Air Force officials “need to make hard decisions” in order to shape the service in the way “they believe it should be in the future,” said Maj. Gen. Robert Kane, global reach programs director in the Air Force Secretariat’s acquisition office, on Wednesday. During a briefing sponsored by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies in Arlington, Va., Kane outlined a paper and an analytical model he helped create to assess the Air Force’s value proposition to determine better pathways for the service’s processes, such as budgeting, requirements, and acquisitions. Each of these Air Force processes has its own values and belief systems and “the key” is to bring them all together “and that’s hard to do,” he said during his March 27 presentation. The model analyzes the projected promise of value that the Air Force is expected to deliver, the trade space, and the core functions and enduring missions of Air Force communities.
Secretary of Defense Austin Lloyd III met with his counterparts from Australia, Japan and the Philippines to discuss bolstering defense ties on May 2. The discussion included plans for joint F-35 exercises with Japan and Australia in the coming years.