Air University captures lessons from Air Force ACE implementation
MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. -- After helping lead the Air Force's implementation of Agile Combat Employment, Sandeep Mulgund wanted to document what the service learned while moving ACE from an emerging concept into the way the Air Force operates.
He didn't want to do it right away.
Mulgund left the Air Staff in April 2025, after the work wrapped up at the end of 2024. He wanted some distance from the effort before looking back at what happened and what might help the next team asked to take on something similar.
“I was less interested in those kinds of tactical sort of immediate reactions and more interested in looking back on it with the passage of time and putting things in context to be able to have a bit broader perspective,” Mulgund said during an Air University Press Author Connect interview.
The idea eventually came to Air University.
Mulgund pitched it to then-Air University commander Lt. Gen. Andrea Tullos in September 2025. Air University captured the resulting work through Air University Press inImplementing New Airpower Concepts: Insights from Agile Combat Employment.
Mulgund wasn't trying to write only about ACE. He also wanted to capture lessons that could help the next team trying to move a major effort across the Air Force.
“There’s always the next initiative to get after as our idea for operations, the threat environment, and new technologies evolve,” Mulgund said. “I thought there were some things we learned that the next such team can use to enable them to accelerate whatever they’re getting after.”
“A large part of it was just learning how to coordinate a big endeavor across the entire Air Force,” he said.
Some of those lessons came from looking much further back.
For decades, the Air Force had grown accustomed to generating airpower from large, fixed locations in largely uncontested environments. Mulgund found examples from an earlier era when that wasn't the case.
He looked to the 8th Air Force operating from England, the 9th Air Force on the European continent, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's island-hopping campaign in the South Pacific and the Flying Tigers in China during World War II.
Those forces also had to figure out how to generate airpower while operating under threat.
“What we have done with ACE over the last few years is part of a larger evolution of air power,” Mulgund said.
Mulgund also looked at how the Air Force organized the ACE effort.
The service established an ACE working group that operated much like an operations planning team. People from across the Air Force joined the effort, many while still doing their regular jobs.
The working group wasn't supposed to become permanent.
“Once you get to some kind of steady state, it is time to fold the work back into normal staff processes rather than it being a special initiative,” Mulgund said.
By fall 2024, he believed ACE had reached that point. The concept had been embedded in Air Force doctrine, appropriations and technology development.
“Disbanding the working group was the right decision,” Mulgund said.
There was still work left to do.
“I would say that the area where the most work remains to be done is joint integration,” Mulgund said.
The Army has multidomain operations. The Marine Corps has expeditionary advanced base operations. The Navy has distributed maritime operations. Each service has worked through its own approach to operating with a lighter footprint and generating combat power across domains.
Mulgund said the services then have to figure out how those approaches work together.
“What often tends to happen is that each military service first works to figure out what they are doing, and then they figure out how to make it work across the joint force,” he said.
Joint exercises are part of that process.
“The services don’t really start to figure it out until they conduct joint exercises like Bamboo Eagle,” Mulgund said. “So, there remains a fair bit of work to do in terms of military service crosspollination as we move forward.”
The Air Force has also worked through ACE with allies and partners.
Mulgund pointed to the Royal Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force, along with the Royal Canadian Air Force, French Air and Space Force and Korean Air Force, as partners working through similar questions about generating airpower from different locations and under different conditions.
His work on ACE has also led him toward another subject.
Mulgund is developing a book on command and control. He said discussions about command and control often focus on technology, communications systems and resilient networks.
Those things matter, he said, but they aren't enough on their own.
“Indeed, these aspects of command and control are critical,” Mulgund said. “However, they cannot take command and control forward on their own.”
For Mulgund, it comes back to people making decisions when they don't have perfect information.
“What is required is that we get back to the fundamentals of command and control, or what I call the human endeavor of decision making in the presence of uncertainty,” he said.
Technology will keep changing. So will the operating environment. Mulgund said uncertainty will remain.
“Uncertainty and complexity, fog and friction, have never gone away,” Mulgund said. “They just evolve and transform.”
That's part of why Mulgund wanted some distance before looking back at ACE.
The next Air Force-wide effort won't look exactly like this one. Mulgund's point was that the people working it shouldn't have to relearn everything his team learned while moving ACE across the service.
That's where the work fits at Air University.
Mulgund brought experience from an Air Force-wide operational change effort into the university. Air University Press provided the publishing capability to capture those lessons and make them available to the force.
It's one example of Air University operating as an integrated enterprise. The university brings together capabilities from across its schools, centers and other organizations based on what a problem requires. In this case, publishing helped preserve lessons from an operational effort. Other problems may call for education, research, doctrine, wargaming or technical expertise.
That approach supports Air University's work to forge expert joint warfighters and solve operational problems for the Joint Force.
Mulgund's paper also leaves some questions open. He identifies joint integration as an area where more work remains and is carrying lessons from ACE into his research on command and control, where his focus is on people making decisions under uncertainty.
For him, the reason for writing the paper was simpler.
“There’s always the next initiative to get after,” he said.
He wanted the people working that next initiative to have the lessons from this one.
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