U.S. Air Force

Overview

In mid-September 2026, the Air Force’s two top leaders stood before the service’s own association conference and announced that 38 days of combat had changed how the Air Force will fight. Operation Epic Fury — a campaign in which 500 aircraft flew roughly 10,000 sorties as the joint force struck more than 13,000 military objectives — had ended the assumption American airpower had operated under for decades: that its aircraft could generally launch from bases protected from direct enemy attack (Military.com). Airmen endured about 1,200 “Alarm Reds,” repaired damaged airfields 48 times, conducted more than 420 reportable explosive ordnance disposal operations, launched aircraft while bases were under attack, intercepted enemy drones, assembled thousands of weapons, and kept operating after their own living quarters were destroyed (Military.com).

“For decades, American air and space power has often operated from a position of sanctuary. Those days are over,” Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach told the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on September 14. “We can no longer treat point defense as a side hustle. We must make it a core function of air and space power” (Military.com). It is the sharpest public verdict any recent service chief has delivered on the state of his own force — and it explains nearly everything the Air Force did in 2025 and 2026: the leadership turnover, the scrapped reorganization, the completed acquisition overhaul, and a plan to look, in Secretary Troy Meink’s words, “radically different” by 2032 (Military.com).

The chief who left early and the chief who replaced him

On August 18, 2025, Gen. David W. Allvin unexpectedly announced his retirement — two years into the typical four-year term for a service chief. About ten weeks later, he was given a traditional Pentagon sendoff, “clapped” out by assembled Airmen (Air & Space Forces Magazine). No official reason was given for the early departure, and this profile does not speculate about it.

His replacement’s path was unusual. Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach had been set to retire after relinquishing command of Air Combat Command, but returned to consideration when Allvin stepped down. On October 30, the Senate confirmed him as the 24th Chief of Staff of the Air Force by unanimous consent, sidestepping the confirmation gridlock that had complicated other senior defense appointments (Air & Space Forces Magazine).

Wilsbach arrived as a fighter pilot with more than 6,000 flying hours in the F-15C, F-16C, MC-12, and F-22A, 71 combat missions, and commands that trace the Pacific’s fault lines: the 7th Air Force in Korea, the 11th Air Force in Alaska, and the 18th Wing at Kadena Air Base in Japan — followed by Pacific Air Forces and then Air Combat Command, the Air Force’s largest command (Air & Space Forces Magazine). He had made a name at ACC by calling out, in February 2024, a “discernible decline” in Air Force standards and ordering sweeping inspections — a posture that aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on fitness, grooming standards, warrior ethos, and lethality, and with Meink’s own stated concerns about readiness and the need to “rebalance” the budget (Air & Space Forces Magazine).

The modernization portfolio he inherited reads like a list of the Pentagon’s hardest problems: the troubled F-35, KC-46, and T-7 programs; the B-21 Raider, which is comparatively healthy; the autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the future F-47 air dominance fighter; and looming over everything, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program — one of the biggest modernization efforts in department history and already billions over budget (Air & Space Forces Magazine).

The reorganization that died

Wilsbach’s predecessor had been the champion of an ambitious restructuring called “re-optimization for great power competition,” begun under former Secretary Frank Kendall. Its centerpiece was a new Integrated Capabilities Command — a major command built to centralize how the Air Force sets its requirements — along with an expanded Air Education and Training Command mission and “Deployable Combat Wings” meant to organize and prepare forces for deployment more predictably (Air & Space Forces Magazine).

Much of that plan has already been unwound. Meink scrapped the Integrated Capabilities Command, and the four-star commanders and the major commands pushed back on the deployable combat wings concept (Air & Space Forces Magazine). In place of a new command layer, the requirements work was folded into the Air Staff under a Chief Modernization Officer tied to Air Force Futures — headquarters would hold the roadmaps while the major commands field and refine the tactics. It was a quiet admission that a year of reorganization planning had been chasing the wrong structure, and it landed squarely in Wilsbach’s first months.

The acquisition overhaul, completed

The structural change that did survive was the one imposed from above. In 2025, Hegseth ordered a Pentagon-wide overhaul of how weapons are bought, aimed at matching commercial timelines, widening the defense industrial base, and pushing emerging technology — and at killing the slow, risk-averse, fragmented program-office culture. The Air Force’s version: consolidate every program executive office into new organizations led by a single Portfolio Acquisition Executive with cradle-to-grave authority over all programs in a mission area (DefenseScoop).

On July 27, 2026, the service announced the job was done: all acquisition portfolios now sit under 17 PAE-led organizations. The first batch of five came in January — command, control, communications and battle management; fighters and advanced aircraft; nuclear command, control and communications; propulsion; and weapons — with the July tranche adding bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, mobility, ISR and special operations forces, presidential and executive airpower, and others (DefenseScoop). Each PAE now owns the entire lifecycle — modernization, procurement, sustainment — for everything in its portfolio, with contracting authorities pushed down to the portfolio level; one PAE said roughly 85 percent of his organization’s contracting authorities were now delegated directly to him, and that contract timelines were already being shaved by weeks or months (DefenseScoop).

The service’s acquisition chief, William Bailey, called it “a monumental step forward” while insisting the work was not done — the long-term test is cultural, turning the acquisition workforce into leaders focused on delivering capabilities to warfighters even imperfect ones, rather than on complying with established procedures (DefenseScoop).

The force of 2032: autonomous, dispersed, and under attack

Epic Fury gave the transformation its rationale and its numbers. The Air Force plans at least 500 Collaborative Combat Aircraft in service by 2032 — and Meink announced the names of the first two: the FQ-42 Vengeance and the FQ-44 Fury (Military.com). A second, cheaper class of uncrewed aircraft — the Mass Modular Aircraft — is meant to supply long-range combat power at roughly half the cost of a CCA and one-tenth the cost of a fifth-generation fighter: 100 by 2029 with congressional funding, another 500 by 2032 (Military.com). Tens of thousands of weapons from a new Family of Affordable Mass Munitions should follow by 2030 (Military.com).

The logic, Meink argued, comes straight from the battlefield’s new economics: “In the European Theater, one-way attack drones have replaced artillery as the primary killer, while armor often sits idle.” For a military accustomed to extraordinarily capable and extraordinarily expensive weapons, the answer is “cost-effective combat power” — pairing manned aircraft with low-cost autonomous systems to produce mass (Military.com). But the service also expects its own bases to be targets: Wilsbach announced a Point Defense Weapon System combining kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities, plus a dedicated career field for point-defense Airmen that will be operational within two years (Military.com). Aircraft may have to launch while missiles and drones arrive; maintainers may have to repair runways while attacks continue; weapons crews may keep generating munitions after their own facilities are damaged (Military.com).

The transformation extends into orbit. For the first time, Meink publicly acknowledged that “the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action” — few further details were offered, but the disclosure made the same point as the ground war: U.S. forces can no longer assume their critical systems are beyond an adversary’s reach (Military.com). Proliferated satellite constellations and the Space-Based Interceptor program are the visible part of the same shift (Military.com).

Wilsbach kept returning, though, to the people inside the machines — pointing to the more than 50-hour operation to rescue the crew of an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down during Epic Fury, an effort that ultimately involved 176 aircraft across fighters, bombers, tankers, intelligence platforms, and special operations forces (Military.com). “Operation Epic Fury was not the story of one airplane, one weapon or one career field,” he said. Basic Military Training has already been retooled to expose new Airmen to flight lines, ranges, and operational environments earlier (Military.com). The money question hangs over it all: Meink warned that the cost of sophisticated systems is outrunning inflation — “They perform extremely well, but the costs are growing faster than the rate of inflation” (Military.com).

Founded 1947 — the youngest service

The Air Force became an independent service on September 18, 1947, when the National Security Act of 1947 took effect — the same law that created the structure that became the Department of Defense, established the Central Intelligence Agency, and set up the National Security Council. It carved the Army Air Forces out of the Army into a fully independent, co-equal military branch, and W. Stuart Symington was sworn in as the nation’s first Secretary of the Air Force that day (Arnold AFB). On September 18, 2026, it marked its 79th birthday — a service built for prompt and sustained offensive and defensive air operations, now training for the day its own bases are the front line (Arnold AFB).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not name the adversary in Operation Epic Fury or give the campaign’s exact dates — the sources fully read for this profile do not state them. It does not speculate on why Gen. Allvin retired early; his departure is reported as unexpected, nothing more. It does not state the Air Force’s current end strength or aircraft inventory totals, which were outside the fully-read sources. The 2032 force numbers (500+ CCAs, hundreds of MMAs, tens of thousands of munitions) are the service’s stated plans, not delivered inventory. The point-defense career field and Point Defense Weapon System are announced, not operational. No claims are made about Space Force responsibilities — the service that owns much of the space mission — which were outside the scope of the sources read.