Lt. Gen. Tim Haugh
WASHINGTON: While the Air Force is moving fast to develop new, more secure cloud-based environments for all-domain data management, the service continues to be hampered by its aging IT infrastructure, says Lt. Gen. Tim Haugh, commander of the 16th Air Force.
“Our ability to get out from underneath our infrastructure is probably our biggest challenge,” he told the JADC2 and All Domain Warfare Symposium, sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), today.
Haugh explained that the Air Force has developed “two incredible building blocks” to underpin its Advanced Battle Management System (AMBS), designed to enable Joint All-Domain Command and Control:
- A Microsoft Office 365 Azure cloud, where the service is migrating its “daily productivity software,” such as email, under the Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) effort launched in 2017.
- cloudONE, “where we put all of our business systems and operational data.”
The problem is being able to reliably connect to those cloud services via current IT systems. “Our challenge is reaching those two awesome cloud instances from within our own infrastructure,” he stressed.
Fixing “the underlying infrastructure is a challenge because of how broad in scope and scale it is,” Haugh, who had a busy day, elaborated in a presentation to C4ISR’s annual CyberCon 2020 this morning.
This is the reason the service is now considering turning to commercial companies to provide IT as a service, he told NDIA, starting with pilot programs at several locations. “Our ‘enterprise as a service’ risk reduction activities are informing those pilots that will allow us to leverage more and more commercial infrastructure, as opposed to Air Force providing infrastructure at many of our bases,” he said.
As Breaking D readers know, the 16th Air Force was created within Air Combat Command last October, integrating the former 24th and 26th Air Forces into a single headquarters to manage combined intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, cyber, electronic warfare, and information operations. Thus, Haugh’s portfolio crosses a large number of ongoing service efforts linked to its leading role in developing the JADC2 concept.
In the area of integrating ISR sensors across the air, land, sea, space and cyberspace domains into JADC2, Haugh said the biggest hurdle is figuring out how to create public-private partnerships with industry to allow the Air Force — and DoD writ large — to use the data it already has “to get us to outcomes faster.” Developing and allowing new machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithms to compile, integrate and make sense of the vast amount of ISR data currently collected is complicated because so many of the sensor systems are proprietary, he explained.
“We’ve got to get rid of the proprietary nature of much of the things we built to do our previous ISR missions, and be able to transform that into either relevant data or relevant systems that meet the demand of today,” he said.
