The Air Force wants to expand cloud-based comms, official says

The Air Force’s top tech integration office has been busy deploying cloud-based command and communications tools for air defense. Now, the goal is to take them to operational systems while expanding use of tactical kits, said Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey, program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, or C3BM.

“I told you a year ago that we were deploying capability out, from a cloud-based command and control perspective, to air defense sectors. It's out, it's at all of them. It's running, they're using it. It's active,” Cropsey told reporters at the annual Air, Space & Cyber conference. 

Pentagon leaders have tasked each of the services with developing their own contribution for unified communications across platforms. The tech C3BM fields will feed the Air Force’s portion, the DAF Battle Network, which includes the Advanced Battle Management System, or ABMS. 

“These software-defined, hardware-enabled kinds of programs are never really done. You're in continuous integration, continuous development all the time. So the team is running at speed and scale on the software app side of this with regards to how we think about the homeland defense mission with [North American Aerospace Defense Command], [U.S. Northern Command],” Cropsey said. 

The Air Force has also deployed 16 kits called tactical operations center-light, or TOC-L, with plans to expand their use in 2025. 

“The teams are operationally beating the snot out of them right now. And they're doing that intentionally so that we can understand better, from an operational use context, what works and what doesn't work,” Cropsey said. “And then we're going to fold that immediately into the next iteration on those kits.” 

Cropsey announced plans last year to first introduce cloud-based command and control tools to air defense sectors before pushing them to larger command theaters. Now, the goal is to add those tools and a common user experience to the systems that air operations centers use to plan and execute major operations.

“The historical echelons that we've created between tactical, operational, and strategic are getting blurred more and more as the speed and the scale of conflict accelerates,” Cropsey said. “And so now, when we start talking about what that looks like as we're moving forward into the future, now we start talking about a common battle management interface capability, or CBI, that's taking that core [user interface and user experience] that's been built inside CBC2, and now starts to extend it into that operational layer.”