Air Force Battle Network Is Here and Now

AFA NEWS: Air Force Battle Network Is Here and Now

Air Force illustration

AURORA, Colorado — The Air Force’s contribution to the Defense Department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort has expanded over the last two years and it is now fielding capabilities, service leaders said.

While the Advanced Battle Management System still exists as a program of record and budget line, the service has broadened its CJADC2 efforts to the Department of the Air Force Battle Network. And the service is pushing out capabilities in “thin slices,” Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, program executive officer for command, control, communications and battle management, told reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium Feb. 14.

Since September, the Air Force has deployed cloud-based command and control into the Eastern and Canadian Air Defense Sectors, and the technology is operational, Cropsey said. “We will continue to knock down those pins as we’re moving forward to the rest of those air defense sectors.”

The Air Force has also deployed 16 tactical operation center-light kits, “which is really … the basic building block for where we’re going for infrastructure for [command and control],” he said.

Those kits — which he described as a “high-powered computer sitting in front of you” with some “wicked good fusion and data integration” of hundreds of feeds — are deployed to various locations globally and are being integrated into joint combatant command-level and service-sponsored exercises, including the Army’s upcoming Project Convergence exercise, he said.

“So, we’re giving the operator an opportunity to go muck around with it and figure out what works, what doesn’t work, what we need to modify, how we need to maybe improve or change some of the” user interface, Cropsey said.

In addition, the service needs to figure out “which data for what person for what decisions so that you can simplify as much as you can” and empower the operator to make the best decisions, he said. “And that’s where we’re spending a lot of our time in that interaction with the operational team saying, ‘Okay, did that help, or did that distract you? Did you need more data or less data? Was it the right data or the wrong data?”

The service plans to move into a phase two for that program to scale the capability — which he said is needed in the hundreds of units. However, the lack of fiscal year 2024 funding has that in limbo.

“Not having a budget … it’s killing me, because my budget was supposed to double this year,” he continued. “So, my ability to do what we need to do at scale is literally completely hamstrung right now. I have axed strategies that I’ve had to basically put on the shelf because contracting officers don’t like you to put [requests for proposals] out when you don’t have money for them.”

His office has burned through money available under the continuing resolution to complete initial delivery of the tactical operation center-light kits, but other things are getting pushed, such as “all the other parts of the architecture that would have been expansions off of what I was already doing,” he said. “So, like a lot of this is all digital infrastructure, right? So, it all falls under the digital infrastructure heading.”

“So, that deployable digital infrastructure is the one that we’re still pulling the thread on,” he continued. “But all of these enabling, and I’ll say, variable mission sets off of that, that all have different requirements around them, I basically back burnered.”

Cloud-based command and control, or CBC2, has to get delivered, he said. “So, I will kick everything else to the curb in order to keep CBC2 on schedule and on delivery, which we have done. But it’s been at the expense of being able to expand that software pipeline into other places and other capabilities.”

Still, his office rolled out some other small contracts in recent weeks using funds available under the continuing resolution, he added. The office issued two contracts for track-fusion integration. One went to Lockheed Martin and Kintetica and the other to SciTec.

“And they’re both going to be on basically a six-month sprint,” Cropsey said. “They’re going to be charging the hill with regards to what we need to do on that front with algorithms and data fusion,” he said.

“Our digital infrastructure program is also mature and [is] a whole portfolio of different processing nodes and network capabilities that you’re going to start seeing deployed as well,” he said.

“And then the other thing that we’ve got going, our distributive battle management node, is an element that goes out and grabs these individual pieces and integrates them into a single capability offering. That’s also ready to start getting into initial deliveries under our phase one, with air control squadrons in multiple different [areas of responsibility],” he said.

Cropsey described the work his office is doing as “starting at the center and then … growing that out incrementally and as rapidly as we can.”

Building out the Department of the Air Force Battle Network is not going to be a big, multimillion-dollar program or acquisition, he said.

The approach is “getting to relatively straightforward, capable systems that work and then rapidly iterating off of them — that’s the model that we’re using,” he said.

“You’re going to see lots of very targeted, specific kinds of awards that are coming out to do a thing over here, a thing over there, do some integration, present another capability and then work it back into the operational scene as quickly as we can so that we’re giving the operators a lot of touch time and a lot of feedback.”

Cropsey reiterated that the acquisition approach has to be iterative because there is no finished product when it comes to command and control. Capability is needed urgently.

The acquisition approach is fueled by a requirements generation process that is focusing on mission threads and kill chains rather than specific platforms, Brig. Gen. Daniel Clayton, director of the Advanced Battle Management System Cross-Functional Team, told reporters.

The team has applied a “model-based systems engineering approach to kind of functionally decompose joint military operations,” he said. “In that process, we think about command and control as planning, command and battle management.”

Under battle management, there are 13 sub-functions, he said. “This is something … where industry can come in and say, ‘Hey, we think that we have a software application that can apply to one of those 13 sub-functions for battle management’ … there’s an opportunity here for industry to come in at the software application [or] at the microservice level to provide an offering.”

“We’ve applied some scientific rigor to the art of” command and control “that maybe no one has done before,” he said. “But based on this baselining and then experimenting, we can validate and say, ‘Yes, if you apply automation to this human-machine team, it actually does move the needle and you get better results. Cloud-based command [and] control is just one instantiation of a microservice or a software application that has come in” from industry.

Lastly, the Department of the Air Force Battle Network requirements and acquisition teams are keeping a close eye on Ukraine for lessons that could shape the Air Force’s approach.

The Ukrainians are “working through different aspects of network connectivity … the ability to kind of do dynamic, on-the-fly updates” to mission plans, Cropsey said. Having to toss out plans and make more operational decisions on the fly requires more network and system capability.

“We’ve obviously ingested a lot of that information and a lot of that observational, anecdotal information that those kinds of opportunities are affording us,” he said.

Clayton said the war in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of adopting commercial technology.

“The speed with which they were able to take commercial-off-the-shelf readily available today and then apply it for military applications, I think that is a significant lesson learned — more a lesson identified — but we may be able to do something with,” he said.

“I think we’re at an inflection point in history where … in a lot of ways the U.S. military will be doing less,” he continued. “Like we didn’t develop it ourselves, right? It’s about how can we rapidly take stuff off the shelf and apply it to military use cases?”

Topics: Battlefield Communications