Air Force Creates New Deputy Chief Role for Cyber and Comms

The Air Force has split one of its top leadership roles to create a new deputy chief of staff job focused on command, control, communications, and cyber—a move meant to devote more attention to missions at the core of modern warfare.

For years, Air Force headquarters has combined its A2 office, which manages intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and its A6 office, which handles cyber warfare, under one deputy chief of staff. Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback was the most recent official to hold that title. 

Now the service is breaking those offices apart, expanding the Air Staff to include a separate A6 position: the deputy chief of staff for warfighter communications and cyber systems. Maj. Gen. Michele C. Edmondson, previously a senior adviser to the Air Force undersecretary, is taking on the job. 

The Air Force unveiled the change at a July 23 ceremony at the Pentagon.

“Our mission is to ensure warfighters have the reliable, secure communications they need to succeed in a complex and contested environment,” Edmondson, who also led the training organization 2nd Air Force, said in a statement. “We’re building an enterprise that connects people, systems and decisions at the speed required by today’s operational demands.”  

In a release, the Air Force called the move “one of the most significant reorganizations of the Air Staff in over 30 years.” The change is a “necessary step to treat communications and cyber as the operational enablers they are,” Lauderback said. 

The A6 will ensure comms and cyber capabilities are “available, secure, and aligned with warfighter priorities,” Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin added.

The A2 job has become the deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Brig. Gen. Max E. Pearson was nominated to jump a grade to lieutenant general to take that position. 

The Joint Staff, the Army, and the Navy separate out the intelligence and command, control, communications, and cyber directorates. The Air Force’s move to do so coincides with a yearslong push to upgrade the service’s command-and-control networks to fit with the broader Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort. 

Service officials have sought to elevate cyber warfare, too. Most notably, they planned to elevate Air Forces Cyber out of 16th Air Force, which trains and equips the service’s offensive and defensive cyber operators, to become a separate component. That move is still pending.