New leader chosen for Air Force’s information warfare command
President Biden has nominated Maj. Gen. Kevin Kennedy to be the next commander of the 16th Air Force, the service’s information warfare entity, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy, who is currently serving as the director of operations for U.S. Cyber Command, would get his third star and succeed Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh. Haugh was recently selected to serve as Cyber Command’s deputy commander in April.
16th Air Force was created in 2019 and serves as the first information warfare entity for the Air Force. It combines cyber — serving as the main service component to Cyber Command — electronic warfare, signals intelligence, information operations and weather data.
Since its creation, 16th Air Force has rallied around a concept of convergence where it combines these various disciplines and takes a problem-centric approach to provide combatant commanders with options.
“From that data is there an outcome we want to achieve?” Haugh has previously said. “Based on that, now you have options. Is that something a combatant commander would like to be able to expose, is it something that an interagency wants to communicate to an ally, or is there something in there that is an illegal activity that might lead to a sanction?”
Kennedy has previously served in a number of cyber roles to include principal director to the deputy CIO for command, control, communications and computers and information infrastructure capabilities at the Department of Defense; director of cyberspace strategy and policy in the office of information dominance and CIO for the Secretary of the Air Force; assistant deputy CIO for digital transformation and assistant chief of staff for cyber effects operations at the headquarters Air Force level.
