The Combined Air & Space Operations Center’s Combat Operations Division
WASHINGTON: The Air Force’s Kessel Run coding ‘factory’ has just fielded new software to speed targeting by the service’s far-flung Air Operations Centers — aimed at supporting Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2).
“This is a huge milestone for Kessel Run, ACC and our users,” said Col. Brian Beachkofski, commander of Kessel Run. “Only a year after delivering stand-alone applications to support operations, we’ve fielded an MVP suite of nine applications connected by a common data layer for usability assessment and user feedback.”
Air Combat Command has certified the new software suite, called the Kessel Run All Domain Operations Suite (KRADOS), for early use, the software center announced today is a “minimal viable product (MVP)”. According to the press release, an MVP is “an early version of functioning software delivered to users in order to rapidly advance its basic capabilities to a more complete operational package the warfighter can begin using in operations.”
Operators are given the MVP software to use and then provide real-time feedback to coders at Kessel Run, who can provide fixes or updates on a rolling basis.
Eventually, the new KRADOS software will completely replace the legacy Theater Battle Management Core Systems — the service’s decades-old air tasking order system — at the two dozen Air Operations Centers (AOC) around the world.
The AOCs — such as the 609th AOC at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar — gather intelligence and surveillance data on potential targets, decide the resources best suited to carry out strikes, and then send weapons to hit those targets.
Kessel Run is using cloud technology to “enable a mesh, distributed Command and Control network that will allow us to leapfrog from the current state of the art to an inherently flexible and dynamic system that adapts faster than our adversaries can keep up with,” Hannah Hunt, Kessel Run chief of staff, told me last year. “In JADC2 parlance, this is the idea of a ‘Dynamic Tasking Order.’ At Kessel Run we call this grand vision ‘Continuous Airpower’. In order to realize that vision, we need to wean ourselves from the AOC’s reliance on physical humans and physical hardware in brick and mortar buildings.”
Kessel Run previously fielded a smaller subset of these software tools to the AOC at Air Force Central (AFCENT), the air component of US Central Command, focused “on narrow problem sets existing in that theater,” Kessel Run’s release explained. “The KRADOS MVP includes these previous software tools, adds several new ones, and integrates them all to produce an integrated system designed to encompass the whole AOC planning and execution process.”
The goal is to work out the bugs and improve KRADOS performance at AFCENT, then, over the next year, begin to expand distribution of the software to the other AOCs.
