Air Force Culls ABMS Experiment After Budget Cut

WASHINGTON: The Air Force’s premier Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) program plans to hold a fifth ‘onramp’ experiment this summer, but it was forced by Congress’s budget whack to drop a sixth event designed to include allies in the Pacific region, says the service’s Chief Architect,Preston Dunlap.

ABMS initially had three onramps — the service’s term for the ABMS tech evaluation exercises — planned for this year, numbers four, five and six, he told reporters today. The sixth one “was going to be in partnership with Australia, and allies and partners, in the Pacific Rim,” he said, but “just due to the budget constraints, we had to pull the plug on that.”

The 2021 spending bill passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump Dec. 27 slashed the ABMS budget nearly in half: from the requested $302 million to just $159 million.

The summer onramp will help tighten the ABMS program’s focus, he said, to put priority on tech to aide operators implement DoD’s emerging Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy for managing fast-paced, computerized global warfare with peer adversaries.

“We’re going to look at sort of three big mission thrusts that cut across the services,” Dunlap explained.  “Number one: decisions priority and information advantage. Two is being able to do survivable, agile, and distributed operations. And number three: being able to do rapid, all-domain kill chains. So … those will form the basis of the next [onramp], and then shape the events going forward into FY22.”

“What we want to be able to do is use these events to not only drive the technology forward, but to be able to evaluate, develop CONOPS and technology as a ‘recipe’ for how we use them as a system-of-systems, or capabilities, together,” he added.

While Dunlap continues to be in charge of ABMS-related R&D abd the onramp experiments, responsibility for transitioning ABMS tech into acquisition programs of record since late last year has been in the hands of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. RCO already has identified what capabilities are to be included in the program’s first set of planned buys, called “releaseONE.” These include some 16 separate ABMS ‘products,’ such as cloudONE and platformONE, that have been tested through the ABMS onramps.

Dunlap said that, even in the face of the budget woes, the Air Force is “laser-focused on getting the first capability release out the out the door over the next year or so.” Then as more capabilities are proven viable and desirable to operators via the ABMS onramps, those will go to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond for approval as new RCO programs. He demurred detailed questions about where that process stands to the RCO, however.

Despite having to slightly cut back the scope due to both lack of funding and COVID-19 restrictions, Dunlap added, the ABMS program was able to pull off, for the most part as planned, its fourth onramp in the Baltic Sea. That onramp was the first to involve allied partners and thus to be tagged as a “Combined JADC2 (CJADC2)” exercise. Cosponsored by Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa (USAFE-AFAFRICA), with support of European Command (EUCOM) during the last week of February, that experiment included “assets from U.S. Naval Forces Europe – Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet, U.S. Army Europe – Africa, U.S. Strategic Command, the Royal Air Force, the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and the Polish Air Force,” an Air Force press release said.

The February onramp had three big “mission thrusts,” Dunlap elaborated:

• “Dynamic targeting,” or sometimes simply referred to as ‘rapid kill chains.’ This means the ability to “understand and make sense, and then decide off of what we see and take actions,” Dunlap explained, in particular using artificial intelligence and machine learning for automated target recognition (ATR). The ability to include of “joint and coalition partners” in those decision cycles was another crucial piece of this part of the demo.
• “Base defense and agile operations.” This includes capabilities to counter drones (aka uninhabited aerial vehicles, UAS) and cruise missiles, he said. “Integrating sensors was the big thing, and so there were a number of joint, commercial, and allied sensors that were added into the network there.” This thrust also involved a demo using the Air Force Research Laboratory’s “Ninja Counter–sUAS System,” designed “to identify drones, determine the source, and offer a counter measure when necessary,” according to AFRL. The onramp also used Anduril Industries ‘”Sentry towers, with some AI algorithms on it, to do some detection,” Dunlap said.
• Demonstrating new “technologies that enable the integration of cyber and distributed edge capabilities.” This mission thrust involved moving “unclassified and classified data over both government and commercial systems,” Dunlap said, by augmenting the Air Force’s “Theater Deployable Communications Package” with “new options for that system to be able to pass data.” For example, the demo linked in SpaceX’s Starlink satellites that provide space-based Internet connectivity, and used them to move to and from DoD military communications satellites “in a way that’s never been done before,” he said.

“What you really are seeing when we do these dev/eval onramps, is the ability to drive our system-of-systems development forward alongside the warfighter,” Dunlap said. “We need to be able to evaluate and drive tech as a family of capabilities — and there’s an IoT [Internet of Things] and a network component of that — but then, there’s getting the right mix and balance of assets that we need to achieve operational missions.”

For example, commanders, housed in a C-17 on the ground simulating an airborne mission, used Apple and Samsung tablets to share classified and unclassified data and information during the onramp, via a new “Software Defined Networking” capability developed by Amazon and Juniper Networks, Dunlap explained.

The February onramp, he elaborated, wasn’t planned upfront to demo a particular set of technology developed under ABMS research and development projects. Rather, it meant to bring a mix of technologies to address in-field operational problems laid out by USAFE-AFAFRICA Commander Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian and EUCOM Commander Gen. Tod Wolters.

“I think one of the biggest things that we got out of the event was a further refinement of our requirements, and an ability to see and understand things that we must get better at in order to meet the vision, long term, for a JADC2 and an ABMS kind of future that moves at speed and scale,” said Brig. Gen. Adrian Spain, USAFE-AFAFRICA director of plans.

In particular, Spain told reporters during today’s briefing, he was excited by “the combination” of three things: “space-based connectivity, tactical comms at the edge and cloud services at the edge, and secure, multilayer security communications that are mobile, agile, and and secure.”

Together, those capabilities “enable all of the things that we want to try to do at speed and scale here, and contribute in both connecting and in the command and control aspect, of Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control.”