You are listening to War in the Rocks, a podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the editor-in-chief of Warren the Rocks.

In this episode, I sat down with some people from the Air Force, one of whom you might have heard from before on this podcast, General Dave Goldfield, Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

And we spoke about the way that the Air Force is positioning itself for great power competition and the possibility of a major power war

General Goldfein thanks so much for doing this.

You bet.

And thanks to the lift home from Alabama.

I don't know how I would have gotten home otherwise.

Absolutely.

They have you.

So I'd love to talk about and hear from you about how the Air Force is responding to guidance in the national defense strategy

and rewarning itself away from what have defined the last, you know, since 9-11, these continuous

fixed operations in Afghanistan and later Iraq

towards great power competition primarily with Russia and China in mind.

Well, for us it starts with the key tasks that we're responsible for not only in the Air Force but across the joint team, our allies and partners, but the tasks begin with defending the homeland.

And then from defending the homeland, we've also got two-thirds of the nuclear enterprise.

So we're working side by side with the United States Navy.

We're responsible for a safe, secure, effective nuclear deterrent and getting the president where he needs to be when he needs to be

connected to forces on our worst day as a nation and we have to be prepared to fight and win and defeat a pure threat and we have to be prepared to fight and win and defeat a pure threat.

And we have to assume that if in fact we get anchored in that kind of a fight,

that a rogue nation, middle weight, might choose to take us on and take advantage.

And so we've got to be able to deter while we fight and win.

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