SECAF Kendall, looking out to 2050, predicts war winners will be combatants with the best AI

Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems will likely play an even more significant role in determining the outcome of future conflicts as the technology continues to evolve over the next 25 years, according to outgoing Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.

In a congressionally-mandated report submitted to lawmakers in December and set to be published Monday, Kendall outlined his prediction on what security environments and technological advancements will contribute to what both the Air and Space Forces will look like in the year 2050. The document covers a broad range of emerging capabilities that will shape future warfare, many of which are underpinned by an expanded use of AI and autonomy.

“It is likely these areas of advanced military technology will be manifest through the increasingly widespread use of autonomy and automation, in all domains, but especially in space, in cyberspace, and in the air,” Kendall wrote in the report, titled “The Department of the Air Force in 2050.”

The assessment comes at a critical inflection point for AI and autonomy, especially their use by the Defense Department as it looks to counter emerging threats from adversaries such as China and Russia. During Kendall’s tenure at the helm of the DAF, both the Air and Space Forces have made strides in leveraging the technologies — from using artificial intelligence to assist personnel in day-to-day tasks to the development of the Air Force’s robotic wingmen known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).

As the technology proliferates in the coming decades, Kendall believes the department’s greatest challenge will be understanding what the right mix of manned and unmanned capabilities will be for specific warfighting functions.

“The hardest thing, I think, for us to come to grips with is going to be the human-machine interface and how the decision making takes place,” Kendall said Monday during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re going to have to figure out how to manage this in a way which is cost effective, which is consistent with our values [and] which is militarily competitive. I think that’s going to be a tough problem to solve.”

Kendall predicted in the report that AI-assisted decision making and support tools will be at the center of many military functions and capabilities by 2050. In particular, he highlighted that AI will likely inform battle management platforms to quickly inform mission planning and also help extract relevant target identification and tracking information from multi-sensor databases.

“Victory or defeat in the air or in space at the human scale is likely to be determined by which combatant has fielded the most advanced AI technology in the areas most crucial to achieving victory,” Kendall wrote.

At the same time, autonomous systems will likely become even more common in warfare by 2050 than they are today in Ukraine and the Middle East, Kendall noted. While space systems have always carried a significant degree of autonomous capability, aerial platforms and weapons are also expected to operate with less human intervention.

The Air Force is on a path to introduce more intelligent autonomous systems into the force with its planned fleet of CCA drones, expected to fly alongside the service’s manned fighter jets to conduct various missions. Contractors General Atomics and Anduril are gearing up for first flights of their respective Increment 1 CCA prototypes in 2025, and the Air Force is already in planning stages for the follow-on Increment 2.

Kendall said at CSIS that he expects the Air Force to use a mix of manned and unmanned platforms “for a long time” — pushing back on recent comments made from tech titan and top Trump advisor Elon Musk that urged the U.S. military to stop buying manned aircraft. 

“We’ve got to think through the command and control, and I think for the foreseeable future crewed fighters are going to be managing the formation that includes CCAs,” Kendall said.

Introduction of more autonomy and artificial intelligence will also require a significant culture change within the Department of the Air Force, which is another battle all in itself, Kendall noted.

“The culture and the history and the legacy of the Air Force, which I have been steeped in — particularly for the last few years, but also for my whole life — really is about the role of the pilot,” he said. “Letting go, to some degree of that, I think is an incredibly difficult, emotional thing for people to do.”