Each service branch already was in the middle of doing what they always do: reconsidering what they need to change to meet changing threats. How much any of them will be forced to change what weapons they need, where they position their people, or how much they need to spend, is now largely in the hands of a madman in Moscow. 

In 2021, Army leaders were planning for (yet another) pivot to the Pacific. The end of the Afghanistan war was a bigger symbolic shift than an actual change of Army resources, but it had strategists questioning what came next. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth spoke exclusively to Defense One about her goals for modernizing things like weapons, personnel and computer networks, while other critics worry far more soldiers are needed in Europe now, rather than staring at China.   

For the Air Force, on one hand, preparing for China is not that much different than preparing for Russia, officials say. On the other hand, watching the Ukraine conflict from the skies and deterring Russia at NATO’s border has exposed the U.S. reliance on decades-old aircraft to do basic intelligence missions alongside its high-end stealth fighters. Already, the Air Force’s entire suite of aircraft was under reconsideration, as leaders determine what they need, and how much they hope Congress will give them to spend.

“Now, Air Force leaders are figuring out how they would use, and base, all of those new aircraft if the U.S. had to fight China or Russia. And that could mean shedding missions or figuring out new ways to fight,” reports Defense One, including an exclusive interview with Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown. It also means hoping for a budget to do it all and more, with increased demand for ISR drones and new worries that America’s nuclear weapons-delivery vehicles suffice. 

A few miles even higher, Russia’s war is testing the Space Force, and helping its advocates make the argument that the newest service branch needs to expand its capabilities far faster than planned. After all, space is “the most important foundational area for everything we are doing, everything we need to be doing,” said the Pentagon’s comptroller, last month. Defense One spoke to ​​chief of space operations Gen. John Raymond, who tells more here.

No service was already pitching a major expansion like the Navy when China was the main concern. Now, Russia’s war on Europe and threats at the West may have provided all the reason Congress needs to help Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday steam closer to his vision of building a 500-ship fleet. It’ll take more than just money, but the real questions are: will the Biden administration let the Navy do it, and how soon? Gilday outlines the details of his vision, and how he hopes to navigate the roadblocks that could slow the massive shipbuilding expansion, here.  

Meanwhile, the clock ticks toward 2030 for the Marine Corps’ big plans to reinvent itself. In the meantime, Commandant Gen. David Berger describes to Defense One how the service is moving beyond plans and into fielding new equipment and testing new concepts and formations. The devil may be in the details of changes like new battalion structures and a stronger emphasis on diversity. Berger spoke just before Putin’s invasion and like his joint service counterparts insisted at the time it would not change much, saying that the Marines would continue to devote three-quarters of its force to the Indo-Pacific region. “China is the nation's most significant challenge.”

Whatever the outcome for Putin or Ukraine, predicting the year–and the decade–ahead just got a bit more complicated. 

Several years of analysis combined with some groundbreaking exercises and experiments have convinced Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday that the Navy will need to add more than 200 vessels to its current fleet of 298 battle force ships to successfully face off against China in the next decade.

“Based on that, based on the Large Scale Exercise we did over the summer, based on the integrated battle problem we just did in 5th Fleet with some 100 unmanned platforms over the past few weeks, I’ve concluded, consistent with the analysis, that we need a naval force of over 500 ships,” Gilday told an audience at the WEST 2022 conference in February.

This work is expected to produce a long-term shipbuilding plan that will be the Navy’s fourth in recent years. It will follow the 2016 declaration that the Navy should build up to 355 ships; 2019’s integrated naval force structure assessment; 2020's Battle Force 2045, completed under then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper; and the Biden administration’s first long-range shipbuilding document, released last June.

Gilday has said that the new plan will most closely hew to the Battle Force 2045 document—“it’s the one that I’ve based my best advice on”—because it was led by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, not just the Navy and Marine Corps. 

“I think that kind of naval force, that kind of distributed force, is consistent with the analysis we see from the Joint Staff and [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] with the Joint Warfighting Concept,” he said. “I think it speaks to the vulnerabilities we hear called out by the Joint Staff and the Chairman’s risk assessment.”

Overall, Gilday said, “We’re doing a lot of work to look at things differently, thinking about how we would fight differently, in distributed fashion across a wide vast ocean like the Pacific, in terms of integrating all domains simultaneously.”

The CNO ran down a list of ship types and the numbers to expect in the long-range plan.

“My view on carrier aviation remains unchanged: I think we need 12 carriers,” he said. “I think we need a strong amphibious force, to include probably nine big-deck amphibs and another 19 or 20 [smaller amphibious warships] to support them.”

“Sixty destroyers and probably 50 frigates. Seventy attack submarines and a dozen ballistic missile submarines. About 100 support ships. And probably, looking into the future, 150 unmanned” vessels, he said.

Gilday also said the Navy has continued to drive down the number of ship-days lost to unexpected delays in shipyard work, a focus of his since he ascended to the Navy’s top job in 2019. He added that more than half of those days were consumed by the few remaining Ticonderoga-class cruisers, ships that he has sought Congressional permission to retire. He said the Navy entered this year’s budget negotiations asking to retire all seven Ticos, but the 2022 defense authorization act requires the service to keep two of them. 

“I wish the number was zero,” he said. 

A similar battle is looming with a far younger class of ships: in its 2023 budget request, the Navy will reportedly ask lawmakers to allow it to retire up to 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships, vessels that have struggled to find their place in the fleet when they haven’t been struggling to get underway. 

If Congress didn’t buy the Navy’s reasoning on the cruisers, what are the chances that lawmakers will be happy with the upcoming 2023 budget request? Gilday told reporters last month that he thinks he’s made progress in repairing strands of trust eroded by the unexpectedly lengthy and costly efforts to develop and deploy the Ford-class aircraft carriers, DDG-1000 destroyers, and the two LCS classes.

The CNO said he has taken lawmakers’ concerns to heart, and that’s why the service’s unmanned programs are now moving in “an evolutionary manner, not a revolutionary manner.” 

Gilday also suggested that he and the Navy have had some success in persuading Congress that the service is on the right track, and in explaining the value of a navy to the American public.

This year, Gilday will have a confirmed Navy secretary to help him make the service’s case in the upcoming hearings into the 2023 budget proposal. It took the Biden administration nearly seven months to appoint and confirm Carlos Del Toro, a retired Navy commander.

But at least one key lawmaker has signaled his reservations. 

“I continue to be concerned as to how CNO Gilday’s plan aligns with the Biden Administration’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy,” said Rep. Rob Wittman, who represents Virginia’s tidewater region and is the top Republican on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, in a March 2 statement. 

“Last year, this administration did not even provide Congress with a 5-year investment vision.  Without a credible 30-year shipbuilding plan, the industrial base has no real map to invest for the future. Additionally, the ‘divest to invest’ approach of this administration presumes a benign China response in the short term. We need to be ready for conflict in 5 years, not in some fairy tale Battle Force 2045. The administration needs to be forthright with Congress in the fiscal year 2023 budget request and their intent to dissuade future conflict now.”

And even if China stays “benign,” there is still Russia to deal with. Stay tuned.

“You don't want to think about just the short term at the expense of the long term,” Brown continued. “We gotta be able to balance our abilities and capabilities, to be able to address the current events, whether it's Russia, whether it's in the Middle East, at the same time, we continue to modernize and transition to the future.”

The age of the Air Force’s fleet has been noticeable in its response to Putin’s war in Ukraine. In an attempt to fortify NATO’s eastern flank, the Air Force has deployed Rivet Joint signals intelligence planes built in the 1960s and JSTARS radar aircraft that began flying missions more than three decades ago. Every day, KC-135 refueling tankers built in the 1960s and KC-10 tankers dating back to the 1970s are high above Poland and Romania while NATO allies France, the Netherlands, and the UK all use newer tankers built in this century.

But newer replacements are on their way. F-35 and F-15 fighters, KC-46 tankers, and new search-and-rescue helicopters are all entering the fleet. The B-21 stealth bomber is progressing toward its first flight. And new warplane technology, part of the Next Generation Air Dominance effort, is secretly under development.

Now, Air Force leaders are figuring out how they would use, and base, all of those new aircraft if the U.S. had to fight China or Russia. And that could mean shedding missions or figuring out new ways to fight.

“I do think we need to think about the degree to which we support different requirements,” Kendall said. “Those requirements are not going to go away, but I think we do need to think about how we balance our posture around the world, and how we balance both near-term and longer-term capabilities.”

Over the past two decades, the Air Force has picked up new missions, the largest among them: operating a fleet of high-flying, reconnaissance and strike drones. Kendall has previously talked about new types of drones. The service’s 2023 budget proposal is expected to reflect some of those changes, he said.

“The Air Force has to support a combination of long-range strike capabilities and forward tactical air capabilities, as well as mobility capabilities, and our strategic [nuclear] capability,” he said. “None of those missions go away…and as the threats get more severe, then you want to have more capability.”

Brown said the Air Force must figure out which of today’s weapons will cease to be relevant in the decades ahead.

“When I think about…making that transition to the future, it's how we balance risk between the demand signals from the combatant commanders today, to the demand signals that the combatant commanders will have five, 10, 15 years from now,” he said. “If we maintain the same demand signal with the same capabilities, we'll never transition to the future...“We gotta be able to balance that as we go forward.”

Kendall also pointed to the two-year-old Space Force and its growing number of missions. At the end of the day, the Air Force will be competing against its younger sibling for money in the Pentagon budget.

That budget is expected to grow this year and again next year, but some is inflation, which is driving up the costs. When budgets were tighter earlier in the 2010s during Kendall’s last tour as the head of Pentagon acquisition, the Air Force found itself shedding people to pay for new planes. 

“I'm hopeful that we can stay pretty close to the force structure we have as we modernize,” Kendall said. “It's a question of resources.”

Space Force leaders are still figuring out the satellite constellations needed to counter China and Russia.

“I can see the requirements increasing over time and the demands for money increasing over time to some degree,” Kendall said. “One way to resource that is to take the force structure down temporarily and then build it back up.”

But both Kendall and Brown want to avoid that.

“I've been around the Air Force when we had a push to reduce our end strength in order to get force structure. It didn't work out so well,” the chief of staff said. 

Creating uncertainty

When Kendall thinks about the future, his prime focus is creating uncertainty for China, Russia, or any other potential adversary. One way is by spreading out forces across more than a handful of existing bases in the Indo-Pacific.

“For the Air Force to do that, we have to find places where we can land and take off,” he said. “That limits us a little bit, but we also need support infrastructure there.”

For some bases, that means building new hangars and facilities to withstand a missile attack. It also means using decoys. 

During the Cold War, the Air Force had plans to take off and land along straight stretches of the German autobahns. While that might still work in Europe, it’s not necessarily an option in the Pacific.

If troops are more spread out, an enemy always needs to figure out a way to counter that. That could mean an enemy wasting its missiles on bases that are empty.

“We need to create uncertainty and really just make it harder for him and increase the [weapon] inventory size he needs,” Kendall said. “As a deterrent matter, if he's uncertain about the outcome of that strike, and how much of an Air Force he's still gonna have to contend with after he does it, that's a good thing for us.”

The Air Force is also coming up with new ways to quickly deploy troops to remote locations—a capability it calls agile combat deployments. Once deployed, airmen would do jobs in addition to their specialty, allowing fewer people to deploy,

“The real goal here is to be able to take small packages of airmen, generate combat airpower from just about any location they can support,” Brown said. “If our adversary sees us operating from as many airfields as we can throughout the Indo-Pacific, they've got to account for [it].”

This is a big change from the past two decades, when the Air Force operated largely from super-bases with established infrastructure in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

“If we go to a major conflict, there better not be any union cards,” Brown said. “We're gonna have to be able to take our airmen and be able to flex back and forth.”

When Brown thinks about battles of the future, he envisions a far more dangerous aerial environment than Afghanistand and Iraq, where Air Force fighters and bombers flew without worrying about enemy aircraft or surface-to-air missiles.

“That may not be the case in a future conflict,” he said. “We've got to make the transition to those capabilities that will be survivable in a highly contested environment.”

For Kendall, that means investing in new technologies and weapons that have a value in those types of conflicts. He said the Air Force needs to figure out earlier in a weapon’s development how much of priority it is and if it’ll have the cash to buy it down the road.

“If you know you're not going to have it high enough on the priority list to fund, that it's not going to be affordable, and it doesn't have enough value relative the other things you want to do, don't waste your money on a prototype for something you have no intention to buying,” Kendall said.

Both Kendall and Brown expect allies to play a greater role, whether in basing, information sharing, or even building new weapons.

“I think too often ‘allies and partners’ becomes a term that we use, but we miss opportunities,” Brown said. “What I mean by that is: how do we bring our allies and partners in much more than we do today.”

In the Pacific, there could be opportunities to share more information with allies.

“We're making progress, but…to be honest, we, I think, we could probably do more in certain areas, to break down some of those barriers, and not wait till we have a crisis to start sharing,” Brown said. “The more we're able to share earlier in the process, this is where you get to a better alignment.”

Since getting his first star in 2009, Brown has been in jobs that focused on Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. He said allies could play a larger role in weapons development and he pointed to the recent AUKUS pact between the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. The alignment could be used as a way to open up the aperture a bit more for areas…all three of us are interested in,” Brown said.

Force Design

This year, Marines will finally learn the results of the Infantry Battalion Experiment Campaign Plan, or IBX30, which aims to reorganize the service’s infantry battalions. The Force Design document called for the experiment to test a proposal for a smaller force given extra training to hold their own in a challenging environment. Three battalions across the service are participating in the experiment, as is a team at Quantico running tabletop exercises.

After collecting and analyzing the data, “sometime this [fiscal year] we’ll know pretty much where the infantry battalion of the future ought to be,” Berger said. 

He thinks they will start implementing changes to their battalion structure this year.

“We can't wait too long. But jeez, there’s so much learning happening at the same time, we all want to make sure we’re—we don't go so fast that we’d miss a great idea,” he said.

Next up will be the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept, expected to be ready by next year. Berger said he’s happy with how fast Marines have figured out how to implement it even before all the gear arrives and amid the battalion restructuring. 

“They aren’t waiting for that, and I don't want them to wait,” he said. “They're figuring it out. Our job: listen. Ask questions, try to take the best of what they're learning, and they're learning, and they're learning. Figure out how the institution can fit that in going forward. It’s fun.”

This new concept will be executed by Marine littoral regiments, the first of which stood up on March 3 in Hawaii. As this 3rd MLR works toward full operational capability over the next few years, it will continue to experiment with ways to do artillery, surveillance, and electronic warfare; and to establish forward bases for the joint force.

President Joe Biden’s National Defense Strategy is still being finalized, but Berger is confident that Force Design 2030 will support it. The team working on the new policy in the office of the defense secretary has kept the Marines apprised of roughly what’s in it, he said.

“I think when you lay out the next national defense strategy, and you put next to it force design, you'll go ‘No problems, they’re aligned’,” Berger said.

People/Talent Management

With the restructuring and concept development underway, Berger said, he is turning to the Marines’ personnel system. Released in November, his “Talent Management 2030” is part of a “fundamental redesign” intended to recruit people with needed skills and experience and retain more experienced Marines. 

Part of that is updating the IT systems that manage career assignments, creating a “talent marketplace” as the Navy has done.

“We're heading in that direction so that you can see all the assignments that are open next summer. Instead of just what your assignment person needs to fill, you can see it all. And you can communicate with them all,” he said.

He also aims to diversify the force, and help Marines understand why this is critical to finding the best solutions to tough problems, through open discussions without repercussions or stigma.

“Diversity—put aside the ‘woke,’ respond to—whatever, put all that stuff aside. I know in my heart that an organization works better when it's more diverse. Every single study says that, so that's not an opinion. If that's true, then now we're not talking about a number anymore, we're actually talking about: what is the peak of warfighting capability that our unit can be, relative to the threat, what is that? I know that there's a diversity element to that,” he said.

This year, Berger wants to make sure Marines “understand the ‘why.’ Because otherwise it turns into ‘you were told to do an hour of training’.”

Budget

Like their Navy brothers and sisters, the Marines remain busy in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Maintaining readiness, training with allies, and deploying with the Navy while marching towards the future of great power competition costs money. This fiscal year has brought the additional pressures of five months without a new budget and the highest inflation in 40 years.

So the Marine Corps has been doing everything it can to find savings, in the hopes that their budget discipline will encourage Congress and the Defense Department to reward them with extra money. 

“If I don't ask you for any more money, and I, from within, do everything within my power to become efficient, to make sure we're squeezing every dollar out. Then when you have a checkbook too, you're going to look around and go,  ‘Who should I give extra money to?’” Berger said. “I think the logic is they’ll, not reward, but that is the incentive for good behavior in any organization, not just the military.”

Congress’ more-than-five-month delay to pass a 2022 budget delayed contracts the Marines had planned, and they have had to operate and train without knowing when they would be reimbursed. When interviewed for this story during the continuing resolution in February, Berger was not concerned that the Force Design 2030 timeline would be thrown off the rails but that it was being delayed every month without the needed investment of funds.

“We could talk about the danger of that. If it were, let's say it was seven or eight or nine years ago, we could say, ‘hmm that's really bad.’ But we're in a different place right now with peer competitors who aren’t operating in a continuing resolution. They're fully funded and moving,” he said. “So the problem is keeping in this pacing, you know, world we're in, we can't keep pace if we don't have a budget. They're moving. There's no continuing resolution in Russia or China.”

Deployments

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dominated the news and foreign policy discussions for weeks and thousands of American troops have been sent to Europe to assure allies and deter further Russian aggression, especially against nearby NATO countries. But for Marines, the Indo-Pacific region remains the primary theater. The crisis with Ukraine is not going to distract the Marine Corps, Berger said days before the invasion, because “China is the nation's most significant challenge.”

“So whatever happens in Europe doesn't change that. We have to account for that, but it doesn't change that,” he said. “We can't get pulled off of the reality of where China is in the world, that current events can't pull us off of there. But we have to be able to absolutely flex, adjust, respond.”

Berger also pointed to a recent trip by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Indo-Pacific during the tensions over Ukraine and how it signified that the U.S. government was capable of keeping the region a priority.

“Pretty powerful. We are the same in the Marine Corps. That's two-thirds of our operating forces, two-thirds of our fleet Marine force is assigned to Adm. [John] Aquilino and INDOPACOM. Hadn’t changed,” he said. “So our pressure, our presence, our contribution for him hasn't flickered.”

Now into its third year, the Space Force has matured beyond setting up its commands and personnel structures, and is concentrating on the intelligence and battle capabilities it might need sooner rather than later. It’s also grappling with how to best integrate the flourishing commercial satellite space industry into national defense and what that might mean for the U.S. if those systems are hit. 

“Every instrument of national power, diplomatic information, military, economic, is all underpinned by space,” Raymond said at the McAleese conference. “A few years ago, we could assume unfettered access to space and freedom to maneuver in space. You can't assume that anymore.” 

One of the big lessons coming out of Ukraine is the need for resilience in the form of smaller, dispersed satellites in low Earth orbit. It’s a point Raymond has made repeatedly to Congress, think tanks, and reporters: that the United States currently nests critical GPS and tracking capabilities in a few large, vulnerable, and very expensive satellites. Then Elon Musk underscored that argument when his low Earth, mobile Starlink constellation ensured Russia could not put Ukraine in a blackout.

The Tranche 0 and Tranche 1 Transport Layer, a constellation of networked, low Earth orbit, optically connected satellites underway at the Space Development Agency are the military’s answer for that resiliency, and the program transfers into the Space Force this fall. They are expected to launch into service by 2024.

“If you were to ask me what's our big emphasis this year,” Raymond said in an interview with Defense One, “it's building a more resilient architecture that can more effectively operate in the strategic environment that we face.” 

By forming a linked network, the satellites will be more dispersed and survivable. They’ll be able to speed NATO allies targeting data with secure Link-16 communications and track hypersonic missiles with unprecedented speed and accuracy, a senior defense official told reporters on Tuesday. 

The program got an unexpected $550 million funding boost from Congress in the 2022 omnibus budget bill to speed up satellite development and launch, the official said. 

The satellites will “be able to detect missile launches at sensitivity levels that are not achievable today with the missile warning system,” the official said, “and being able to provide those those rocket and missile launch and detection data to war fighters directly in theater, over tactical data links, so that they can either take evasive action, take cover or in the event that we have capabilities to take them out in glide or terminal phase, to be able to engage.” 

Ukraine has made the need for this capability more urgent, the official said. 

The whole point of these proliferated architectures is so that in conflicts like we see in Ukraine and could be anticipated in the future and other parts of the globe, we can fight as a unified force at great speeds that have never been demonstrated before,” the official said. 

“Recent events have shown us that these capabilities are not something that we want to delay in fielding. I think that the appropriators saw that as well, and that's why they wanted to make sure that we got these capabilities to the warfighter as rapidly as possible. And that's what led to our additional funding,” the official said. 

The Ukraine conflict has also highlighted the role commercial satellite firms have in national security, and in mid-February, just as commercial satellite firms Maxar and Planet were showing the world the massive Russian buildup along Ukraine’s border, the Space Force was tasked by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to look at how those firms could be leveraged to augment low Earth orbit capabilities. 

That raises a lot of inevitable questions, not only for this conflict, but for competition by the United States, Russia and China in future space operations too, said Victoria Samson, Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation.

“What's really interesting as well for this conflict…is kind of a blurring of the line between military and commercial space,” Samson said. ”The question is, how do you distinguish between combatants and non-combatants now?” 

“It's a gray area, and I think it's going to become more and more important, and we're definitely seeing that becoming an issue as part of this conflict,” she said. 

This year, the Space Force will also move forward on establishing the National Space Intelligence Center. The center will remain nested within the larger National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but “sharpen the focus on space intel,” Raymond said. “This is a critical center that we need to respond to the changing nature of the domain that we find ourselves in.” 

The Space Force is also expected to complete a proposal on how it could conduct the Air Force’s Ground Moving Target Indicator mission over its satellite network, to provide that capability when JSTARS aircraft cannot fly into highly contested zones. 

“That work is ongoing; it will be done this spring here in the next couple of months,” Raymond said. 

The Space Force is still working with the other military departments through the Joint Requirements Oversight Council to treat satellite-generated tactical-level ISR as a “task class” to see what each services’ requirements are, and doing the same with intelligence agencies that operate their own satellites. 

“Once we get those requirements defined, we'll work with the intelligence community to figure out which ones of those requirements are being satisfied, which ones might not be satisfied, and then come up with a plan jointly between us and the Intelligence community to meet the needs that aren't being addressed,” Raymond said. 

It’s much more progress than the space operations chief expected in the service’s first two years of existence as the service grew from just him to more than 14,000 Guardians and civilians. 

“We're a couple of months over two years old,” Raymond said. “If you told me we made the progress that we have made by now, I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.” 

“We’ve got all the pieces coming together.”