Enable breadcrumbs token at /includes/pageheader.html.twig

16th Air Force Advances Phoenix Initiative

The effort will help pull in more innovation through improved relationships.

Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall speaks with U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Shannon Meads, 70th Operations Support Squadron publicly available information operations noncommissioned officer in charge, during a visit at Fort Meade, Maryland, on February 2, 2024. The 16th Air Force is targeting “deliberate partnerships” to aid its information warfare efforts. Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Kevin Iinuma.

The U.S. Air Force’s information warfare arm, 16th Air Force (AFCYBER), is formalizing the way it forges partnerships and industry engagements to better support innovation reaching its airmen involved in critical missions.

The Numbered Air Force (NAF) is responsible for global intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance; cyber operations; electronic warfare; global weather intelligence; and other operations.

“The initiative started under Gen. [Kevin] Kennedy's tenure, and it was really about us taking a look at being more deliberate with industry and academic institutions, and even within government, with science and technology, and research and development organizations,” said Brian Cook, technical director, AFCYBER, in an interview with SIGNAL Media.

“Don't get me wrong, it wasn't like [collaboration] wasn't happening before,” Cook stated. “We just weren’t as deliberate as we wanted it to be, and we wanted to be able to have those enhanced partnerships with those entities. We want to help drive modernization—modernization in the way we bring technologies and capabilities in and insights into our force.”

The Phoenix Initiative is designed to be the NAF’s “innovation incubator, focusing on forging a community and culture of innovation, thought leadership and mission enhancement,” to enable more modernization into the NAF’s information warfare missions, according to an NAF document. Project Phoenix, a subset of the Phoenix Initiative, was created in 2023 “to convene midgrade, tactical mission experts and innovators” selected by leadership to participate in multimonth sprints to identify new missions and support command and component operational requirements, among other objectives.

With academia, AFCYBER is looking to grow its regional relationships into a wider program of universities that can aid in advanced technology and capability thought leadership. The NAF already has an agreement with the University of Texas system, with activities at the University of Texas-El Paso and the University of Texas-San Antonio.

“Some of the efforts include malware analysis, where we are looking at understanding operational technologies in the Internet of Things, what vulnerabilities exist out there, and what the things are that we need to be looking at,” Cook shared.

AFCYBER has also expanded relationships within the service’s own institutions, including the Air Force Academy, the Air Force Institute of Technology and Air University.

Industry and academia can connect at an operational mission level, which benefits all parties.

“That is what they are thirsty for,” the technical director stated. “They say, ‘Oh my goodness, you mean that I can actually do research or write a paper, and I can do things that would be linked to an operational interest and outcomes?’ There is a lot of appetite for this.”

In addition, AFCYBER harnesses the Education With Industry program, sending cyber airmen for a year or so to the private sector companies, which helps the NAF from an operational perspective.

One of the technologies Cook said the NAF is looking to harness is automation to help airmen and to perform staff business.

“Instead of taking in this massive amount of data, creating spreadsheets and then creating PowerPoints, how do we automate that in such a way where you have dashboards that are timely and relevant?” Cook said. “And so we're looking at things related to automation. We're also looking at artificial intelligence and machine learning as [enabling technologies]. We are partnering with AFRL [Air Force Research Laboratory] and the intelligence community that have quite a bit of expertise there to see what they're working on and how can we partner with them.”

Additionally, the Phoenix Initiative aims to “promote the information warfare NAF mission across critical sectors to energize Air Force talent recruitment for the high demand domain expertise required to compete and contest our adversaries,” the NAF document stated.

This goal stands true, Cook said, whichever form AFCYBER ends up taking.

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) is elevating several of its NAFs to become service component commands—for example, changing 12th Air Force to be Air Forces Southern. DAF leadership is currently deciding how to organize AFCYBER once the cyber mission aspects of the NAF are elevated to become a service component command. The NAF is currently under Air Combat Command. Elevating it to a service component command has it reporting directly to Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin.

“It depends on what is part of Air Forces Cyber and what is part of whatever the other [organization will be],” Cook stated. “But we are going to continue to focus on our challenges as a group, and even if not everyone is together. Our organizations, in many instances, even if they don't fall under the same AFCYBER or 16th Air Force umbrella, they're still dependent on the same infrastructure. And so in that regard, we are still going to have to work together, because then it is all of our aspects coming together to deliver information warfare and helping to deliver outcomes."