary, Frank Kendall.
When he leaves office in January — after more than five decades at the Defense Department and as a military contractor, including nearly four years as Air Force secretary — Mr. Kendall, 75, will have set the stage for a transition that is not only changing how the Air Force is organized but how global wars will be fought.
One of the biggest elements of this shift is the move by the United States to prepare for potential space conflict with Russia, China or some other nation.
In a way, space has been a military zone since the Germans first reached it in 1944 with their V2 rockets that left the earth’s atmosphere before they rained down on London, causing hundreds of deaths.
Now, at Mr. Kendall’s direction, the United States is preparing to take that concept to a new level by deploying space-based weapons that can disable or disrupt the growing fleet of Chinese or Russian military satellites.
To Mr. Kendall, there is no other choice for the Air Force.
“If there were one thing I could accomplish as secretary, it would be to give the enterprise — the institution — a sense of urgency about responding to the threat and being more prepared,” he said during an hourlong interview at the Pentagon this month with The New York Times. “Conflict can happen. It’s not inevitable. It may not even be likely. But it can happen at any time. And we need to be ready.”
Perhaps of equal significance is the Air Force’s shift under Mr. Kendall to rapidly acquire a new type of fighter jet: a missile-carrying robot that in some cases could make kill decisions without human approval of each individual strike.
In short, artificial-intelligence-enhanced fighter jets and space-based warfare are not just ideas in some science fiction movie. Before the end of this decade, both are slated to be an operational part of the Air Force because of choices Mr. Kendall made or helped accelerate.
The Pentagon is the largest bureaucracy in the world. But Mr. Kendall has shown, more than most of its senior officials, that it too can be forced to innovate.
“It is big,” said Richard Hallion, a military historian and retired senior Pentagon adviser, describing the change underway at the Air Force. “We have seen the maturation of a diffuse group of technologies that, taken together, have forced a transformation of the American military structure.”
Mr. Kendall is an unusual figure to be the top civilian executive at the Air Force, a job he was appointed to by President Biden in 2021, overseeing a $215 billion budget and 700,000 employees.
He grew up on an apple farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, joining the Army while still a teenager. He later graduated from West Point, followed by the California Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in aeronautical engineering.
Before he ended his education, he also earned a Master of Business Administration from Long Island University and a law degree from Georgetown University. In between jobs at the Pentagon, he served as a human rights lawyer, defending the trial rights of terrorism suspects held at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
Mr. Kendall, who has a folksy demeanor more like a college professor than a top military leader, comes at the job in a way that recalls his graduate training as an engineer.
He gets fixated on both the mechanics and the design process of the military systems his teams are building at a cost of billions of dollars. Mr. Kendall and his chief of staff, General David Allvin, have called this effort “optimizing the Air Force for great power competition.”
One of Mr. Kendall’s earliest Army assignments was in the 1970s, when he was stationed in Germany and commanded a team that operated a Hawk missile system designed to defend Europe against potential Russian attack.
The Hawk missile had an onboard digital data processor and radar system that allowed it to evaluate the speed and direction of an approaching enemy missile, and to adjust its course so it could strike and destroy the threat.
It was an early hint of the automation revolution that would eventually lead to the precision military strikes of the Persian Gulf war of 1991 and the remotely piloted drones used widely during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — as well as civilian deaths from poorly planned drone strikes there.
Mr. Kendall has taken these innovations — built out during earlier waves of change at the Air Force — and amped up the focus on autonomy even more through a program called Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
These new missile-carrying robot drones will rely on A.I.-enhanced software that not only allows them to fly on their own but to independently make certain vital mission decisions, such as what route to fly or how best to identify and attack enemy targets.
The plan is to have three or four of these robot drones fly as part of a team run by a human-piloted fighter jet, allowing the less expensive drone to take greater risks, such as flying ahead to attack enemy missile defense systems before Navy ships or piloted aircraft join the assault.
Mr. Kendall, in an earlier interview with The Times, said this kind of device would require society to more broadly accept that individual kill decisions will increasingly be made by robots.
“In a major conflict, you’d have to deal with a lot of targets in a very compressed time frame,” Mr. Kendall said, meaning that human pilots will supervise the A.I.-powered drones but they cannot be expected to authorize each use of lethal force.
“Individual decisions versus not doing individual decisions is the difference between winning and losing,” Mr. Kendall added. “You’re not going to lose.”
These new collaborative combat aircraft — which will cost as much as about $25 million each, compared to the approximately $80 million price for a manned F-35 fighter jet — are being built for the Air Force by two sets of vendors. One group is assembling the first of these new jets while a second is creating the software that allows them to fly autonomously and make key mission decisions on their own.
This is also a major departure for the Air Force, which usually relies on a single prime contractor to do both, and a sign of just how important the software is — the brain that will effectively fly these robotic fighter jets.
Chris Brose, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director and now an executive at Anduril, the military contractor building one of the aircraft, said that without Mr. Kendall, production on this new aircraft would not be underway.
“He has proven that real change is possible, at scale,” Mr. Brose said. “There are a handful of other people who played key roles. But if you removed him, this never would have happened.”
The open question, added Mac Thornberry, the Republican former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is if the pace of change is fast enough.
“There’s a lot of respect for the way he sees the threat, the direction he’s trying to go,” said Mr. Thornberry, who is now a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. “But some would say that the system is never going to get there in a time frame that matters.”
Still, Mr. Kendall has been anything but shy when it comes to demanding change at the Air Force, including operations at the Space Force, the five-year-old agency that he also oversees, Mr. Thornberry and Mr. Brose agreed.
Space, Mr. Kendall said in the interview this month, is no longer just a vast empty region used to deploy satellites that spy on what is happening on earth, or perform other key tasks such as missile tracking, geolocation and communications.
Space is now a fighting zone, Mr. Kendall acknowledged, like the oceans of the earth or battlefields on the ground.
The United States, Russia and China each tested sending missiles into space to destroy satellites starting decades ago, although the United States has since disavowed this kind of weapon because of the destructive debris fields it creates in orbit.
So during his tenure, the Air Force started to build out a suite of what Mr. Kendall called “low-debris-causing weapons” that will be able to disrupt or disable Chinese or other enemy satellites, the first of which is expected to be operational by 2026.
Mr. Kendall and General Chance Saltzman, the chief of Space Operations, would not specify how these American systems will work. But other former Pentagon officials have said they likely will include electronic jamming, cyberattacks, lasers, high-powered microwave systems or even U.S. satellites that can grab or move enemy satellites.
The Space Force, over the last three years, has also been rapidly building out its own new network of low-earth-orbit satellites to make the military gear in space much harder to disable, as there will be hundreds of cheaper, smaller satellites, instead of a few very vulnerable targets.
Mr. Kendall said when he first came into office, there was an understandable aversion to weaponizing space, but that now the debate about “the sanctity or purity of space” is effectively over.
“Space is a vacuum that surrounds Earth,” Mr. Kendall said. “It’s a place that can be used for military advantage and it is being used for that. We can’t just ignore that on some obscure, esoteric principle that says we shouldn’t put weapons in space and maintain it. That’s not logical for me. Not logical at all. The threat is there. It’s a domain we have to be competitive in.”" [1]
These ideas are really bad. Space-based warfare blinding the Chinese equipment is calling for exploding nuclear devices in space to blind their enemy too. Destructive debris fields these actions create in orbit destroys our life as we know it.
Filling the Earth with autonomous, Terminator-like killers, artificial-intelligence-enhanced robots makes life here so dangerous and difficult for humans, that the nation that starts it first, could suffer a lot. Zelensky, who is developing autonomous killer drones, is already a walking dead.
What is the difference between Frank Kendall and Newton? For Frank Kendall, an apple falling at an apple farm never hit his head, so it didn't enlighten his mind.
1. Departing Air Force Secretary Will Leave Space Weaponry as a Legacy. Lipton, Eric. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Dec 29, 2024.
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