Gen. David W. Allvin completed two years as Chief of Staff, half the statutory tour length—but long enough, he says, to have made a mark on the Air Force.
“We can’t always pick when we’re asked to lead. We can’t always pick when we’re asked to leave,” Allvin told Air & Space Forces Magazine, diplomatically pushing aside the central question of his tenure and abrupt retirement, announced unexpectedly in August. “But we do have control over everything in between.”
Some of Allvin’s initiatives have already been cast aside, but key decisions during his tenure promise breakthrough capability in the future. Allvin secured the White House’s backing for the stealthy F-47 Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, which President Trump touted as Allvin stood beside him in the Oval Office. He designated the service’s initial Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the YFQ-42 and YFQ-44, as fighters, the first uncrewed aircraft designated with an “F.”
Those two aircraft will prove out the human-machine teaming that underpins much of the Air Force’s future operating concept.
Allvin’s effort to de-emphasize major commands and centralize requirements authority in an Integrated Capabilities Command in Washington is dead, having withered under scrutiny from other four-stars and the new Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, who dispensed with the provisional command in October. The fate of “deployable combat wings,” a new rotational model, remains a work in progress. And the renaming of Air Education & Training Command to “Airman Development Command” is not going to happen.
All that said, Allvin sees progress coming from his time as Chief and the contributions he made over the decade prior, when he was a little known Pentagon insider and a quiet Vice Chief of Staff under his predecessor, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. When Brown was selected by then-President Joe Biden to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it cleared the path for Allvin to succeed him, an unlikely selection as the first non-fighter pilot to be Chief since Gen. Norton A. Schwartz in 2012, and only the second since the early 1980s.
Allvin’s retirement ceremony was held Oct. 10, on a mild Friday afternoon at Joint Base Andrews, Md., presided over by Brown’s successor as Chairman, Gen. Dan Caine. It was in the same hangar where Allvin ascended to the Chief job at a ceremony led by Brown, who was dismissed as Chairman by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in February.
Allvin has remained in office, however, providing continuity until Gen. Kenneth S. Wilbach can be confirmed as his successor.
Allvin’s background is atypical. He began his career flying airlift missions, became a test pilot and mobility commander, then spent a decade as a strategist and planner both in the Pentagon and in Europe.
Allvin entered test pilot school in 1993. His four years as a test pilot included a hair-raising episode in a C-130J Super Hercules.
“I found myself in a Herc, in over 90 degrees of bank, and going at about a 30-degree per second roll rate. And I’m just like, ‘This is not what this is designed to do,’” he recalled. Allvin recovered the plane but considered the incident a wake-up. “We had more surprises in the C-130J than we should have.” He was testing how the C-130J operated during a stall. “In a regular C-130, it stalls beautifully. All the drag comes out. It drops. You can push the power forward. You fly out of it. It’s like a dream. In the C-130J, though, because of the change in the geometry of the propellers and the way that it flows over the wings, it’s a squirrely sort of stall. I was testing slowing down, slowing down, putting in the right control surfaces. The way you do that is you still try and maintain wings level. Because of the way that the propellers flowed, the flow came over the wings. One wing stalls slowly, but before the other one. So you’re trying to fight the one wing from stalling, and then the other one just snaps. So I was doing that, I was maintaining controls, watching all the instruments, and then it just went the other way.”
Testing the then-brand new C-17 in the 1990s, Allvin learned the Army was concerned that paratroopers would face greater risks from the new jet than from legacy C-141s.
“When we videoed it, there were a couple of times where … [paratroopers] came together and they bumped chutes, and one time they crossed chutes. And so that becomes dangerous. And so the Army safety two-star said, ‘We’re not doing the C-17.’”
“It was almost dead,” Allvin said. But the issue was ultimately resolved in what amounted to a fly-off.
“So we went out to Yuma and did a test, same air, same day, same troopers, and we sort of flew around, and the data showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the number of close calls, bumps, or anything between the C-17 and the C-141,” Allvin said. “We went through all sorts of machinations with changing deck angles, changing the way that they jump, all these sorts of things, and finally adapted it and got it on the right path.”
Today, the Air Force’s 222 C-17s are in constant demand, perhaps the Air Force’s most versatile aircraft, used for everything from humanitarian airdrops and delivering military aid to occasionally transporting the Secretary of Defense.
Test pilot training familiarized the future Chief with the Air Force’s other aircraft and missions. At test pilot school, the lines blur. “There’s one test pilot school curriculum, and it’s mostly fighter-centric,” he said.
He gained further skills at what is now known as Air University’s School of Advanced Air & Space Studies.
“I was supposed to be learning about airpower history and theory. More than anything, I learned how to make an argument,” Allvin said. “I learned how to do critical thinking. I learned how to understand the debate, what my weaknesses are … how to make an argument and think critically.”
On 9/11, he was in command of the 905th Air Refueling Squadron at Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D., scrambling tankers to support fighters responding to al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
A decade later, he was in Afghanistan as the head of the NATO Air Training Command from 2010-2011.
“The language barrier is there,” Allvin said of his time in Afghanistan. “Then there’s the aptitude, and then there’s the discipline.”
Official government oversight reports criticized U.S. policy for making the Afghan Air Force overly reliant on the U.S. military and Western contractors for maintenance. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction criticized the approach to equipping the Afghans and the slow pace of progress. By 2011, more than 30 coalition partners were participating in the AAF train-and-advise mission, and Afghan pilots hit several training milestones. Even so, the DOD noted the still-fledgling nature of the AAF, whose entire force was rated as “established but not operational,” one report stated.
When American maintainers left the country in mid-2021, the Afghans struggled to keep U.S.-provided UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters airborne.
Allvin saw the gap between what the Afghans wanted and what they could do. “The leadership values the capabilities more than what they might bring to a national air force. There was just a culture clash,” Allvin said. In the midst of his tenure, an Afghan air force officer turned on his helpers and shot and killed nine Americans—eight Airmen and a contractor.
Returning to the Pentagon, Allvin was drafted to work on a vision for the future of the Air Force for then-Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welch. The result was the “Air Force Future Operating Concept: A View of the Air Force in 2035.”
“We started sort of mapping out what we thought the future should be … This is, circa 2015, right in the middle of, still, a Global War on Terrorism … and then it’s going to be about ISIS,” Allvin said. “But that wasn’t going to be the long-term future of the Air Force.”
Looking back, the work seems prescient. “There were things like CCAs in there,” Allvin said. “There was a thing called multi-domain command and control, which became … combined joint all-domain command and control. But that concept was there. Now remember, space was still part of the Air Force, but proliferated low-Earth orbit [satellite architecture] was in there. Human-machine teaming, the fusion of data, there were all sorts of things there.
“I was able to sort of put together some pieces of a vision of a future force: the way we would fight, what we would fight with, the Airmen we would need to fight that,” he said.
A career-enhancing assignment came when Allvin was sent to U.S. European Command as director of strategy and policy, from 2015-2018, arriving the year after Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Around the same time, then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter asked the combatant commands to develop more modern battle plans—and first up was U.S. European Command, then led by Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove.
“The SecDef challenged us to be the first COCOM to develop combatant commander plans in accordance with the new style, and Dave was instrumental in making that happen,” said Breedlove.
Allvin was involved in early discussions of the steps Sweden and Finland would need to take to join NATO should their public eventually decide to do so. After one meeting with Swedish officials early in his tenure at EUCOM, Allvin was pulled aside. Adm. Jonas Haggren of Sweden had something to say: “‘I don’t know how else to tell you this, but our nation is not ready to join NATO. Our country is not, but my leadership told me we need to make sure that if and when they are, our military is ready,’” Allvin recalled. “About two weeks later, [Gen.] Timo Kivinen, the counterpart from Finland, asks the same basic thing.”
“I spent a lot of time with them, doing things, increasing interoperability, working together, doing all that,” Allvin added. “And so as I look back, if all that had played just a little bitty part in helping them join NATO, I feel like I did something pretty good. And so that was another, I think, a big accomplishment.”
That paved the way for what happened after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Sweden and Finland joined NATO with relative ease.
After a stint as the Joint Staff director for strategy, plans, and policy, Allvin served as Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force when Brown coined the phrase that the service’s goal was to “accelerate change or lose.”
“We didn’t really have a clear direction on accelerate toward what? … We’re moving the force forward, I think I have an idea of some of the areas we need to accelerate toward,” he said.
Yet on becoming Chief, Allvin began with the slogan “follow through.” His point was that the Air Force needed to continue in one direction. “That vision went through a couple of different iterations, different administrations, with different priorities,” Allvin lamented. “And so it wasn’t a smooth flow, by any means, but I will tell you that through all of it, the logic has not changed. It is still compelling logic.”
That logic included modernizing and enhancing the force with the first unmanned fighters and the go-ahead to build the F-47 after it was put on pause by former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in the waning days of the Biden administration.
“I saw the bulk of all that analysis, and I saw the alternatives,” Allvin said. “I was convinced of two things: One was that we needed a capability like this.
“And two, because of the turmoil that can happen with any transition, and how long it might or might not take to get a secretary [of the Air Force], I had to exert whatever influence I could. So, because of that, I was able to make the case with all the smart people around me that this was a decision whose time was ready. And failing to make a decision was just wasting time and money.”
Allvin was able to share that with President Trump. “So then he asked for more dialogue on it, and we had more dialogue, and he made the decision.”
Standing in the Oval Office on March 21 as Trump announced the decision, Allvin found himself having to share the “value proposition” for the aircraft with the White House press.
“It was a little bit of an out-of-body experience there,” he said, “But I walked out of there feeling as though the Air Force had done well and that this was definitely a step in the direction we needed to go.”
Allvin began his final interview as Chief with a show-and-tell, guiding a visitor around the office and its many historical artifacts: paintings of legendary Airmen like Billy Mitchell and the Doolittle Raiders, a large quotation from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, a Bible signed by every Air Force Chief of Staff, a globe used during World War II by Gen. Hap Arnold, the five-star head of the Army Air Forces whose vision and force of will helped birth the independent Air force.
Arnold predated the Air Force Chiefs who followed, from Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, Chief No. 1, to Allvin, Chief No. 23. Asked what his legacy as Chief will be, Allvin scoffed.
“Such a narcissistic term, right?” Then, reflecting, he offered this: “I feel good about the fact that we’ve laid the foundation. It’s never going to be exactly as you envisioned it at the beginning. If it is, then it was too easy. And if you try and die on every hill to make it that way, you fail. … What’s going to endure? I think as long as the first principles endure, that’s all you can really hope for.”
