Trump announced the moves in a post on Truth Social Friday night.

“I want to thank General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family,” Trump wrote.

He praised Caine as “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”

“Alongside Secretary Pete Hegseth, General Caine and our military will restore peace through strength, put America First, and rebuild our military,” Trump added.

In recent years, Brown has been one the most prominent voices in the U.S. military advocating for modernization initiatives.

During Trump’s first term, he nominated Brown to serve as Air Force chief of staff, the service’s top military post.

As Air Force chief, Brown issued his “Accelerate Change or Lose” manifesto, emphasizing the importance of advancing the Air Force’s technological capabilities in order to deter U.S. adversaries.

In 2023, President Joe Biden nominated him to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. military’s top officer.

During Brown’s confirmation process for that position, he said he intended to keep his foot on the gas for Pentagon modernization efforts.

The Defense Department “should focus investments on advanced technologies, such as cyber defense, space-based assets, and unmanned systems, that can help maintain a competitive edge,” he wrote in response to questions from senators.

Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff generally serve four-year terms, and it’s rare for them to be replaced mid-tenure.

However, Brown’s firing was not totally unexpected. His name was reportedly on a circulated list of officers that the Trump administration was considering sacking for being associated with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives or for other reasons.

In 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd, Brown released a video discussing race relations in America and his experience as an African American officer in the U.S. Air Force.

Before he was confirmed as secretary of defense, Hegseth suggested on the Shawn Ryan Show that Brown should be fired.

In a statement Friday night, Hegseth said that Brown “has served with distinction in a career spanning four decades of honorable service. I have come to know him as a thoughtful adviser and salute him for his distinguished service to our country.”

He also stated that Caine “embodies the warfighter ethos and is exactly the leader we need to meet the moment. I look forward to working with him.”

A defense official said Brown didn’t intend to provide a statement about his firing.

Meanwhile, Trump is also firing Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti and Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife, and the administration is looking for new nominees for Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force, Hegseth announced.

“Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” Hegseth said.

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“This is our hemisphere that we live in, and so those allies and partners are critical to us,” he told DefenseScoop Thursday on the sidelines of an event in Washington hosted by the Center for Secure and Emerging Technologies.

While it has operated as a key Defense Department innovation hub for almost a decade, DIU was elevated and realigned to be a direct report to the secretary of defense at the start of Beck’s tenure last year. At that time, Beck — a Navy reserve captain and former Apple executive — unveiled his strategic vision for DIU 3.0. Under that plan, the unit aims to scale capabilities it has already helped mature, while explicitly focusing on the most critical, real-world gaps by physically embedding officials within the combatant commands to match approved technologies that can support existing needs.

In Chile, Beck connected with DIU’s first embed at U.S. Southern Command, Sarah Cuellar, who is the unit’s key liaison for the region and is also the deputy director of its energy portfolio.

“She’s double-hatted and she’s fantastic. She has a military [special operations forces] background, a technology background, and she’s currently bilingual,” Beck said. 

Southcom is primarily responsible for providing force protection, contingency planning and other capabilities in most areas of South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The command currently faces a range of unfolding and emerging threats, including those posed by transnational criminal organizations and adversaries like China and Russia.

According to Beck, DIU “actively uses Southcom as kind of a test bed for things that we might leverage in other places around the world,” including in autonomy or other intelligence tools. Both organizations, in his view, are relatively small and nimble, and seek to move really quickly.

“They’re an [area of responsibility] that has both a broad range of partners. And they also have a pretty broad maritime environment, which is important. And then there’s also a lot going on in the region itself that is also really important,” he told DefenseScoop.

The main reason for his visit to Chile was to attend the South American Defense Conference at the invitation of Gen. Laura Richardson, commander of Southcom, who co-hosted the summit alongside the Chilean defense chief. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown was also in attendance.

“A major focus of the discussion was actually around technology — AI — and how do we leverage this technology in order to do things together?” Beck said. 

Defense leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname and Uruguay joined the American and Chilean officials for the conference, and representatives from Canada, France and the United Kingdom where there as observers.

In the separate remarks they delivered at the event, both Richardson and Brown each spotlighted intensifying needs for the military partners to collaboratively harness AI and jointly pursue efforts to enable space-domain awareness.

“Authoritarian, communist governments are attempting to seize all they can here in the Western Hemisphere — operating without regard for domestic laws or international laws. Malign state actors are increasingly using advanced technology to perpetrate corruption, disinformation campaigns, cybercrime, human rights abuses that undermine the fabric of democratic societies, and hide the truth from populations,” Richardson told attendees.

“In the rapidly evolving global security landscape, the need to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into defense and security functions, has transitioned from a forward-looking ambition to a here-and-now immediate operational necessity,” she said.

During his presentation, Beck said he sought to shed light on his organization’s evolution from DIU 1.0, to 2.0, to 3.0, and “what that means for taking capability and speed, and combining it with focus and scale to have strategic effect.”

“I also talked a lot about the criticality of international partnerships to that work, and how we’re working closely with partners around the world — that our allies and partners are one of the unique strengths that we have as a nation,” he added.

Looking ahead, Beck said the U.S. and its partner nations in the region are working out next steps and possible future collective engagements on emerging technology, as they continue to build momentum around joint efforts.

“It’s about getting that whole group together and enthusiasm around how we work together. There are a lot of ways that particularly data and AI can make a difference — for not just the major conflict-oriented forms of deterrence and warfighting — but also things like combating counterterrorism and transnational crime, securing fishing rights, all kinds of things that matter so much to these countries and that we can really work together as a team to help get at,” Beck said.

He’s deeply familiar with the region, noting that he spent a lot of time there as an Apple executive who had “the Americas” within his portfolio.

“So, I was not surprised to see how much technology is in the region. There’s a lot of great, for example, software that’s already been built in the region, as well as critical areas around the supply chain that’s already there,” Beck said.

However, the DIU chief noted that he was “encouraged” by the ways in which America’s partners in Southcom’s area of responsibility are actively pursuing military innovation. 

“I think for me, it was a big ‘Aha!’ moment to see just how immediately some of the same kinds of technologies — for example, in domain awareness, that are so critical to us for deterring major conflict or winning if we [are] forced to fight — are also critical to these other strategic imperatives, like transnational crime, like securing a fishing rights, etc., that are very much front-and-center on all of their minds as well,” Beck told DefenseScoop. 

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But there will be challenges in convincing everyone in the Department of Defense to see beyond their own immediate needs, Brown said.

“The challenge here is having all of our service members understand the big picture, and why this is so important, why we need to modernize and what’s at stake,” Brown said during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. “From that perspective then, you step away from your own parochial interests, and then we do what’s best not just for your part of the organization, but what’s best for the entire organization.”

In his three years as the Air Force’s top officer, Brown has been a staunch advocate for the service’s modernization programs. In his “Accelerate Change or Lose” manifesto, he emphasized the importance of advancing the Air Force’s technological capabilities in order to deter U.S. adversaries.

While he acknowledged that some modernization efforts during his tenure have made more progress than others, Brown pledged to bring his aggressive mindset on modernization with him as chairman, if confirmed. 

“We’ve got to be able to do that a bit more across the force, and put what’s best out front for the force to ensure we’re doing the right things to protect the nation and our national interests,” Brown said.

In the past, Brown has been focused on fleshing out a number of Air Force modernization initiatives. He has prioritized investments in the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) — which serves as the service’s contribution to the Pentagon-wide effort known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) — as well as capabilities that would turn the Air Force into a more data-centric service.

In written responses to advance policy questions from senators, Brown also pointed to a number of key modernization initiatives that are needed to stay ahead of U.S. adversaries. 

In addition to enhancing interoperability between U.S. military branches and allies and partners, Brown wrote that the Defense Department “should focus investments on advanced technologies, such as cyber defense, space-based assets, and unmanned systems, that can help maintain a competitive edge.”

He committed to continuing the department’s efforts to defend against adversary hypersonic weapons, which are especially difficult to detect and defeat due to the high speeds they fly at and their ability to maneuver mid-flight. That includes the Space Development Agency’s upcoming constellation of missile warning and missile tracking satellites, according to his written responses.

“Active U.S. missile defense will require advanced technologies to provide greater efficiencies for U.S. active missile defense capabilities, to include space-based sensors and boost-phase defense capabilities,” Brown wrote. “The exploitation of space provides a missile defense posture that is more effective, resilient, and adaptable.”

There are other modernization efforts at the Pentagon experiencing shortfalls, Brown said in some of his written responses. For example, he noted that the joint force’s integration of electronic warfare into operations is a “work in progress.”

On a broader note, Brown acknowledged difficulties in internally developing innovative technologies at the DOD, as well as acquiring them from the commercial sector. He wrote that one of the challenges in this area is the inability to bridge the so-called “valley of death” in acquisitions where promising technologies fail to transition from research and development into production and fielding.

When asked about the Pentagon’s acquisition of new tech during the confirmation hearing, Brown said there is much to improve upon.

“We have great innovation here within our nation, and we want to make sure that we’re putting that into the hands of our warfighters as quickly as possible,” he told lawmakers. “I also believe there’s an iterative process to this. … There are so many things that are software-based today, and if we knock down any barriers to be able to move faster, I’m all for it.”

But like with accelerating change across the joint force, removing acquisition roadblocks that stifle innovation with commercial industry will also require a mindset shift, he said. 

“It’s not a flip of a switch, it’s a culture change that takes a bit of time to get it bought into the force and start to move,” he added.

Brown was mostly met with accolades from both Republican and Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing. If confirmed, he would succeed Gen. Mark Milley as the top officer in the U.S. armed forces.

However, his path to becoming the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff currently faces a roadblock due to Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blanket hold on senior military confirmations.

The senator’s protest of the Defense Department’s abortion policies has put a halt to the Pentagon’s senior leader appointments — a move that has since left the Marine Corps without a confirmed commandant in the wake of Gen. David Berger’s retirement earlier this week.

When asked about the holds during his confirmation hearing, Brown said the blocks to military appointments will eventually have a trickle-down effect and create issues that may exacerbate the Pentagon’s current retention challenges.

“Because we have more junior officers who now will look up and say, ‘If that’s the challenge that I’m gonna have to deal with in the future, I may not want to [stay in the armed forces]. I’m going to balance between my family and serving in a senior position.’ And we will lose talent because of those challenges,” Brown said.

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Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, in written responses to senators’ questions prior to his confirmation hearing Tuesday, said he supports the current setup in which the two organizations are headed by the same individual.

“I, as the nominee to be the CJCS, believe this arrangement to be an effective model to ensure a high level of collaboration and mutual support between USCYBERCOM and NSA,” he wrote in his advance policy questionnaire.

The so-called dual-hat arrangement is one of the most hotly debated within the cyber world. Since Cybercom was created a decade ago, it has been co-located with NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland and shared a leader. At the time, this made sense to help the nascent command grow, relying on the personnel, expertise and infrastructure of the NSA. The arrangement was initially expected to be temporary.

However, proponents of keeping that setup intact say the military can benefit from the unique intelligence insights and resources of NSA, leading to faster decision-making and operational outcomes. Opponents argue the roles are too powerful for one person to hold and relying on the intelligence community’s tools — which are meant to stay undetected — for military activities poses risks to such espionage activity.

Concerned with the prospect of a premature split, in which Cybercom would not be ready to stand on its own, Congress has issued a prohibition on a breakup in leadership until certain metrics are met. They include, among others, that each organization have robust command-and-control systems for planning, deconflicting and executing military cyber operations and national intelligence operations — as well as ensuring tools and weapons used in cyber ops are sufficient for achieving required effects and that Cyber Command can acquire or develop these tools, weapons and accesses.

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brown, along with the secretary of defense, would have to make those certifications to Congress.

But as time has gone on, there seems to be recognition among many, to include lawmakers, that the current arrangement is a net positive for national security and could be a more permanent fixture.

A recent report conducted by a Defense Department and intelligence community steering group, led by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Joseph Dunford, said the current arrangement is beneficial for national security.

The report “found ‘substantial benefits that present compelling evidence for retaining the existing structure,’” Gen. Paul Nakasone, who currently leads both Cybercom and NSA, wrote in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year.

Brown noted that the findings “were compelling and clearly articulated the organizational synergies gained and unity of effort granted to the Director of the National Security Agency/Commander USCYBERCOM through the Dual-Hat arrangement. Our experiences since 2018 demonstrated that we can work at the speed or relevance, with informed interagency support, to best serve our national security interests.”

The 2018 midterm elections were seen as a seminal moment for the partnership. Following the foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, U.S. officials were keen to not repeat the same mistakes. Nakasone created the Election Security Group, which was a joint venture between Cybercom and NSA.

Officials noted that the organization was highly successful and demonstrated the power of the partnership between the two organizations in which NSA’s foreign intelligence can inform Cybercom’s operations to take action against malicious cyber activity abroad.

“The successes that USCYBERCOM and NSA have experienced in defending our elections, in engaging ransomware actors, and in many other missions with the other Combatant Commands, rest on the alignment of USCYBERCOM and NSA,” Nakasone wrote in congressional testimony.

“The Senior Steering Group highlighted these accomplishments for the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence, finding that the dual-hat structure is in the best interests of USCYBERCOM, NSA and the nation. Success in protecting the national security of the United States in cyberspace would be more costly and less decisive with two separate organizations under two separate leaders. The enduring relationship is vital for both organizations to meet the strategic challenges of our adversaries as they mature their capabilities against the United States,” he added.

Informed by this study, the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are building a roadmap for the agencies, John Plumb, principal cyber advisor to the secretary of defense, wrote to the House Armed Services Committee in March. Once that is finished, he said, they will brief the roadmap to Congress.

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In response advance policy questions — a questionnaire senators pose to nominees for high-level positions prior to their confirmation hearings — Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown noted the joint force needs to do more on the EW front.

“This is a work in progress, and the biggest block to doing this is a mindset shift,” Brown, who is currently the Air Force chief of staff, replied to a question asking if the Department of Defense has adequately integrated electronic warfare into joint concepts and operational plans. “Often we think of electromagnetic warfare as a supporting effort to enable some other weapon system or capability. In modern warfare, electromagnetic warfare may be the main effort to achieve the desired strategic effects, especially in the pre-conflict phase where we ideally deter a fight from happening in the first place. Our joint concepts and operational plans are progressing towards this reality, but I think we have room for improvement.”

Following the end of the Cold War, the DOD largely divested of much of its high-end electronic warfare capabilities. Now, adversaries recognize the U.S. military’s dependence on the spectrum and its strategic importance. The joint force relies on the spectrum for communications and navigation — to include precision strike, GPS and data. Adversaries have developed sophisticated systems to jam, spoof and confuse U.S. capabilities.

Now, in many cases, the U.S. military is playing catch-up in both trying to develop offensive jamming capabilities to attack enemy systems while developing tools to defend against them. The spectrum is a maneuver space that involves a cat-and-mouse game of continuous countermeasures as nations try to gain advantages relative to adversaries.

“Electromagnetic warfare operations are dynamic. U.S., allied, partner, and adversary capabilities in the electromagnetic maneuver space are constantly changing, which creates perpetual challenges to get the right capability to the right warfighter at the right time to be operationally relevant against the right threat,” Brown wrote.

Previously, Brown has recognized that the spectrum can be more cost-effective than traditional kinetic capabilities, such as munitions, given they provide a nearly unlimited magazine.

“In some aspects, an electron is much cheaper than a very expensive missile … We’ve got to think about the cost curve” and be able to conduct both the kinetic and non-kinetic attacks, he said in 2021, adding that the Air Force had been “asleep at the wheel” for the last 25 to 30 years within the spectrum.

Regarding whether or not DOD systems are adequately protected from enemy electronic attack, Brown noted in his advance policy questionnaire that the answer depends on adversaries’ capabilities.

Challenging factors include that the joint force has lost some muscle memory defending against electronic attack over the last 20 years as it was busy conducting operations against technologically inferior adversaries in a permissive environment. Additionally, operations in the spectrum during that same time have changed while adversaries have evolved.

“If confirmed, I am committed to ensuring that we continue to invest in additional capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum,” Brown said.

He also recognized that the DOD is not adequately conducting “Tier One” exercises utilizing adversary-level electronic warfare tools. Tier one exercises are focused on the national level or combatant command level.

Integrating electronic warfare capabilities into exercises can be challenging for a number of reasons. For one, access to the spectrum is finite and using jammers can adversely affect civilian capabilities such as airplanes and first-responder capabilities. Turning on these jammers can also provide adversaries that might have passive sensing capabilities deployed near U.S. forces the ability to collect on those signals and develop counters to them.

“Our Combatant Commanders recognize the critical importance of electronic warfare and prioritize the objectives of their Tier One exercises accordingly, tailored to the threats within their geographic or functional areas of responsibility, but frequently the objectives of the exercise and limited threat replication capabilities overcome the realism of the exercise,” Brown wrote.

“Electronic warfare continues to evolve rapidly, and we must forecast and preemptively update our training to remain dominant. Our Joint Warfighting Concept emphasizes the importance of the electromagnetic spectrum and provides a unified approach to shape joint force exercises. A live, virtual, constructive (LVC) simulation environment will be essential in this effort. If confirmed, I will ensure the Joint Staff issues guidance on the realism of the training events,” he added.

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In the past, a service member specializing in air battle management had expertise that was tied to specific airframes — such as the aging E-3 Sentry airborne early warning and control aircraft and the E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (J-STARS). Some of these platforms will be phased out of the fleet in favor of more modern systems that will enable Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), a Pentagon-wide effort to better connect all the services’ sensors and shooters under a more unified network.

Brown, who has been tapped by President Biden to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasized that even with changes in platforms and concepts, the Air Force will still need experienced battle managers to work through missions.

“The thing we got to think through is how we restructure our organizational construct of putting that expertise in the right place,” he said Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “And whether it’s in the air control squadrons that do more of this versus them being tied to an airborne platform — those are the things we’re looking at to be able to make sure we’re putting that experience in the right place.”

In particular, Brown noted that the Air Force will have access to more space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data in the future as a portion of the E-8 J-STARS fleet is set to be replaced with a space-based Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI).

In the Space Force’s budget request for fiscal 2024, it is requesting $242.6 million to kick off the brand new program, known as Long Range Kill Chains. The initiative is intended to expand the GMTI capability to track surface targets in contested environments where current J-STARS platforms are unable to fly.

“Space-based GMTI system will provide actionable information on adversary surface targets to the warfighter through the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) as an integral part of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept. The [Space Force] is working with the Air Force and the Intelligence Community (IC) in a complementary way to design, develop, and deploy space-based GMTI systems,” budget documents stated.

Adding more space-based surveillance tools will also likely create more observational data for officials to work with than previous platforms did, creating new aspects for the air battle management mission, Brown said.

“We’ve got to look at not only how we do the battle management asset, but also how we do the processing, exploitation and dissemination [of data] that’s associated with it as well. And that’s a paradigm shift. This is an area that we’ve got to be willing to change,” he said.

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During the announcement in the White House Rose Garden, Biden described Brown as a “butt-kickin’ American airman,” an “operational leader in the joint force” and a “top-notch strategist.”

He noted Brown’s advice that the U.S. military must “accelerate change” or risk losing future conflicts.

“To keep American people safe, prosperous and secure, we have to move fast and adapt quickly. We have to maintain a combat credible force, capable of deterring and defeating any potential threat. We have to manage our competition with China and meet the reality of renewed aggression in Europe. We need to make sure we retain our competitive edge in an age where emerging technologies and technologies from AI to 3D printing can fundamentally change the character of conflict. With Gen. Brown as chairman, I know I’ll be able to rely on his advice as a military strategist and as a leader of military innovation, dedicated to keeping our armed forces the best in the world,” Biden said.

If confirmed by the Senate, Brown would succeed Gen. Mark Milley as the highest ranking member of the American armed forces.

Brown began his military career nearly four decades ago as an F-16 fighter pilot, and was eventually tapped as the commander of Pacific Air Forces for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command where he focused on emerging threats from China, which the Pentagon now views as its top competitor. He later became chief of staff of the Air Force in June 2020 — the first Black officer to lead a military service branch.

In his current role, Brown has notably been a staunch advocate for the Air Force’s modernization programs, from sixth-generation aircraft and drones to artificial intelligence and other digital capabilities. He often emphasized the importance of advancing the Air Force’s technological prowess in order to deter U.S. adversaries like China and Russia through his “Accelerate Change or Lose” manifesto, a message he’ll likely carry into his role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“The Air Force must modernize to counter strategic competitors by balancing risk [and] by divesting platforms and capabilities that have decreasing relevance against the pacing challenge. Investments in speed, agility and the lethality of Air Force capabilities underwrites the Joint Force,” Brown told the House Armed Services Committee during a fiscal 2024 budget hearing last month.

Brown was particularly focused on fleshing out the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which serves as the Air Force’s contribution to the Pentagon-wide initiative known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). That effort aims to connect the military’s sensors and shooters under a more unified network across the joint force — a challenge Brown repeatedly noted must be executed without breaking the bank.

He has prioritized investments in digital infrastructure and modernizing cloud-based communications in order to mature ABMS.

“We must focus on the Joint Warfighting Concept, enabled by Joint All-Domain Command and Control and rapidly move forward with digital, low cost, high tech, warfighting capacities,” he said in his strategic vision.

Brown also sought to turn the Air Force into a more data-centric service by elevating and expanding various capabilities such as the “data-pulling” tool known as Project Brown Heron. Initially stood up to generate data on health and readiness during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Air Force is now collaborating with industry and using the platform to drive other types of insights for Air Force operations.

The service chief also advocated for new career paths for personnel with specialized skills in emerging technologies.

“We have what we call career pyramids … which means these are the squares you’ve got to fill in order to move up the chain. I want to take a sliver off the side of that and say, ‘You’ve got some special skills, you don’t have to follow the same path.’ I want to make sure that you continue to have the opportunity to do meaningful work, opportunities to still get promoted and get pay raises. Maybe you don’t move, you stay in the same location for a number of years versus our standard three- to-four-year cycle of movement, and allow individuals to progress that way,” he said in February at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution.

Military occupational specialities might also need to be shaken up so they military can better “operate data,” he suggested.

“There’s people inside the Air Force that know how to do this, but not probably to the level that we’re probably going to need,” Brown said at the Brookings Institution event. “If I think about the Air Force specialties we have today, there’s some that we have today that we probably won’t need in the future; and there’s probably some that we don’t have today that we need more of, like data. And how do you start to build out that career field and those capabilities and say, ‘These are valuable to the Air Force’ and build them into and give them a developmental path and a career that … they can see themselves [moving] up to the higher levels?”

During a press briefing at the Pentagon on Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described Brown as “an incredibly capable and professional officer” with “deep experience in warfighting.”

At the same press conference, Milley also lavished praise.

“I’ve known CQ, like Secretary Austin has, for a long time. He’s a great officer, in my view, personal view. He has all the knowledge and skills attributes to do this job. And he has the appropriate demeanor and chemistry,” Milley told reporters. “CQ is absolutely superb and I’m looking forward to a speedy confirmation.”

It wasn’t immediately clear when the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a confirmation hearing.

Retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, former staff director for the SASC, said he expects Brown to be confirmed.

“He embodies both the joint and service perspective, but especially helpful will be his deep knowledge and experience in the Indo-Pacific theater — the key to this ‘decisive decade,'” Punaro said in a statement.

“The Senate Armed Services Committee will conduct a thorough and complete confirmation process and hearing, and I fully expect General Brown to be confirmed on an overwhelming bipartisan basis — once he leaps over any procedural hurdles currently in place for senior military nominations,” he added.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., ranking member of the SASC, praised Brown in a statement.

“Gen. Brown is an exceptionally qualified officer who brings decades of experience tackling America’s hardest national security problems,” Wicker said. “I have also known him to be a thoughtful advocate of accelerating innovation so that our armed services can be ready to defend our country and deter potential threats, especially those from the Chinese Communist Party.”

Brandi Vincent contributed reporting.

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The Air Force plans to spend more than $6 billion on a new CCA drone program and related projects over the next five years. The platforms are expected to serve as robotic wingmen for the service’s manned fighter jets and perform other missions, and they are one of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s “operational imperatives” for modernization.

SASC Chairman Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said pursuing these types of uncrewed systems “makes a great deal of sense.” However, “one of the constraints I think we have is the number of missiles available for our aircraft right now. And creating this autonomous capability [and] multitudes of other aircraft would compound our missile problem,” he told service leaders during a committee hearing Tuesday.

Kendall responded that the service is requesting multiyear procurement of several different types of munitions, including the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), noting that officials are also asking for an increase of approximately $1.5 billion in spending for missile procurement compared with the previous budget to address the issue raised by Reed.

“We’re trying to do a balanced set of investments, and that includes the weapons as well as the platforms,” Kendall said. “We’re also trying to increase the production capacity that you have when we get it into production.”

According to budget documents, the multiyear procurement strategy fits in with the “large lot procurement concept” in which “individual MYPs would be executed in a concurrent and overlapping multiyear strategy so that synergies in production across different but related programs can generate efficiencies and result in greater production capacity, accelerated delivery, and lower unit costs.”

Large lot procurement “represents an evolution of the existing MYP contracting and financing strategy, that leverages the savings generated through the use of Economic Order Quantities (EOQ) financing to procure additional lots of missiles under a Buy-to-Budget concept, to further improve efficiencies and yields. In addition, the MYP supports the procurement of critical munitions and enables substantial progress towards improving inventory objective requirements to meet the National Defense Strategy,” per the documents.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown said extra funding for munitions will help “facilitize” the Air Force’s ambitions and enable an increase in production rates, not only for weapons like AMRAAM, but also the follow-on Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM) — which he noted will be an “important aspect to support the collaborative combat aircraft.”

Service leaders see acquiring CCA drones as a cost-effective way to augment fighter jet capacity, with the expectation that the next-generation unmanned aircraft will cost a fraction of a manned F-35.

The push comes as China is developing its own advanced drones.

During the hearing, Kendall noted that Beijing, which the Pentagon views as the top threat, is fielding capabilities that are designed to defeat the U.S. military’s ability to project power, including modernizing their air-to-air weapon systems.

“That’s the reason that I’m so obsessed with getting on with the next-generation capabilities” like collaborative combat aircraft, he said.

The new drones are expected to carry some of the same munitions that manned platforms are equipped with, which means the service will need larger inventories.

“One way to think about it is that the pod or the weapon that might have been under the wing of a crewed aircraft is now flying in separate [uncrewed] aircraft and managed by that commander of that [manned] aircraft. The analysis that we’ve done shows that the adversary has to honor each of those aircraft as it is a full threat,” Kendall explained.

CCAs would increase adversaries’ targeting challenges and present “tactical dilemmas” that they don’t currently have to face, he noted.

The robotic platforms would also keep pilots out of harm’s way and allow the Air Force to take more risks.

“We can sacrifice one of these aircraft, put it well out in front, use it to draw fire and force the other side to expose itself and then be subject to engagement,” Kendall said. “We call them a ‘attritable.’ They’re not expendable, but we can afford to lose some of them operationally. There’s nobody in them that we’re going to lose. So, it changes our tactical options substantially.”

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“I think more and more — not just the Air Force, but the Department of Defense in general — is relying more and more on data and realizing the value of data,” Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa, explained in a media roundtable at the annual AFA Warfare Symposium.

The first of eight principles in DOD’s latest enterprise-wide Data Strategy, which was revamped and reissued in October 2020, establishes that “data is a strategic asset” and a “high-interest commodity” that “must be leveraged in a way that brings both immediate and lasting military advantage.” Broadly, the strategy also sets a variety of goals to ensure that military and department data is visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable and secure across the sprawling organization. 

Air and Space Force officials recently shed light on how their teams have been working deliberately to support the department’s overarching aims to become much more data-centric in this decade.

Project Brown Heron

The department is refining and scaling a nascent “data-pulling” tool that was first created and deployed amid the novel coronavirus pandemic to swiftly generate a range of information on health and readiness to inform mission-critical decisions, according to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown. 

“I’ve been meeting on a regular basis with” the Project Brown Heron team, he told DefenseScoop at a media roundtable, referring to that evolving effort. 

Via Project Brown Heron — and the Envision platform associated with it — the Air Force is integrating data feeds across the enterprise and with commercial sources to more easily “pull” the most crucial information required for operations, Brown noted.

Technology firm Palantir has been contracted more than $100,000 since 2021 to support activities related to Project Brown Heron. Most recently, on Tuesday, the Air Force awarded Palantir an $18,516,667 firm-fixed-price modification for the project and platform, which that latest contracting announcement said “supports three mission areas to automatically ingest data across the [DAF] that informs personnel decisions, planning and operations, and space situational awareness and command and control.”

Brown didn’t mention that company specifically at the media roundtable. But he did provide examples for how Brown Heron and the Envision platform are expanding beyond the original COVID-19 and readiness datasets that inspired it, to drive other new insights as well.

“One, I built a data tool for my general officer assignments. I’m a huge NFL fan,” he explained, adding that he’s visited multiple football facilities and witnessed how player and personnel movements and trends — like depth charts, or who is on the practice squad — can be tracked with real-time data.

“I had a hard time doing that as a chief — I wanted to have that data. So, we actually were able to work with various companies to pull in our existing data and then display it to us in a way that is useful,” Brown said.

“We did the same thing as we look at the global force standards,” he added, highlighting the service’s process for determining risk-informed planning assumptions based on existing and emerging threats. Data can be used to show what’s available and how certain moves could impact future readiness for particular weapon systems.

In early March, the chief was briefed by Air Force developers who demonstrated the tool and are continuing to strengthen it based on his team’s feedback.

“And then we have one here, just recently, where we started looking at our ecosystem as we make budget decisions and working through our [Program Objective Memorandum or] POM process,” Brown also noted.

“If you put money here, or pull money from a different location, how does it impact further down the line? Because what happens is we surprise ourselves sometimes — we’ll make a decision here and it has second order impacts, but we can’t see those until much later — then we are doing what I would call damage control. How do we see these scenarios much earlier? I would also tell you, we are still probably in the early stages of being able to use artificial intelligence, and part of that is really having the depth of understanding [required to responsibly apply it],” Brown said.

He added that the service is engaging externally “to build those relationships [with outside partners] that really understand how to use” AI.

‘It’s all about the data’

Some of the Air Force’s component commands, however, are already exploring how AI assets can help them make better use of the huge volumes of data they capture from more mature sources right now.

During a media briefing at the AFA symposium, Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central) Commander Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich told DefenseScoop that his team is “absolutely going to need” to apply AI and machine learning capabilities to sift through the heaps of drone data its assets collect — and some work aligned with that intent is currently unfolding. 

In one use case, officials are focused on “the basic problem” of detecting surface-to-air weapons “in the event of a hot war.”

“And so being able to find those ballistic missiles — kind of, for those of you who remember the great Scud hunt of 1991 or in 2003, right? We’re trying to go, ‘What does it look like now, today? How do we go and find these beforehand?” Grynkewich explained, referring to incidents where U.S. military forces frenetically searched for Scud missile launchers hidden during Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

His command has “in place today” algorithms that are “training to identify ballistic missile launch vehicles” in as near real-time as possible, Grynkewich noted. They’re feeding as much imagery as they can — including from on-orbit, commercial, geospatial and drone imagery sources — to train the technology to “look and go, ‘We think that this is a ballistic missile of X-type.’”

“We still have a human on the loop to go and confirm that. But it’s really accelerating our kill chain, if you will. And we’re making some good progress there. But yeah — it’s all about the data that we generate off of these things,” he added.

At another press roundtable, Hecker said emerging AI and other technologies are a major reason why DOD components are just now starting to see and fully harness that “value of data.”

“It used to be — and still is, to a certain extent — that we get so much data that we can’t process it all. But now, with different algorithms, quantum computing and these kinds of things, we’re able to take some data that I think just kind of fell through the cracks before and we’re actually getting a fair amount of information from that data, just because of the way that we’re able to categorize it, tag it and those kinds of things,” Hecker told DefenseScoop.

Like Brown, he made a sports connection to military data consumption.

“We have loads of [drone] video data. It comes in and we have terabytes of that stuff — but we can’t, when we always want it, reach out and grab what we need. So if you look at ESPN, right, and let’s say they have somebody that broke the rushing record from 25 years ago. And when you’re watching that football game, they pull that and show that clip in literally like 20 seconds. We weren’t able to do that [with imagery]. So we’ve worked with ESPN to figure out how you tag this data, so we can have the same capabilities as them. So, if we are in an operation that we need to go back 10 or 15 years — because we recognize this person — we can pull it and figure out some things,” Hecker said.

That effort has roots that trace back to 2011 when Hecker was commander of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Since then, it has “really advanced, compared to those early stages,” he told DefenseScoop.

Elsewhere, within the Space Force — America’s newest military branch — “everything we do is data,” Gen. Chance Saltzman also told DefenseScoop during the symposium.

The second-ever Chief of Space Operations noted that data is constantly captured from satellites, ground networks and other sources that is quickly turned into “something that’s of operational utility,” by Space Force guardians. 

“Whether it’s a missile-warning track, whether it’s a precision point on the planet enabled by GPS — that’s all just data. And so, we’re very sensitive to the fact that if you can’t manage data, if you can’t protect your networks, if you can’t rapidly make sense of the data, then you’re not going to be effective as a force,” Saltzman said.

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The ACE project aims to advance the Pentagon’s autonomous systems capabilities as the U.S. military pursues robotic wingmen and other drones. Industry participants for the recent tests included EpiSci, PhysicsAI, Shield AI and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which put their algorithms through their paces.

“In early December 2022, ACE algorithm developers uploaded their AI software into a specially modified F-16 test aircraft known as the X-62A or VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft), at the Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and flew multiple flights over several days. The flights demonstrated that AI agents can control a full-scale fighter jet and provided invaluable live-flight data,” DARPA said in a press release Monday.

“We conducted multiple sorties [takeoffs and landings] with numerous test points performed on each sortie to test the algorithms under varying starting conditions, against various simulated adversaries, and with simulated weapons capabilities,” ACE program manager Lt. Col. Ryan “Hal” Hefron said in a statement.

“We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live. This highlights the importance of not only flight testing advanced autonomous capabilities but doing so on testbeds like VISTA, which allowed us to rapidly learn lessons and iterate at a much faster rate than with other air vehicles,” he added.

AI agents had previously defeated a human F-16 pilot during a series of simulations that were part of DARPA’s AlphaDogTrials.

DARPA did not disclose any additional information about the different results that were found in the recent flight tests compared to previous simulations.

The agency noted that a human pilot was onboard the two-seat aircraft to take over if anything went awry while the AI agents were in control during the test flights.

Although the X-62A is a modified F-16, it can also be programmed to demonstrate the flight-handling characteristics of a variety of different aircraft types. And the VISTA will support a variety of programs, according to officials.

The platform was recently upgraded with what officials are calling a System for Autonomous Control of Simulation (SACS).

“What we’ve done with investments from DARPA, with investments from the [Air Force] Research Lab is put it an autonomy core kind of brain on there. That’s going to allow us to actually go fly autonomy [technology] and have a person still in the aircraft to intervene if we need to,” Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien, commander of the Air Force Test Center, told reporters during a media roundtable in September at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

The VISTA is going to be very busy with flight testing, he noted.

“The X-62 is booked solid. We have a roadmap for the next probably two or three years of all the different programs it will support. We’re also looking at efforts to try to figure out how we would actually bring up more aircraft and get autonomy engines on to accelerate this. But as far as what we’ll continue to do — that that will probably evolve based on the data of what we do. But I think increasing capacity right now is one of our [desired] things,” he said.

“Eventually, hopefully, we can get some other aircraft modified with the autonomy core engine and start accelerating the pace of testing, look at teaming tactics, and get two ships and three ships and things like that going,” he added.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has said that previous progress with the ACE initiative contributed to his decision to move forward with a “collaborative combat aircraft” program. That drone project is expected to receive significant funding in the fiscal 2024 budget, although Kendall has suggested that many aspects of the program will be classified.

“We’re heading down the path to have much more capability for uncrewed aircraft,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown said Monday at a Brookings Institution event. “When you look at one of our operational imperatives — next-generation air dominance family of systems — we’re going down the path of collaborative combat aircraft.”

Officials envision teaming those next-gen drones with manned platforms such as the F-35 and a forthcoming NGAD fighter.

“As we look into our future budgets there’s three aspects of this. There’s the platform itself, there’s the autonomy that goes with it, and then there’s how we organize, train and equip to build the organizations to go [use that technology]. And we’re trying to do all those in parallel. So we are thinking through aspects” of that, Brown said. “I think you’ll see as we start looking at our future budgets and the analysis we’re doing as part of our operational imperatives that we are committed to more uncrewed capability.”

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