Future of Air Force’s chief architect position unclear after Dunlap’s departure

WASHINGTON: In 2019, the Air Force tapped Preston Dunlap to be the service’s first-ever chief architect — the man tasked with the job of overseeing the complicated “system of systems” that would be its Advanced Battle Management System. But with Dunlap set to depart the job in the coming weeks, the future of the position itself is hazy.

“I’m looking at that,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said during an event at the National Press Club on Tuesday after being asked whether he would appoint a successor to fill the chief architect job.

Dunlap, who came to the job from a senior position as Johns Hopkins’s applied physics lab, handed in his resignation to Air Force leaders on Monday after three years in the chief architect role, saying “the time has now come to pass the baton.”

Kendall praised Dunlap’s performance and said he plans to meet with Dunlap in the coming days before his departure. However, Kendall left the door open on whether he would appoint a new chief architect or whether a different kind of position was called for. 

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Currently “organizations get to manage individual programs, but we don’t have someone who is in charge of the overall design of these things that have to tie together and perform functions as a whole,” he said. “And I think we need to create something that has more of that kind of responsibility. I haven’t even decided what we might call it yet, but we’re moving that direction.”

Kendall pointed to Project Overmatch, the Navy’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort, as a potential model. That effort is led Rear Adm. Doug Small who pulls double duty as head of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command — a position that oversees more than 150 Navy programs, in sharp contrast with the civilian position of Air Force chief architect, which has more limited responsibilities.

While it’s unclear what, in particular, Kendall wants to emulate from the leadership structure of Project Overmatch, he spoke favorably of the “systems command” approach that allows the Navy to manage large portfolios that include many programs.

When the Air Force announced Dunlap’s appointment to the chief architect job in March 2019, the service stated that he would “enable the development of enterprise-wide combat capability through families of systems… [and] create and manage family of systems trade space, design margins, and define interfaces and standards to ensure interoperability across domains and permissive to highly contested environments.”

However, Dunlap was more widely known as the point person in charge of managing the Air Force’s flagship JADC2 effort, the Advanced Battle Management System — a role that, one could argue, became increasingly constrained during Dunlap’s tenure.

Backed by Will Roper, then the Air Force’s acquisition chief, Dunlap envisioned ABMS as a “military Internet of Things” that would radically reshape defense IT and allow any sensor and shooter to connect. Initially, he sought to prove out off-the-shelf technologies through a series of “on-ramp” events held four times a year, allowing companies to receive direct input from operators on products after seeing how those troops employed the tech during exercises.

However, in November 2020, the Air Force tapped the Rapid Capabilities Office to manage ABMS procurement and create the effort’s acquisition strategy. Dunlap would continue to oversee on-ramp experiments, the service stated then.

But after Kendall took over as the Air Force’s top civilian in July 2021, he terminated plans for future on-ramp events, criticizing the ABMS program’s reliance on demonstrations.

“My early observation is that this program has not been adequately focused on achieving and building specific, measurable improvements and operational outcomes,” Kendall said in September. “We should not be doing demonstrations and experiments unless we can link them to true operational improvements, unless they move us down the field to lower risk acquisition programs.”

After Dunlap handed in his resignation, he posted an eight-page letter on LinkedIn on Monday imploring the Defense Department to defy the gravitational pull of bureaucratic inertia and become more like companies such as SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led firm that has successfully developed novel space tech such as reusable rockets.

Dunlap pointed to his success at “shock[ing] the system” during the ABMS experiments — where the Air Force accomplished milestones like deploying SpaceX’s Starlink satellites for the first time — and delivering products that made it possible for Pentagon employees to work from home during the pandemic.

“All this seemed impossible, however, when I arrived on day 1,” he wrote. “Not surprisingly to anyone who has worked for or with the government before, I arrived to find no budget, no authority, no alignment of vision, no people, no computers, no networks, a leaky ceiling, even a broken curtain.”