Jason Brown, Gareth Littlechild, Nicolas Lyautey, Shingo Mizuiwa, and Michael Trautermann

The nature of work is rapidly evolving, and the military is not immune. The present Digital Age is having profound effects on the way specialties, trades, and entire professions are viewed. Technology adds speed and efficiency to work environments, but also complexity as workers of all types integrate disparate software applications and datasets, requiring them to use higher cognitive skills to do their jobs effectively. COVID-19 has only emphasized this point—our ability to respond to modern-day crises increasingly depends on the digital capabilities organizations possess. The current crisis has taught people to communicate, team, learn and overcome challenges differently in the Digital Age. As such, troops at all levels have new opportunities to solve complex problems, redesign workflows, and scale solutions—if provided permission and expertise.

Digital technology has the potential to revolutionize military capabilities, especially in the air, space, and cyber domains. Wearables, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, and autonomous vehicles are all examples of technological opportunities for operating and defending air bases more efficiently and effectively. Rapid manufacturing of software and hardware will shrink timelines for logistics, intelligence, and command and control. Whereas past visions of centralized decision-making through network-centric warfare failed to live up to the hype, real digital transformation is now affecting every business and industry through the democratization of technology. While digital technology is not a panacea, it may make the difference between winning and losing in future operating environments and will require a force of multifunctional, digitally-capable airmen to develop and apply these capabilities. If our allied air forces—the U.S. Air Force, Royal Air Force, Armée de l’Air, Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, and Luftwaffe, among others—want to stay competitive and interoperable, they must take significant steps now to cultivate digital talent from the flight line to the four-star general.

Reasons for Change

As digital technology changes the nature of work, it is also changing the way people think about national security. Recent national publications, including the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy, the 2017 French Strategic Review of Defence and National Security, the 2020 Royal Air Force Strategy, the 2016 White Paper on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr, and the Japan Cabinet Office’s Integrated Innovation Strategy all describe a future where digital innovation is the key to competitive advantage. China understands this, evidenced by Xi Jinping’s plan to make China “a country of innovators.” So do the Russians; their Ministry of Defence recently created a “technopolis” allowing troops to experiment with artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

These shared visions of a digital future naturally affect the development of defense capabilities. The potential of digital technology is shaping new warfighting concepts, which envision the rapid integration of data, automation of tasks, and the need for interdisciplinary skills. While these concepts generate much discussion on how allied air forces will fight, there is not nearly as much attention paid to those who will do the fighting.

If air forces are to apply these digitally-focused defense concepts, they should not expect the tradecraft and specialties traditional to the military profession to endure or remain the same. In the commercial sector, the evolution of technology and the pursuit of competitive advantage are causing some jobs to disappear and others to emerge. Innovation is accelerating, creating the expectation for lifelong learning and technical proficiency. This compels any modern workforce to develop new mindsets, skills, and methods to accomplish its mission. Transformation and modernization are common to the lexicon across allied defense communities, but they rarely place people at the forefront of those conversations. Military trades, and the human resources system behind them, have been slow to adapt to the Digital Age.

Years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense recognized a critical deficiency in regional, cultural, and language expertise, and built a framework to advance these skills throughout the force. This framework trained troops throughout the armed services in regional, cultural, and language areas at varying levels based on their role. The framework also provided career opportunities for troops who wanted to dive deeper. Modern air forces could take a comparable approach to cultivate digital talent within their ranks. This means creating a framework emphasizing digital literacy within core training and education programs, creating opportunities for all airmen to obtain digital skills, and providing every airman an ability to apply these skills on the job.

Cultivating Digital Talent

The first pillar of this framework makes digital literacy a foundational competency for all airmen. Allied air forces could incorporate terms and concepts tied to software development, artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity throughout all forms of military training and education. Digital upskilling is becoming critical to the success of every enterprise-level organization. These organizations recognize their success is tied to their employees’ ability to leverage data as a strategic asset and apply digital capabilities to their mission. This compels organizations to teach both digital hard skills—such as coding, algorithm development, and data engineering—and soft skills—such as design, product management, and leading digital organizations.

On that note, upskilling applies as much to senior officers, enlisted, and civilian leaders as it does to airmen working the flight line. While enterprise leaders may not code on the job, they must understand how digital technologies apply to business operations. The conventional wisdom among senior leaders is software, data, and information technology infrastructure are assets to be protected. Few senior leaders have been taught how to use these capabilities to their competitive advantage. New warfighting concepts will not come to fruition unless leaders with non-technical backgrounds can intelligently discuss the capabilities, constraints, and interoperability of software and information technology architectures.

Turning now to the second pillar in the framework, cultivating digital talent requires giving airmen opportunities to develop hard and soft digital skills through online and in-residence courses. The digital upskilling industry is booming, and allied air forces should adopt the same courses the commercial sector uses to upskill their workforce. While many aspects of military trades will still require distinct training pipelines, digital technologies are increasingly dual-use, i.e., applicable to both private sector and military missions. Adopting commercial training methods to keep pace with evolving dual-use technology, as well as methods to track skills via professional certificates and badges, will allow air forces to assess the digital competency of individuals and entire organizations.

The third pillar gives airmen the chance to use these skills on the job, which seems intuitive, but there are several obstacles. The most obvious is the legacy information technology infrastructure that plagues our allied air forces and most public sector organizations within our respective countries. Our militaries have historically underfunded information technology upgrade efforts or stretched out timelines to the point of creating risk. Creating digitally literate airmen and leaders can reverse that trend, as the force will grasp the value of accelerating information technology modernization plans, and giving airmen the infrastructure to apply their digital skills.

The bigger challenges our air forces share, however, are organizational culture and policies. Because allied militaries outsourced capability development in the Industrial Age, our respective workforce models do not account for it occurring in the field. Our allied air forces organize operational units to execute the mission, not to develop and test new capabilities. Consequently, many argue innovation should happen outside operational units.

However, digital capabilities provide airmen opportunities to create, adopt, and scale solutions similar to the way they develop tactics. Long ago, our allied air forces learned success in the air depended on the ability to create, share, and scale new tactics to adapt to the adversaries we shared. We built a culture and framework around this bottom-up, problem-solving approach to ensure a competitive advantage. Given success in the air today depends heavily on an ability to connect to capabilities in other domains, airmen must have the ability to innovate digital solutions in ways similar to traditional tactics development. There are certainly tactics to evaluate in controlled environments, and there will be digital capabilities that must follow a similar path. That said, combat environments are uncontrolled, and success will be defined by the ability of airmen to integrate software and data at speed and scale.

Overcoming Obstacles

Adopting these recommendations may seem like common sense given the changing character of war, our allied air forces’ future aspirations, and the changes to personal and professional lives driven by digital transformation. However, several plausible counter-arguments could be made against the recommendations above. The first is the overstated risk of losing upskilled airmen to the private sector. This argument is flawed on several levels. It discounts the role talent plays in national security and ignores airmen expectations. The men and women joining the allied air forces today have an ability to solve their own logistics and social challenges through apps on their phone. If denied the opportunity to learn and work with equally sophisticated technology, they may simply not stay or join in the first place. Upskilling airmen at the cost of retention is not the real problem. Refusing to provide airmen the skills they need is a far greater risk to national security.

Another counter-argument is that airmen should focus on their core mission and air forces should find digital talent elsewhere. This approach has become unfeasible. On the one hand, the competition for experts in fields like data science and artificial intelligence is increasingly challenging and expensive. On the other hand, enterprise-level organizations still require organic capabilities to sustain their growing digital capabilities. The U.S. Air Force learned this lesson the hard way in an attempt to improve its command and control capacity and now supports airmen-led software development teams throughout the service. These teams became necessary because a procurement system designed for hardware could not meet the cost, schedule, or performance needs for digital capabilities.

While these initiatives are a start, there is no doubt our allied air forces will need more digital talent in a time of crisis. At the time of this writing, COVID-19 has forced our air forces to create multiple digital workarounds to collaborate and share information to perform their mission. Conflict will be far more challenging and require a great deal more digital creativity and expertise from all airmen.

A final counter-argument is, rather than upskilling all airmen to some degree, air forces should simply increase the numbers of airmen who apply digital skills as part of their core specialty. While, unquestionably, these career fields need a boost in numbers, it is impractical to believe there will ever be enough of these specialized airmen to meet the demand for digital skills. The limiting belief that air forces must trade airmen who specialize in aircraft maintenance for airmen who are coders, for example, is a false choice. Our allied air forces need airmen who can do both to develop and integrate the digital capabilities necessary for continued success. Interdisciplinary skills, or mixing a mission and digital mindset, is what built the most successful companies driving present innovation economies. If allied air force efforts to cultivate digital talent are isolated to a distinct career track, they will fail to create the multifunctional airmen air forces need to succeed.

The Airmen We Need

The U.S. Air Force, Royal Air Force, Armée de l’Air, Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, Luftwaffe, and other allied air forces have dominated the skies over the last three decades largely because of standoff weapons, superior sensors, and creative airmen who could push the limits of their hardware. The days of relying solely on that playbook are over. In the Digital Age, software, data, networks, and digitally competent airmen will be the capabilities that deliver our decisive combat advantage. They, and their ability to think creatively, will drive the next revolution in military affairs. These respective defense communities are talking seriously about the opportunities the Digital Age presents. As such, any conversation about the air forces we need should start with the airmen we need, as well as a recognition that in the age we live, talent matters more than numbers.

Finally, without a doubt discussions of digital readiness will dominate the post-COVID-19 conversations about defense and national security—specifically, the ability to develop and apply modern technology for crisis response and mission assurance. Our allied air forces have a long way to go in implementing the same technology private sector enterprises use to view the impacts on their supply chains, personnel, and business operations. We expect our governments and defense sectors will scramble to find technology to do the same, but its adoption will depend on organizational culture and competencies. The only way our air forces inoculate against the disruption the next crisis will bring is by upskilling the airmen upon whose knowledge and abilities, both individually and collectively, we depend.

Jason Brown is a U.S. Air Force officer assigned to the U.S. Chief of Staff of the Air Forces Strategic Studies Group at Headquarters, Department of the Air Force.

Gareth Littlechild is a Royal Air Force officer assigned as an exchange officer to the U.S. Chief of Staff of the Air Forces Strategic Studies Group at Headquarters, Department of the Air Force.

Nicolas Lyautey is a French Air Force officer assigned as an exchange officer to the U.S. Chief of Staff of the Air Forces Strategic Studies Group at Headquarters, Department of the Air Force.

Shingo Mizuiwa is a Japanese Air Self Defense Force officer, Brookings Institution fellow, and liaison officer to the U.S. Chief of Staff of the Air Forces Strategic Studies Group at Headquarters, Department of the Air Force.

Michael Trautermann is a German Air Force officer assigned as an exchange officer to the U.S. Chief of Staff of the Air Forces Strategic Studies Group at Headquarters, Department of the Air Force.

The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their air forces or governments.

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Header Image: An F-16 fakes off during a U.S. Air Force Weapons School training exercise at Nellis Air Force Base on June 8, 2017. (A1C Andrew D. Sarver/USAF Photo)

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