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Senior leadership must play a major role

• The success of enterprise-level future concept development requires advocacy by — and continuous engagement with — the highest levels of senior leadership, including the Secretary of the Air Force (SECAF), Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF), and Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force (VCSAF).

AFWIC analysis should be of the highest quality

• AFWIC should aim to become the organization within the Air Force with the highest standards for quality of analysis. No critique of a proposed future concept of operations (CONOPS) or force structure option should come from a source outside AFWIC or the Air Force that was not already identified and assessed within AFWIC.
• The products of the analysis should be — and should be perceived to be — Air Force products rather than AFWIC products.

AFWIC must reduce barriers to innovation

• Large institutions, such as the Air Force, must break down barriers between organizational units and cultures to achieve agreement on innovative, enterprise-wide solutions to future problems.

AFWIC should stay above the fray of current operations

• To successfully address future challenges, CONOPS, and force structure options, AFWIC needs to stay above the fray of current operations and work in a time frame beyond the Future Years Defense Program. However, any solutions identified by AFWIC eventually will need to shape the Program Objective Memorandum and be plausible enough to gain stakeholder buy-in. These considerations are somewhat in tension with one another.

The Air Force has long faced a challenge integrating force design and capability development planning with programming. The consequences of not executing the integration function well can lead to imbalances in capabilities, vulnerabilities in subsystems, and insufficient funding for investment in new capabilities. Over the past several years, Air Force leaders have recognized the need to improve both the quantity and quality of the Air Force's enterprise-level analysis and decisionmaking on future force planning. In February 2018, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy, Integration and Requirements asked RAND Project Air Force (PAF) to assist the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC) in conceptualizing and executing analytical and other products to support options for future force design and capability development and their links to planning and programming.

To this end, PAF team members spoke to AFWIC leaders and key staff, other Air Force stakeholders, and individuals familiar with integration efforts in the other services. The team developed a roadmap of analytical and other product elements that could enable AFWIC to sustain its integrating role in future force design. In this report, the authors present their findings, recommendations, and vision for AFWIC's analytical processes and products. For AFWIC to succeed and endure, senior leaders will need to create favorable conditions for independent analysis of new concepts and options for future force design in support of the joint force and their practical implications for Air Force near-term planning, programming, budgeting, and execution.

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Objective Analysis. Effective Solutions.