Friday, February 21, 2014

US Air Force to Better Plan Budget, Starts Sixth Generation Fighter Effort

The Air Force has launched a major effort to craft a new strategy and new efforts to better plan how it will spend its money, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said today.

“The question for us now is, what is next? Is it strategic agility, cyber-centric operations, blended deterrence, all the above or some combination? I don’t know. Whatever it is, we’ve got to figure it out, and we’ve got to figure it out quick,” Welsh said, during a presentation to some 500 people attending the Air Force Association’s winter conference. New Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James was seated in the front row, listening to Welsh’s speech.

“We need a strategy. We’ve needed it for a while,” Welsh said. This one will look out 30 years. It will be “reviewed every two years and completely updated every four years,” he said. Welsh said he didn’t know what the strategy would look like.

[...]

Later in the speech, Welsh committed the Air Force to begin the early work on a sixth generation fighter, something his immediate predecessors had resisted. “And folks: it’s time to start working on the sixth gen fighter. Nobody wants to hear that, but we have to,” Welsh said.

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