Will the Air Force go Facebook-style for next-gen comm?
Drop the traditional model of one-on-one communications in favor of a social media-format broadcasting of information, one top official advocates.
As the Air Force prepares to bring in its next generation of airmen, the service faces a new kind of service member: the digital native raised in a culture of broadcasting information of all kinds. That gulf between the new generation and the digital-immigrant Air Force makeup until now must be reconciled in order to operate in today’s theater, according to a top Air Force official speaking Oct. 21 at an AFCEA event in Vienna, Va.
It’s a matter of moving from traditional, one-on-one telephone-style contact to the mass approach of today’s social media.
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“Marconi to Google – that’s Ma Bell to Facebook. The Marconi is a radio, and it was a great way to communicate one human at a time. But you can step on each other or delay the information exchange requirement maneuvers,” said Brig. Gen. Bob Ranck, director of warfighter systems integration, Air Force CIO/A6. “If you’re moving to Google or Facebook then you’re sharing with a broader audience with a greater information exchange requirement.”
Like exchanges on Facebook – but with decidedly greater implications – communications between airmen and aircraft need to be broadcast and then distributed as necessary by those receiving the info.
“Unfortunately we design individual aircraft to communicate with individual aircraft and individual populations. It’s a Ma Bell mentality. It’s not a network ... it’s only one information exchange requirement at a time,” Ranck said. “We ought to be designing a network so that information is not passed from one person to another, but published and subscribed. When you publish and subscribe the information, the guys that need it can pick it up and can do the individual call if they need to.”
Ranck said that within his directorate, they are working to overcome the cultural barriers between the two generations – and the traditional Air Force methods of communications built on archaic requirements and realities.
“Fast forward to the director of warfighting systems integration [office], with one foot in the obsolete world, and one foot in the IT world, recognizing that I’m a digital immigrant and the people I’m building requirements for ... are people who expect more than second-generation communications in a fifth-generation aircraft,” he said.