US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has underscored an urgent need for sweeping modernization to keep pace with the growing capabilities of China’s military. The commentary, reported by a major news service, frames modernization as more than a line item in the budget; it is a strategic pivot designed to ensure air power remains credible and ready in an era of intensifying strategic competition.
Kendall highlighted that current defense spending growth in the United States trails the trajectory of China’s defense budget expansion. This gap, he argued, could erode technological advantages and readiness if not addressed with deliberate investment in people, platforms, and data-driven logistics. The emphasis is on accelerating capabilities across the full spectrum of air and space operations, from advanced aircraft to resilient command and control networks that can survive peer-level threats.
Beyond the broader modernization push, attention has focused on a flagship modernization effort known within defense circles as the next generation doomsday capability. A major contract valued at approximately 13 billion dollars has been awarded to the Sierra Nevada Corporation to develop an advanced airborne command post intended to ensure senior national leaders can maintain communication and command authority in a crisis. This project envisions a significantly upgraded aircraft to substitute aging platforms that entered service in the 1970s and are nearing the end of their service life. The work is distributed across several states, with design and modification efforts coordinated from facilities in Colorado, Nevada, and Ohio, and the program is projected to reach milestones through the mid-2030s, including a planned completion around 2036.
In parallel, progress on a broader reform of the airborne command and control fleet has included the E-XX program, widely described in defense circles as a future cornerstone for secure, survivable communications with intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The evolving communications architecture for this family of aircraft is being designed to ensure robust links under contested conditions, reducing susceptibility to jamming and cyber interference while maintaining continuous situational awareness for senior decision-makers across multiple domains.
Earlier reporting about the Doomsday Plane family noted that aircraft tracking data recently captured by flight monitoring services pointed to activity tied to the high-priority airborne command post concept, including instances in which assets associated with this mission profile appeared in locations such as Vilnius. This kind of activity illustrates how the United States continues to test and validate the mobility and reach of its most sensitive communications platforms, even as the broader modernization program evolves through several stages of testing, evaluation, and capability integration.
Overall, the modernization effort represents a multi-decade planning horizon that aligns funding, technology acquisition, and strategic objectives to preserve command and control viability in a competitive security environment. The aim is not only to replace aging hardware but also to upgrade the underlying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance networks, the secure data links that bind them, and the personnel programs responsible for keeping this complex system ready under pressure. Official representatives emphasize that progress will be measured not only by the form of the hardware but also by the resilience of the decision loops, the speed of information flow, and the ability to operate from dispersed, survivable locations in a contested global theater. The broader narrative remains one of steady modernization as the United States seeks to maintain aerospace advantages while adapting to evolving threats and advancing technologies across air, space, and cyber domains.