Dr. Elena Wicker
In 2023, the United States Air Force released the executive summary of its newest future operating concept, outlining six key “fights” supported by modernization focused in seven “operational imperatives.” This document identifies changes to the future character of war and proposes solutions for overcoming those challenges. For example, adversaries’ ability to project combat power over long distances means that Airmen must “fight to get airborne,” since no base will be a sanctuary. This is not the only future concept in development; every service and the Joint Staff are trying to solve critical future challenges. The content of these documents is critical, but so is the structure and process that produces that content.
Future concept development is worthy of close examination for a few reasons. First, these documents have the potential to reshape the armed forces. Concept documents influence requirements for acquisitions and technology development, inspire new force designs, and drive doctrinal change. Not all military innovation is positive either. Second, modernization and innovation are necessary but uncomfortable processes whose success and impact are moderated by bureaucratic structures and processes. The shape of the bureaucracy producing future-focused documents can influence the text, format, and impact of the final draft.
Rather than examine the text of the future concept, this article will explore the organizations, bureaucracies, and communities that are responsible for producing those texts. There are many actors working toward Air Force modernization, but this complex organizational topography creates real challenges for integrating diverse efforts into a single modernized force. This article describes the history of Air Force futurism and the offices that produce its capstone documents. While we must closely examine the ideas contained in these documents, we must also understand the bureaucratic crucible that those ideas had to survive. Only by understanding their structure and influence can we begin to understand the pressures and politics that forge the Air Force’s visions of the future.
Driving Documents
The documents of the US Air Force can take a wide variety of forms: memoranda, budgets, doctrine, instructions, directives, reports, or assessments. Organizational and operational change is driven by ideas of what the future will look like and the problems that must be solved. On the operational side, these ideas are captured in “future concepts,” documents that lay out a vision of the future character of warfare. There is an important note here on military language: in standard English, a “concept” is defined as “something conceived in the mind,” but for the US armed forces, a concept is a specific type of document that contains ideas for the future of the organization.
Every service and the Joint Staff produce concept documents. These organizations also publish future operating environments, strategies, vision statements, doctrine, and hundreds of other documents. These future-focused documents often appear in clusters. For example in the 2010s, the Air Force Strategic Environment Assessment 2014-2034, combined with the vision of Global Vigilance, Global Reach, Global Power expressed by Gen Mark Walsh, drove the development of the 2015 Air Force Future Operating Concept. The Air Force also published a Strategic Master Plan and a strategic framework in the same year. Future-focused documents tend to build upon and support one another.
Concepts are not always published by one service or the Joint Staff. Historically, they have also been co-published by service partnerships. The Army and the Air Force have worked together in a variety of ways to understand and prepare for the future, with one of those partnerships resulting in a quiet but influential 50-year multi-service doctrine initiative. The most well-known historical future concept is AirLand Battle, described by General Donn Starry in Military Review as “the unifying idea which pulls all these emerging capabilities together so that, together, they can allow us to realize their full combined potential for winning.” According to Starry, the AirLand Battle concept would not work without the Air Force: attacking follow-on echelons behind the forward line of troops required Air Force capabilities. While AirLand Battle was the driving concept, the changes proposed within it were enabled by a new organization. In the 1970s, the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force had established a “Dialogue” between the services’ doctrine organizations, eventually establishing a joint directorate – the Air Land Forces Application (ALFA) – to develop concepts and doctrine. By the 1990s, ALFA expanded to become the Air Land Sea Application (ALSA) and in 2022, achieved its most recent expansion into the Air Land Sea Space Application Center (ALSSA).
For fifty years, ALSSA has published multi-service tactics, techniques, and procedures (MTTP) publications today, most notably brevity and joint fires doctrine. These documents lay out procedures and wording that allow members of the U.S. military to communicate with one another, regardless of their branch of service. ALSSA publications are given titles that match each service’s doctrine, so many do not realize the source of that guidance. For example, ALSSA’s Brevity publication is published as Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 1-02.1, Air Force Tactics Techniques and Procedures (AFTTP) 3-2.5, as well as a Space Force, Navy, and Marine Corps designation. For over fifty years, ALSSA has continued a legacy of multi-service partnership in document development.
The concrete impact of concept documents is shown in the number of other processes that they influence. Specifically, concepts inspire requirements, documents, and capability development. They can be used to develop new force designs and new organizational structures. Successful concepts are often transformed into the next version of operations doctrine. In 2025, the network of documents is slowly building. The Air Force released the doctrine note on “agile combat employment” while also pursuing seven operational imperatives, announced by Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in 2022. The next year, the six key “fights” future concept was revealed to the public. The Air Force has published its Case for Change and described a reinvigorated focus on “reoptimizing for great power competition,” through people, readiness, power projection, and capability development. As this set of driving documents continues to build, it is important to understand where these documents come from.
Staffs and Organizations
Like the other services, the organizational landscape of Air Force modernization is complicated. Responsibilities for proposing, understanding, and conducting military modernization are spread across the service. When a complex network of driving documents is laid across this innovation topography, the resulting matrix begins to illuminate how bureaucratic and organizational structure matter for military modernization.
Several futures responsibilities sit in the Air Force Staff, as laid out in US Code, Title 10. Within the A5 section of the Air Staff are the operational concept drafters: the people who write the theoretical underpinnings of the Air Force’s understanding of the future. The future concept writers sit in the Pentagon, in the Plans and Requirements section. Since December 2023, HAF A5/7 has been led by Lt Gen David Harris. The Air Force has published several future concepts and contributed to more, including AirLand Battle and others.
In order to see a future concept realized, the service must identify and acquire the necessary items and equipment. On the Air Staff, there are a few different sections that contribute to the identification of these requirements. In 2024, the Secretary of the Air Force established the Integrated Capabilities Office as a Secretariat-level office. Later that same year, the Air Force stood up the Integrated Development Office, or IDO. This office was a partnership between the requirements and acquisitions communities in Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC). AFMC is an institutional major command responsible for “delivering integrated materiel capabilities to the warfighter.” In the same announcement, the Air Force described the provisional status of the Integrated Capabilities Command (ICC) – an organization intended to accelerate modernization efforts. The intent of these changes is to bridge the requirements and acquisitions communities, speeding and streamlining cumbersome processes. By 2025, the ICC is expected to lead Air Force modernization prioritization. Organizations dedicated to integrating capabilities exist in the Air Force Staff, in major commands, and in new commands being stood up. There are several actors working to advance modernization goals, but this complex landscape makes coordination difficult.
One of the most critical elements of a future concept is understanding future technology. This is another space where many actors pursue the same objectives. The understanding and incorporation of emerging technology is a space in which the Air Force has led among the services. Tracing its roots back to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) conducts cutting-edge research in support of Air Force missions. The AFRL has a Center for Rapid Innovation and it also “powers” AFWERX, which describes itself as the “innovation arm” of the Department of the Air Force. For research and analysis, the Air Force supports two federally funded research and development centers: the Aerospace Corporation and Project Air Force in the RAND Corporation. It also funds a university-affiliated Research Center at Howard University, the Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy. Research and analysis for emerging technologies consists of its own wide network of organizations, centers, and laboratories.
The risks of complex organizational topographies are worth noting. Ideas and designs developed in isolation risk misalignment when brought back together and integrated. In 2018, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force called for the implementation of a new planning process, titled the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC). The intent of this process was to span organizations and help break down barriers that had historically created challenges for Air Force modernization. It is unclear how successful this effort was, but a similar approach is being pursued in the new Integrated Capabilities Office. As the ICO director described at an event, the purpose of the office is to approach future technology in an entirely new way.
Not only is intra-service innovation critical, so is inter-service. Most critically, all service concepts and adaptations must be able to work together when brought together as a joint force. The Joint Staff are developing the Joint Warfighting Design – the joint future concept – and the Air Force “six fights” should hypothetically contribute to this development. As former Gen CQ Brown wrote in 2020, the Air Force must Accelerate Change… Or Lose.
Power and Politics
Theoretically, documents published about the future contain the service’s best ideas about how to win a future war. In reality, bureaucracy, politics, and institutional power play a real role in the text of those final publications. While documents contain ideas about winning future wars, the text of those documents is shaped by the bureaucratic politics of the organizations that produce those ideas. This article first lays out the web of documents driving change and modernization, then describes the many organizations and staffs charged with envisioning the future of the Air Force. There are many documents playing different roles and functions. They describe visions, set standards for training, and develop our understanding of the implications of trends and emerging technologies. The landscape of organizations that produce them is extremely complex. In the Pentagon, the Air Staff and the Joint Staff are drafting concepts of future warfare. Elsewhere, the identification and drafting of requirements, emerging technology, funding, and resource distributions are being closely considered and, in some areas, redesigned. The integration of all of these concepts, requirements, and other modernization efforts is a real challenge for all of the military services.
Bureaucratic structure creates areas of responsibility, channels for the application of influence, and delegates organizational power. Through these structures, we can begin to see the network of organizations working toward the future of the Air Force. But process and structure are not everything – actors and informal relationships also drive a great deal of change. Modernization is shaped by a web of documents, overlaying a distributed organizational topography, within which actors negotiate relationships and cultures – all of which combine to shape the future of the Air Force.
Dr. Elena Wicker is a national security analyst at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force, the US Space Force, the Department of War, or the US government.