Air Force lacks critical skills in digital fluency, data analysis
The Air Force lacks key skills needed for modern warfare and struggles to track and manage those skills across the service.
The Air Force faces critical skill gaps in digital fluency, multi-domain operations, strategic decision-making, intelligence analysis and collaboration with allies — capabilities experts say are essential for modern warfare but remain underdeveloped across the service.
Following sweeping organizational changes announced in February 2024, then – Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall commissioned a RAND study to help identify critical skill gaps among active-duty Airmen.
An effort, known as Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition, included a total of 24 changes or action items that were divided into four categories: developing people, generating readiness, projecting power and developing capabilities.
The Department of the Air Force has halted all planning related to Kendall’s initiative in February following an order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Senior behavioral and social scientist at RAND, Miriam Matthews, said the report remains relevant since it focuses on modern warfare and what skills active-duty Airmen need to have regardless of whether the effort is called Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition or it occurs under a different strategic framework.
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“This is more about what is it the active-duty Airmen need to know and skills they need to have in order to be critical in the modern warfare environment,” Matthews told Federal News Network.
Throughout this process, experts — including mid- to senior-level military officers, enlisted personnel, civilians and researchers with institutional and operational expertise in manpower nd operations. They identified five capability areas that are most critical for the Air Force to address: technological advancement, multi-domain operational capability and adaptability, strategic decision-making, rapid and accurate intelligence operations, and collaborative operations with allies.
Skill gaps that hinder the Air Force’s ability to fully develop those five capabilities include limited data acumen and technical depth, insufficient digital fluency and cyber skills, and a lack of joint and combined operations expertise.
“There are a lot of career fields where there seems to be balance in terms of the number of Airmen that need to be trained and what they need to be trained on. There are also certain career fields where some consideration needs to be given to what they’re being trained on, how they’re being trained, who’s being trained, and the tests that they’re expected to take on,” Matthews said.
Compounding these challenges is the lack of a comprehensive system to manage talent and track skills across the service. Existing systems often rely on self-reporting and manual inputs, which makes them incomplete and outdated.
While career field management plans outline the required skills for each specialty, Airmen are increasingly expected to acquire additional skills some of which are gained independently. Although Special Experience Identifiers are intended to capture these experiences, Airmen often need to know which identifiers apply and to manually enter them.
“For their career fields, if they’re trained on new skills that’s not directly relevant to their career field, it’s hard to know based on current databases, if they have those skills, if they’ve been trained on that. That’s just the tracking has limitations,” Matthews said.
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The report does not provide recommendations on how to address the identified skill gaps. It was intended to help the Air Force identify where gaps exist.
“This continues to be something that the Air Force is looking into — where there are gaps and how they can be addressed, and that has to be accounted for not just for this modern warfare environment, but also based on the demands of the government,” Matthews said.
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