Five vectors

Air Force’s strategic plan for the next decade

While we are very close to releasing Air Force’s Strategy 2016-2026, I have to admit that we have arrived at this point by a round-about route. The journey started earlier this year when I sat down with my key staff and outlined my requirement for a communications plan. I wanted to inform Air Force members, and other key stakeholders, of where Air Force was going in the next 10 years and their role in helping us get there. I have always placed great importance on the people element of capability and so, by extension, I have also placed great importance on effective communications.

However, having sat down to develop a strategic communications plan, we almost immediately ran into a problem – what was the strategy we wanted to communicate? This was a wake-up moment for us. Despite having a range of classified and unclassified strategic level documents, an unprecedented capability modernisation program and a strong record of recent operational success, we did not have a single, high-level document that outlined where Air Force was heading as an organisation. In other words, we did not have a formally documented and widely-accessible Air Force strategy. Certainly, Plan Jericho is a good start but its focus is principally on issues directly related to warfighting and so it cannot fully substitute for a comprehensive Air Force strategy.