By
Theresa Hitchens on May 14, 2021 at 4:59 PM
F-22 Raptor
WASHINGTON: A key Air Force focus for the 2023-2027 budget will be “agile combat employment,” and the problem of contested logistics in globalized warfare, says Lt. Gen. David Nahom, service deputy chief of staff for plans and programs.
“As we look forward in our investment, you’re gonna hear us spend a lot of time on we’re calling ‘agile combat employment,’ or ACE: the ability to operate away from establish runways, operate in a manner that makes difficult problems for our adversaries.”
But it’s unclear what ACE will mean as far as equipment and future spending, because the Air Force has yet to fully flesh out the new operational concept for fighting globalized war with Russia and/or China with Beijing in particular moving to beef up its missile inventories and other capabilities for power projection.
"One of the requirements is going to be that all data developed and produced by every weapon system we have has to be made accessible, period," Gen. John Hyten said today.
By
Theresa Hitchens on May 11, 2021 at 5:02 PM
WASHINGTON: The Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), led by Joint Chiefs Vice-Chairman Gen. John Hyten, is asserting new powers to direct how the services fulfill Combatant Commanders’ needs to ensure the future Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC) is not undercut by competing service imperatives and parochial rivalries.
This represents “a little bit of a different take on how the JROC has been run before,” said Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, deputy director of the Joint Staff J6 directorate for Command, Control, Communications, & Computers/Cyber. The idea, he told AFCEA today, is for the JROC to be “more prescriptive, directive to the services.”
“[On] common data standards, we’re trying to find the right balance there, [because] there was a lot of pushback,” Parker said today. “So we’re looking for a minimum required when necessary and really continue to focus on federated [standards].”
“We will have a mission partner federated data fabric out there,” he said, “[but] we acknowledge the services, combatant commands, other agencies are going to have their own fabrics that we need to be able to connect with and interoperate with.”
In layman’s terms: The Defense Department will let its subordinate organizations develop their own data standards, but they’ll need to be compatible enough that the Joint Staff can then knit them together (“federate” them”).