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.
The U.S. sent Air Force F-16s over central Syria in a show of force following the Dec. 13 killing of two U.S. Army Soldiers and one American civilian interpreter by a gunman linked to the Islamic State group.
