The Air Force will build an integrated 10-year plan when it begins planning for fiscal year 2018, as opposed to previous planning approaches that featured 12 separate “cobbled together” core functions.
Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Requirements Lt. Gen. Mike Holmes said Thursday the 10-year integrated plan will build varied courses of action on how the service might choose to move forward, instead of “salami slicing” across 12 core functions. This new approach, he said, would allow Air Force leadership to set different priorities, run those against scenarios set by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and see which ones might offer better solutions against a range of challenges.
Holmes, at an Air Force Association (AFA) event in Arlington, Va., said the Air Force, in previous years, didn’t have the luxury of time, people, space or knowledge together to build competing solutions. Instead, the service built one optimized solution without leaving enough time to go back and make changes that the chief of staff or secretary desired after receiving the strategic plan. Holmes said the goal of the 10-year plan is to work through integration groups to ensure the Air Force has proper funding and that the 10-year plan can be executed by programmers.
Part of the problem with the previous “cobbled together” planning effort, Holmes said, was that planners took parochial approaches to common problems. He said when the Air Force tried to prioritize within 12 individual core functions, planners left out capabilities cross cutting across those 12 core functions because they hoped someone else would pay that bill, allowing them to spend their money on their priorities.
Holmes said the Air Force last year experimented with a process called Enterprise Capability Collaboration. The idea, he said, was taken from the former Air Force Systems Command, which Holmes said used to manage the whole process, from identifying a capability gap through acquiring a system and turning it over to warfighters in the field. Holmes said the Air Force inactivated Systems Command because it believed it had a gap between the folks who acquired system and those who sustained them.
Holmes said the Air Force ended Systems Command because it wanted to make sure it was acquiring systems that had the benefit of sustainers in the acquisition process. Systems Command was inactivated on July 1, 1992; and its functions were merged into Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC). Holmes said the Air Force achieved this goal, but he said that as often what happens when military services reorganize, the Air Force lost perspective on how to approach issues that cut across the service and don’t fit neatly into one core function.