Disruptive Warfare: The Nonkinetic Fight
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Michael Dahm:
All right, good afternoon. I'm Mike Dahm. I am the Senior Resident Fellow for Aerospace and China
Studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. And I'm very excited to welcome you here today
to the Disruptive Warfare panel, where we're going to be talking about information warfare and the
non-kinetic fight.
We're joined today by two leaders who are in the thick of those issues, Air Force Lt. Gen. Kennedy, and
Space Force Lt. Gen. Schiess.
Briefly, Lt. Gen. Kennedy wears three hats as Commander of 16th Air Force, Commander of Air Force's
Cyber, and Commander of the Air Force component of the Joint Force Headquarters Cyber. He's a B1
command pilot, but has been leading the way on cyber information warfare and C4ISR in the Air Force
since 2015.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess is the Commander of U.S. Space Force's Space, and is dual hatted as Space
Command's combined joint force space component commander. Lt. Gen. Schiess started his career as an
ICBM crewman, but then quickly transitioned to space launch responsibilities, and has worked in space
operations since 1997, transitioning to the U.S. Space Force in 2022.
So just so we can level set the audience, I'd like to give both of you an opportunity to tell us a little bit
about your commands, and General Kennedy, we'll start with you.
Lt. Gen. Kevin P. Kennedy:
All right, thanks, Mike. And if you want to fill a room talking about your command, I highly suggest you
have the Chief of the United States Air Force talk about your command the day before, and then you get
about 2000 people.
So a little bit about 16th Air Force. So as Mike mentioned, we wear three official hats and delegates.
There's another capability that sits with us, another hat and role, is the Service Cryptologic Component
Commander, which is an integration with the IC, with DIRNSA as the Director of National Security
Agency.
So in our NAF, we have 10 wings in a center, with the ISR Enterprise, a portion of the United States Air
Force, EW Enterprise, the entirety of the enterprise level cyber, doesn't count the base level enterprise
that connects us and our Airmen to the domain, as well as a large preponderance of the information
operations specialists, those that we have chained in the United States Air Force to do information
operations. About 25% of the individuals, the Airmen that we train, live in 16th Air Force. And we
accomplish those missions.
What do we do across that? We have forces that go from the North Pole, Alaska, all the way down to
care sensors down in the South Pole region. We have groups on the peninsula in Korea. We have a
group that's out in Germany.
And one of the key aspects of that is supporting CFACCs, supporting the joint force, supporting the
intelligence community, and helping generate insights so we can compete now and prepare for crisis
and conflict across all of our wings and centers.
The key aspect that we talked about, just to inform, I know we're not taking questions in here, but as the
Chief talked about the elevation of AF Cyber is to make sure we have our alignment to cyber command
