An April conclave of Air Force four-star generals will make some of the “big thing” decisions about where the service is headed in the next 10 years, said Lt. Gen. Michael Moeller, the Air Force’s strategic planning chief, on March 12. Moeller told attendees of his AFA-sponsored Air Force Breakfast Program address in Arlington, Va., that he’s building an “executable strategy” to make sure the Air Force is prepared to do all it must be able to do 10 years from now. Three-star generals—the vice chiefs of the four-star major commands and the heads of the three-star Majcoms—are answering “28 strategic questions” about the right balance between force structure, readiness, and modernization, said Moeller. “I think we came to a consensus” about Air Force priorities, “and that will help the four-stars wrestle with these difficult questions,” he said. After the four-stars meet at the April Corona leadership summit, “what we’ll have is a series of assumptions [and] yes/no answers about what we bring to the strategic plan,” he noted. The answers will form the basis of the Air Force’s Fiscal 2015 program objective memorandum and let the service “back-cast” those assumptions for the Fiscal 2014 budget request, he said. The final version of the strategy is due in August. “I would almost guarantee that we’ll be smaller,” said Moeller.
The Air Force is shoring up its cyber defenses both on and off base for critical infrastructure such as water and electrical power, and industry experts are calling for more, even specialized, dedicated microgrids offsite to support USAF operations in case of a total blackout caused by cyberattacks.
