The U.S. Air Force is working to integrate Secretary Frank Kendall’s seven operational imperatives, or OIs, to acquire new technologies, conduct research and face potential global threats in the modern battlefield.
Timothy Grayson, special assistant to the Air Force secretary, discussed during the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Air Defense Summit the three OI priorities he’s working on.
Grayson said that the Air Force’s OIs have a goal of “applying innovation on new operational concepts” and advancing functional systems.
“Operational imperatives are not fundamentally about technology,” Grayson stated. “They’re about solving the most critical, important operational problems. Now that being said, it’s about moving fast. It’s about having a sense of urgency.”
“The secretary’s term that I absolutely love — it’s a willingness to yank technology across the valley of death. But it’s fundamentally not about technology. It’s not about funding technology or innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s about solving our operational problems,” he added.
Over the past five years, the Air Force’s “OI-inspired funding” has amounted to about 40 billion, which Grayson said the agency will use in support of its modernization efforts.
“So for you all in industry, you’ll be seeing that not as something labeled ‘OI,’ but as new programs of record coming out, funded by that money,” Grayson stated.
Grayson said the Air Force is now determining how to continue executing the OIs in the coming years.
“I can’t say much about it in the conversation here today, but we have another big tranche of activities that have gone into our budget plan for FY 26 that we just completed. It’s in deliberation,” Grayson said.
Grayson also said Secretary Kendall is “reorganizing the Department of the Air Force right now, and heading the optimization for great power competition. And we’re heavily involved in that as well.”
Regarding producing capabilities, Grayson said he isn’t necessarily focused on a “list of emerging technologies,” but rather on the capabilities needed to execute the OIs.
“Our very first operational period is resilience space order of battle,” he stated. “So a lot of the technology there has gone into how do we harness the power of proliferated low earth orbit, very large diverse constellations, how do we get resiliency, and through diversity of lots of different hybrid constellations and lots of different orbits and altitudes, and then how do you have, from a technology standpoint, things that might be AI-enabled to manage all of that.”
As the global battlefield continues to modernize, Grayson said it is essential that the operational imperatives outline what “risk” the agency is willing to take as they continue to enhance systems.
“So much of this gets down into what I’ll call behaviors,” Grayson stated. “It’s how you do things, it’s the nuance, it’s the cultural things, it’s the mindset that’s hard to capture in some kind of just organizational change document. That’s what I think our biggest risk is going to be is to capture that cultural change in management that goes along with behaviors and organizational structure.”
Don’t miss the Potomac Officers Club’s next summit: the 2024 Navy Summit! At the Aug. 15 event, experts in the field will come together to discuss the Navy’s most important challenges as environments and threats evolve. To learn more and register to attend, click here.
