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Mr. Kendall has taken these innovations — built out during earlier waves of change at the Air Force — and amped up the focus on autonomy even more through a program called Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
These new missile-carrying robot drones will rely on A.I.-enhanced software that not only allows them to fly on their own but to independently make certain vital mission decisions, such as what route to fly or how best to identify and attack enemy targets.
The plan is to have three or four of these robot drones fly as part of a team run by a human-piloted fighter jet, allowing the less expensive drone to take greater risks, such as flying ahead to attack enemy missile defense systems before Navy ships or piloted aircraft join the assault.
Mr. Kendall, in an earlier interview with The Times, said this kind of device would require society to more broadly accept that individual kill decisions will increasingly be made by robots.
“In a major conflict, you’d have to deal with a lot of targets in a very compressed time frame,” Mr. Kendall said, meaning that human pilots will supervise the A.I.-powered drones but they cannot be expected to authorize each use of lethal force.
“Individual decisions versus not doing individual decisions is the difference between winning and losing,” Mr. Kendall added. “You’re not going to lose.”
These new collaborative combat aircraft — which will cost as much as about $25 million each, compared to the approximately $80 million price for a manned F-35 fighter jet — are being built for the Air Force by two sets of vendors.
One group is assembling the first of these new jets while a second is creating the software that allows them to fly autonomously and make key mission decisions on their own.
This is also a major departure for the Air Force, which usually relies on a single prime contractor to do both, and a sign of just how important the software is — the brain that will effectively fly these robotic fighter jets.
Chris Brose, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director and now an executive at Anduril, the military contractor building one of the aircraft, said that without Mr. Kendall, production on this new aircraft would not be underway.
“He has proven that real change is possible, at scale,” Mr. Brose said. “There are a handful of other people who played key roles. But if you removed him, this never would have happened.”
The open question, added Mac Thornberry, the Republican former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is if the pace of change is fast enough.
“There’s a lot of respect for the way he sees the threat, the direction he’s trying to go,” said Mr. Thornberry, who is now a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.
“But some would say that the system is never going to get there in a time frame that matters.”
Still, Mr. Kendall has been anything but shy when it comes to demanding change at the Air Force, including operations at the Space Force, the five-year-old agency that he also oversees, Mr. Thornberry and Mr. Brose agreed.
Space, Mr. Kendall said in the interview this month, is no longer just a vast empty region used to deploy satellites that spy on what is happening on earth, or perform other key tasks such as missile tracking, geolocation and communications.
Space is now a fighting zone, Mr. Kendall acknowledged, like the oceans of the earth or battlefields on the ground.
The United States, Russia and China each tested sending missiles into space to destroy satellites starting decades ago, although the United States has since disavowed this kind of weapon because of the destructive debris fields it creates in orbit.
So during his tenure, the Air Force started to build out a suite of what Mr. Kendall called “low-debris-causing weapons” that will be able to disrupt or disable Chinese or other enemy satellites, the first of which is expected to be operational by 2026.
Mr. Kendall and Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of Space Operations, would not specify how these American systems will work.
But other former Pentagon officials have said they likely will include electronic jamming, cyberattacks, lasers, high-powered microwave systems or even U.S. satellites that can grab or move enemy satellites.
The Space Force, over the last three years, has also been rapidly building out its own new network of low-earth-orbit satellites to make the military gear in space much harder to disable, as there will be hundreds of cheaper, smaller satellites, instead of a few very vulnerable targets.
Mr. Kendall said when he first came into office, there was an understandable aversion to weaponizing space, but that now the debate about “the sanctity or purity of space” is effectively over.
Space is a vacuum that surrounds Earth, Mr. Kendall said. It’s a place that can be used for military advantage and it is being used for that.
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