Air Force Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach was confirmed as the next Air Force chief of staff, the last hurdle before he takes the service’s top spot from Gen. David Allvin. Allvin unexpectedly left the position in August, when he announced his retirement after roughly two years into the four-year job.
Wilsbach’s path to the service’s top position was unconventional, as several of President Donald Trump’s most recent picks for senior generals have been. A career fighter pilot, Wilsbach announced earlier this year that he would be retiring as the commanding general of Air Combat Command, the Air Force’s largest command, but canceled his planned retirement to take the job when Allvin announced that he was retiring.
In his Oct.9 hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wilsbach said one of the major challenges he anticipates tackling is the retention of pilots and generating more flight hours for training across the Air Force’s aging fleet.
He’ll now report directly to another four-star Air Force general and career fighter pilot who also put off retirement to join Trump’s senior Pentagon leaders, Gen. Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Caine retired as a two-star general in December 2024, but was brought back on active duty and elevated to the military’s top position by Trump in April.
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Wilsbach was one of two generals whose candidacies for the top service job were unusually public, along with Global Strike Command leader Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere. Several retired Air Force generals publicly endorsed Wilsbach after Allvin’s departure, an unusually public gesture by retired general officers. Wilsbach also came under fire from far-right-leaning critics, who attacked his support of diversity initiatives earlier in his career. Supporters noted that such policies were widespread at the time, and Wilsbach’s participation would have been mandatory as a commander.
As the commander of Air Combat Command, Wilsbach cultivated a reputation for strict adherence to uniform and appearance standards. In one small case, he turned down a request for aircraft mechanics at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, to be allowed to wear boonie hats on the flight line to ward off the desert heat during the summer months. In a wider-ranging policy, he launched a command-wide focus on uniform inspections, mandating regular open ranks inspections for all 135,000 airmen in the command, and a critical approach to medical shaving waivers.
“While the vast majority of Airmen maintain professional standards, I am concerned by a discernible decline in the commitment to, and enforcement of, military standards,” Wilsbach wrote in a memo announcing the ACC policies. “This will change.”
