Empowered Leaders Vital to Win Next War, Allied Air Chiefs Say

Speaking at the International Air Chiefs Conference hosted by the U.S. Air Force in Washington, top officials from the air forces of Canada and Sweden as well as U.S. defense experts agreed distributed operations and decentralized command and control will be vital when fighting in the future.

But, they said, this will require as much a cultural shift as a technological and doctrinal one — and each will be daunting.

“There’s a cultural challenge within various air forces and militaries about trying to enhance the ability of folks at lower echelons to feel empowered to make decisions, and know that they’re not going to get in trouble and find themselves, I don’t know, in the brig if they’ve chosen the wrong thing,” Becca Wasser, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank and head of its Gaming Lab, said during the panel.

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