Air Force stands up ‘provisional’ Integrated Capabilities Command

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin announced Monday that the service has stood up a “provisional” Integrated Capabilities Command (ICC) that will begin early work to drive the service’s modernization plans.

One of the new organizations created as part of the department’s plan to “reoptimize” for future warfare, the ICC is a major command that will develop operational concepts, integrated capability requirements and modernization plans for the entire service. Speaking during a keynote at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference, Allvin said the provisional command will be led by Maj. Gen. Mark Mitchum, who most recently served as the chief of staff’s special assistant. 

“Their first task to do, is be able to evaluate the way we’re modernizing our Air Force by core functions, … to really answer that question in order to do what and evaluate in terms of the mission threats that need to be accomplished,” Allvin later told reporters during a roundtable.

Allvin has previously said the ICC is intended to address the service’s current capability development process — which he has described as “diffused and fragmented” across each major command — by creating a single organization responsible for generating new requirements for both current and future platforms. 

Around 100 personnel are currently assigned to the provisional ICC and they’re working out of their previous locations or assignments, Allvin explained. The aim is to have up to 800 people working in the final iteration of the command. 

“We have to have the full manning documents understood, have to do the full strategic basing process, full congressional notification, full nomination of the leadership — which is going to be a three-star that has to be nominated and confirmed,” Allvin said. “I would like to have it done within calendar year 2025. A lot of that will be dependent upon how fast we can move through the processes and how fast we can go through the assignment process, too.”

Meanwhile, the Air Force has also named Gen. Duke Richardson to be the service’s first capability development executive officer (CDEO) and lead the new Integrated Development Office — also created under the department’s reorganization efforts — within Air Force Materiel Command. Richardson will serve in a “dual-hat” role as both the CDEO and in his current position as AFMC commander, an Air Force official told DefenseScoop.

Naming Richardson as CDEO is the first step to standing up the Integrated Development Office, Air Force acquisition head Andrew Hunter told reporters Monday during a roundtable. In the new role, Richardson will be responsible for the service’s developmental planning efforts for prototypes and technologies that aren’t quite ready to be considered programs of record and need additional work on development or integration.

“It’s basically saying, ‘We understand where we need to go with the force, and we’ve laid the foundation for how we’re going to get there,’” Hunter said. “It’s not program management, per se, because you aren’t at the stage of the game where you’re executing a program, you’re laying the foundation.”