U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall doesn’t shrink back from commenting on controversy — at the same time as it pertains to the world’s richest person and a key Department of Defense contractor.
Kendall weighed in Tuesday after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acknowledged withholding Starlink satellite service to Ukraine because it planned a surprise attack on Russian forces last yr. The disclosure sparked criticism of Musk, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called for a probe into SpaceX.
The Air Force works with the corporate on quite a lot of missions, reminiscent of national security launches, but didn’t play a task in using Starlink in Ukraine when Musk made the choice last September.
“On the time, SpaceX made some unilateral decisions about what to do for Ukraine. They weren’t on contract to the U.S. … I believe they were definitely donating their services essentially, so that they had discretion,” Kendall said in an interview with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan from the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber conference.
The dynamic has since modified. The Pentagon now has a contract with SpaceX for Starlink services in Ukraine.
“We write our contracts to mainly be sure that we are able to get the services we’d like, as expected from them, and people are enforceable contracts, regardless of the business arrangement could also be — whether it’s individual ownership or a publicly held company. We write agreements with those businesses, they get us what we’d like at an inexpensive cost,” said the Air Force secretary.
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The general public frenzy, triggered by a revelation in Walter Isaacson’s recent “Elon Musk” biography, added fuel to an already simmering debate about whether the U.S. government and allies are too reliant on SpaceX —and particularly its founder and chief executive — for national security matters.
“SpaceX is a crucial supplier to the federal government launch services, and we do buy some communications, and so forth,” said Kendall. “But we do this through business arrangements that we are able to implement.”
The military’s role in space grows
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall III testifies through the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the “Department of the Air Force in review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Yr 2024 and the Future Years Defense Program,” in Dirksen Constructing on Tuesday, May 2, 2023.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
For the Air Force, and the military more broadly, the revelation casts a lightweight on a much bigger topic: the ever-more critical role of space as a contested domain. The shift has required more collaboration between the federal government and the proliferating business space sector.
The Air Force, the Space Force under the branch’s purview, and other agencies have sought to capitalize on the changing landscape. They’re in search of recent satellite and launch capabilities, have pushed for more funding for initiatives in space and at times have crafted more creative contracts.
The trouble has spanned multiple administrations, no matter political affiliation, because the military goals to maneuver more quickly and more affordably where possible.
“The military services that nations, great powers particularly, get from space are very essential to their success. That is true for us. It’s true for potential adversaries,” Kendall said.
He added that the Space Force is being designed with all of this in mind.
Tensions with China rise
The potential adversary the Pentagon is most focused on countering — on earth and arguably in space — is China. A possible conflict with Beijing was a significant topic of the Air Force secretary’s keynote on the AFA conference this week.
He said China is preparing for war with the U.S. but added that doesn’t suggest such a conflict is inevitable.
Kendall has been studying China’s military buildup efforts for over a decade. That buildup has raised concerns, he said, a couple of Chinese technique to design a force to discourage and defeat American intervention within the Western Pacific by exploiting perceived U.S. vulnerabilities.
What would that mean if China invades Taiwan, or the perhaps more likely possibility of a blockade? Is the U.S. military able to counter that, if called upon?
“We’re, but there’s more operational risks than I would really like to see. … It will be a tragic mistake, I believe, if China were to do the varieties of belongings you’ve just described, but they’re actively in search of the aptitude to be effective against us, and to defeat us if possible, and we won’t allow that to occur,” said Kendall.
Air Force looks to the longer term
Air Force leadership has been taking steps to discourage next-generation technological threats. It has an inventory of “operational imperatives” that span all the things from modernization of the air-based leg of the nuclear triad, with the B-21 Raider that is expected to make its first flight later this yr, to a “space order-of-battle,” to the event of a sixth-generation fighter jet within the Next Generation Air Dominance competition.
The plan for NGAD also involves what the service refers to as uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or drones. The Air Force is dedicating billions of dollars to autonomous capabilities over the following five years, believing the technology is mature enough and cost-effective.
Like other facets of the federal government and the private sector, the Air Force can be incorporating artificial intelligence applications.
“It’s really a basket of technologies that supply a special range of capabilities. Military applications include autonomy, pattern recognition, data, analytics, and so forth, with among the functions that humans would normally perform to be automated and done way more accurately and more quickly through AI,” Kendall said.
“We aren’t talking about turning over control of lethality to machines — that is just not what we bear in mind,” he said. “Humans will at all times be within the loop and answerable for any decisions which can be made about lethality. But we cannot ignore this technology, it is going to provide an enormous military advantage.”
A lot hinges, though, on the longer term of defense policy and funding. As has happened multiple times lately, Congress appears unlikely to pass a fiscal 2024 budget before a end-of-the-month deadline.
Analysts expect lawmakers to pass a seamless resolution (CR) that temporarily maintains the established order on government spending. But there’s also the rising risk of a partial government shutdown, or much more detrimental to military modernization, the growing possibility of an prolonged CR.
“That might be devastating,” Kendall said. “All CRs have a really negative impact. They’re very inefficient. They delay modernization that could be very essential. They delay increases in programs which can be going into production, for instance, after which make it very difficult for us to plan and to maneuver forward.”