Speech: JD Vance Delivers the Commencement Address at the Air Force Academy - May 28, 2026

Well, first, thank you to Secretary Meink for the kind introduction. And let me just say it's real brave of the secretary to take pot shots at the Marines while surrounded by this level of air support. [Laughter] I put in my remarks this morning how wonderful it is to be here on this beautiful morning in Colorado Springs.

And that's a note to the vice president and the vice president's speechwriters to check the weather before you make a big speech. That's my first piece of advice. In all seriousness, I am particularly gratified to be honored today by this welcome and this kindness. Some of the people who make it possible for me to do my job, to make it possible for me to be vice president of the United States, are proud airmen and guardians.

The people who run Dover Air Force Base, the people who pilot and crew Air Force II, the staff at my house, the person who delivered me my daily intelligence briefing. They are proud to be airmen or proud to be guardians and I am proud to be here with you today. Without fail, they are skilled and brilliant and professional and kind, the very best of us, just like you.

And today, we celebrate not just you, not just the completed journey, but importantly, we celebrate something far more important -- that today you become commissioned officers and leaders of the great patriots that I interact with every single day. If they are the best of our nation, they are now under the charge of every single person who graduates from this great academy.

You all should be proud, and I hope you are, proud of what you've accomplished, proud of what you've endured, but you should also be sobered by the extraordinary responsibility our nation now entrusts to you. Indeed, so impressed am I with this group and the service that you lead, that I'm hiring a member of this very class for a summer internship after graduation.

So, Cadet Tang, where are you? Raise your hands. Consider this your very first meeting with the new boss. Congratulations. Don't screw it up. [Laughter] Now, all of you celebrate a journey that started not just four years ago, but decades before that. And so, I particularly want to welcome the people who made you who you are, the friends, the family, the faculty, the loved ones, and of course, the other distinguished guests who are honored to be joined here today.

So, I'd like to thank Secretary Meink in thanking several particular folks for being here. General Kreuser and Mrs. Cindy Wilsbach, thank you all. General Chance and Mrs. Jennifer Stoltzman, thank you guys for being here. And last but certainly not least, Lieutenant General Tony and Mrs. Tricia Bauernfeind, thank you all.

And I should also note that we're joined by another special guest, so honored and so proud of you that we have our great Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. Chris, thank you for being here and thank you for your lovely wife for being here to honor our airmen. But most of all, I want to thank the families who are with us this morning.

The young men and women we honor today deserve a tremendous amount of praise. But they know as well as I do that the seeds of many of their finest qualities were ultimately planted by all of you in the bleachers. And to our new officers, my second piece of advice is to show a spirit of gratitude above all to the people who made you who you are.

That will make you better airmen, it will make you better guardians and it will make you better leaders. When you're tired, remember the father or the mother who worked an extra shift to give you a little bit extra. When you're frustrated with someone under your command, and that will happen, remember the time a grandparent or a schoolteacher showed you patience and grace that you didn't deserve.

To the loved ones gathered here today, we will never forget that our nation's airmen and guardians were your sons and daughters long before they were ours. So, I hope you take pride in what they've become and know this -- the administration will always have your back just as these new officers have ours. Now, without further ado, Class of 2026. You've survived the Academy.

Congratulations. You've conquered the six-mile run out to Jacks Valley and back. You flung yourself off the 10M or from even higher up in the rafters. [Laughter] You overcame Astro 310. Endless racetracks. And this is a little surprising to me -- even a herd of wild hogs set loose near Fairchild Hall. Now, who is responsible for setting loose the wild hogs in Fairchild Hall? [Laughter] A few timid hands went up. Those are the future politicians. [Laughter] And lest any of the masterminds of that transgression sweat it out or fear, now is a good time to fall back on a great tradition and announce that I hereby grant amnesty to all cadets serving restrictions and confinements for category one and two offenses.

Class of 2026. You have never passed up an opportunity to prove your gumption to the world. All of you learned how to drop everything and get to inspection ready condition in exactly five minutes and 23 seconds. But beneath all the crazy stories and experiences, something serious and profound happened on this campus over the last four years.

Over that time, this institution has been preparing you to inherit one of the greatest military traditions in the world. And that's not an exaggeration. This academy has a long and storied history. It inculcates some of the finest and most timeless values of our armed services: integrity, service, excellence.

And you are the latest generation to join the proud, unbroken lineage, that strong blue line, you are its newest members. But one of the defining characteristics of American air power, and now space power, has always been its willingness to evolve alongside the nation it protects and the threats that we confront.

You pay homage to the great tradition, but you also innovate for the future. There's a phrase in the military, and I've heard it a lot, which is no plan survives first contact with the enemy. You've probably heard it so many times by now that it barely registers. I heard it a lot when I was in the Marine Corps.

But I've heard it more in the last 18 months, and it's taken on new meaning, because I've come to think that particular phrase explains something much larger than battlefield tactics. People like predictability; we like systems and routines and plans because they create the feeling that the future has already been negotiated on our behalf, it's easy.

And so, we build strategic frameworks and technical models, we build slide decks and PowerPoint presentations with arrows moving confidently across maps all over the world. And for a little while at least, it works. The world feels orderly. But then something crazy happens, it's called reality. Adversaries surprise you; your plan falls through overnight, some asshole cuts you off in the middle of an operation and makes your blood pressure skyrocket, but you can't panic and you can't overreact, not even if it's three in the morning.

And members of the Class of 2026. You are graduating into one of those eras where that reality, that unpredictability of warfare, is becoming impossible to ignore. Now, your nation, your vice president and the president of the United States who sends his very best, we ask you to apply that same adaptability, that same innovation that you learned at this academy to an entirely new era of warfare, one shaped by autonomous systems, AI and cyber operations.

Technologies evolving far faster than military institutions have historically been accustomed to. Now, some of you will operate in the air, some in cyber and some in space. Many of you will hold jobs that would have sounded like science fiction to graduates of this academy even 20 years ago go, but the roles you're about to take are dead serious.

And they are not science fiction, they are now reality, because our adversaries are studying this country every day. They're studying our military doctrine, they're studying our industrial capacity, they're setting our political divisions, our attention span, and new graduates, they are studying you. One of the defining facts for this particular class is that nobody can tell you the skills that you learned over the last four years will remain theoretical; they will become very practical and very real very soon.

Airmen and guardians are serving their nation overseas right now. Across Operation Epic Fury, Absolute Resolve, Southern Spear and Midnight Hammer they've excelled in executing unimaginably challenging missions under real world combat conditions. And time after time, they've made us proud. They've accomplished things that the rest of the world quite literally thought were impossible.

And trust me, I've seen the intelligence reports, your predecessors have done things that other people thought were impossible, and they did them anyway. And those adversaries woke up to realize that what they thought was impossible had been accomplished by our airmen and guardians. You had done them anyway.

Now, when the president needs options, it's our Air Force and our Space Force who provide them, redefining what is possible mission after mission through sheer human daring. It is American air power that allows us to penetrate denied airspace and strike critical targets across enormous distances with speed, efficiency and precision.

And when the president says he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, it is the men and women you will join in just 60 days who give force to that promise and to that guarantee. Now, because you will keep your end of the bargain with bravery and skill and dedication, you should expect some things out of your civilian leadership, out of the president, the vice president, the secretary of war.

This is why we've pushed forward with the F-47 and the Golden Dome and any number of new and advanced technologies. It's why the president has made improving military quality of life such a central focus; why he's insistent on increasing the defense budget to $1.5 trillion; and why he's proud to support pay raises, new barracks and new hospitals and new schools on base.

We want you to be supported so that you can focus on the fight and focus on winning. And you're entering an Air Force, and this is maybe the thing the president and I are most proud of, is that we've seen extraordinary recruitment numbers. The men and women you will lead in the Air Force and the Space Force are passionate, they are ready to go, they are excited to serve, and they will look to you for the leadership of the future.

The mission that we will ask them to do under your leadership will showcase the strength, the ingenuity, and especially the sound moral judgment of our warfighters. And I want to tell you that I saw this ingenuity very real when we had this incredible mission where the 494th Fighter Squadron lost a couple of pilots downed in Iran.

Now we knew they were alive; we didn't know exactly where they were. The first confirmation that both crew members' beacons were active actually happened about a day after these pilots -- or the second pilot, I should say, went down. And there was this period where we were worried that maybe he wasn't alive, and then this moment of joy when we realized that he was.

But that moment of joy, that moment of celebration lasted very shortly because we knew we had somebody behind enemy lines that we had to go rescue. Now your Air Force, your future force went in there and did the impossible, sent airplanes into places where no one thought they could land, assembled helicopters on site, and went and retrieved an American pilot behind enemy lines.

One of the most daring and amazing things that I've ever seen. But I've never told anybody this before. I was sitting in a secured conference room on the phone with our military leadership and our civilian leadership, and that operation hit a bit of a snag. And I think a lot of us were looking around and saying, are we worried here that this is not going to be as successful as we thought it might?

But it was an Air Force general who said, Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, we've hit some snags, but I promise you, we're still going to get everyone out alive. And that was our great Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine. So smooth, so confident, and that's exactly what we did. And what we learned is that sometimes Plan A doesn't always work out, sometimes Plan B doesn't always work out.

But the reason why the Air Force and the Space Force are so powerful is because they go from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C, and they execute time and time again. And that's what makes you the best Air Force and the best Space Force anywhere in the world. But that's the legacy of this academy. Since this institution's first commissioning in 1959, generations of airmen and guardians have carried that tradition through times of war.

Some returned home as legends, pilots and crews whose daring would inspire books and films and direct the eyes of countless young Americans to the skies. Others, like the exemplar of your class, gave everything, sacrificing their lives for a nation that would forever grieve their loss. All these patriots helped write the story of American air power across the most consequential conflicts of the last 60-70 years.

From the skies over occupied Europe to MiG Alley in Korea, to the long years of combat over Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, generations of airmen have served their country with extraordinary skill and professionalism. And now, of course, it is our guardians leading that same mission into space and into cyber.

Class of 2026. This tradition will very soon become your very own, something that gives you credibility, something that people look to you and say, you've got to be impressive because you've got on that beautiful uniform, but also something that you are entrusted to protect and to build on for the next generation.

In 60 days, you will arrive at your first assignments and realize the distance between training and real-world operations is much shorter than you might have expected. You'll be given tasks that sound impossible, and you'll be leading senior enlisted folks, some of whom joined the Air Force or joined the Space Force before you were even born, but they will look to you for leadership.

But you will also arrive prepared through world class academics and athletics of this institution, yes, but most importantly, through repeated exposure to intense fatigue, uncertainty, and responsibility. I love this phrase, No Quit, All Grit. And one thing I noticed while learning about your stories is how often, despite all your successes, things didn't always go exactly as you planned.

Broken elevators during move in, painting the strips red only to spend the next week mopping them clean after a snowstorm. Speaking of which, snow, lots of snow in Colorado Springs. Snow during recognition. Snow during culminating exercises. Snow during seemingly every single major event but you didn't let it stop you.

None of these stories are described by all of you bitterly; you just laugh about it, you carry on, you have the right attitude. And that's as good a sign as any that the amazing education you received has taken root. Most people spend their entire lives trying to eliminate uncertainty. America's greatest military institutions, such as this one, teach you to thrive in it. You thrive in uncertainty and that's what makes you so lethal.

One of the reasons this country invests in institutions like this is because trust, versatility, and fortitude are always important, whatever the weapons and whatever the technology. And I think they become especially important the moment reality collides with our best hopes and our best plans for the battlefield.

Cadets, as all of you know, this year our great nation will celebrate 250 years since the founding. Every new generation born in the United States inherits a civilization that was built by somebody else but must be built upon by the next generation. And with your commissioning that duty passes to you. The general, the superintendent, said something to me while you were marching out, and let me just say for your friends and family, did they look good marching out or what?

I knew we had the toughest air Force and Space Force, now I know that we also have the best-looking Air Force and Space Force anywhere in the world. But the general said something to me he said, you know, sometimes I read headlines and it's easy to get sad or depressed about the state of this country. But when I look at you, when I look at the future of America, I feel great hope that we are and will remain the greatest country anywhere in the world.

But with your commissioning the duty to make America the very best it can be, that duty passes to you. And now, Class of 2026. You join that long blue line at a moment when your nation needs your skill, your nation needs your adaptability, your nation needs your discipline, your sense of honor and your love of your fellow Americans.

Now, as a lot of you, of course, know, we are in graduation season here in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans, most of them civilian, have celebrated or will celebrate graduations during this season. But almost none of them will have your responsibility, quite literally decisions over life and death.

And if you think about it, that responsibility comes from trust. Your nation gives you incredible responsibility because we believe in you. And this brings me to my final and maybe my most important point. You know, this is the only commencement speech that I'm giving this year, and so I've watched a few highlights of graduation speeches where this or that corporate leader will discuss artificial intelligence, AI, and be met with literal boos.

Now you can't boo me, I'm the vice president of the United States, but your fellow Americans are understandably -- they're worried about AI, about how it will affect the labor market, how it will distribute resources, and how it has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another, our social lives.

But the thing I worry about most with AI is how it will change warfare. Now, Pope Leo the 14th in a recent document, encouraged us as human beings not to outsource the most important moral decisions to digital technology. And I want to endorse that sentiment and make it more specific to each and every one of you.

AI will inevitably change warfare and, of course, as you've learned over the last four years, it already has. But one of the things that makes Americans unique, that makes you as warfighters unique, is that we wage war justly. But when I say that we, all of us, wage war justly, I mean fundamentally that you must do so because you are the ones who execute, you are the ones who lead on the battlefield.

You are the ones who ensure that our lethality in war, which is amazing and necessary, it also coexists with our heart and with our conscience. It is an incredible burden to put on your shoulders, but it is one that we entrust to you with full confidence. And if the warfare of the future is to live up to the moral values of our ancestors, decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines.

So, as AI transforms the battlefield in some ways positively, in some ways not, I ask that you be jealous and selfish about your role as a decision maker in warfare. Use technology to make you better but never submit to it. You are the masters of warfare and both your minds, but also your hearts are the opposite of artificial.

Cadets, four years later, you are fundamentally different from the young men and women who first stepped in to the footprints on I-day. You have changed, absolutely, but the world has changed around you. And the mission to defend our United States, no matter what the world may throw at us, remains the same, and so does the deep gratitude that the rest of America feels for you.

So, the Class of 2026. Congratulations. Your country is asking a great deal from you, but it would not be asking it if we didn't believe that you were capable of carrying that duty every single day.

So, let me say, from the president of the United States and from the bottom of my heart to this class of cadets who will soon become officers, I am proud of you. I'm proud of you, I love you, and I'll be rooting for you every single step of the way. Congratulations, Class of 2026.