By Michael Sirak
Defense Daily
January 23, 2007

The Air Force is laying out the plans for modernizing and sustaining its worldwide set of air and space operations centers (AOC) together with Lockheed Martin [LMT], the contractor chosen last year to oversee these efforts, senior officials from both organizations said last week.

Envisioned is a 10-year plan to transform each facility--the nerve centers that plan and execute joint and coalition air operations in a theater--from a collection of disparate tools with limited interoperability to a truly integrated systems of systems that allows planners to direct air, space and cyberspace campaigns dynamically, they said.

In addition to creating seamless operations within each AOC, the Air Force wants to create a homogeneous, network-centric enterprise of its 23 AOCs, making them more efficient, with reduced equipment and manpower requirements and less ownership costs, they said.

"It will not do us any good, especially in this global [environment] that we operate in now, if one [AOC] has got this kind of standard and one has another," Lt. Gen. Charles Johnson, commander of the Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom AFB, Mass., said during a presentation on Jan. 18 in Washington, D.C.

Lockheed Martin will carry out enterprise-wide upgrades to the AOCs in large-scale increments, smaller scale spirals as well as out- of-cycle and emergency modifications as needed, John Mengucci, vice president and general manager of the Mission & Combat Support Solutions Group within Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions, said at the same briefing.

Increments will occur anywhere from every year to two years and will entail major capability additions, he said. Spirals will be added in cycles of weeks for functions "more urgently needed that cannot be part of a traditional block upgrade," he said. The out-of-cycle improvements, scheduled over days, and emergency updates, needing only hours to implement, will address "critical functionality that needs to be rushed to the AOC," he said.

"The trick in all of this, whether it is to do a two-year complete upgrade of the air operations center or [there is] a critical emergency capability being added, is to a have rigorous configuration-managed process and that we do all of the right testing," he said.

The current version of equipment and software going into the AOCs is increment 10.1x, which is dubbed Continuous Planning and Execution.

Among its enhancements is to incorporate time-critical-targeting capabilities, according to Mengucci's briefing charts.

The next version, increment 10.2, the Network-Centric Infrastructure, will feature effects-based operations and machine- assisted courses of action, the charts showed. Increment 10.3, the Net- Ready AOC, will add effects-based assessment and a multi-source common operational picture, while increment 10.4, the Advanced Technology AOC, will incorporate predictive battlespace awareness and cursor-over- target capability.

It is the cursor-over-target capability that is the ultimate vision of the AOCs, Mengucci said. With it, operators will be able to place the cursor over the object of interest on the control screen and have the center's systems automatically generate all of the options for the planners and executers in the center, he said.

A system-of-systems engineering approach is critical in modernizing and sustaining the AOCs, Mengucci said. Today there are a total of 48 systems used in the centers, each of which is currently on its own upgrade path, he said.

"It is very important for us to take the 48 systems that are out there today and make them operate as one," he said.

To support its activities, Lockheed Martin has erected a CSISR "wind tunnel" at its Center for Innovation in Suffolk, Va., Mengucci said. From there, it can conduct thousands of simulations daily to explore AOC issues, he said.

The Air Force fielded its first AOC in 2001. The 23 centers serve various roles.

Five of them, designated AN/USQ-163 Falconeers, are located in places like South Korea and the Middle East to support the U.S. military's regional warfighting commands (Defense Daily, May, 23, 2006). Six AOCs serve specialized missions like supporting homeland defense, air mobility and space operations. The remaining 12 centers fill support roles and are used for training, testing and technical support, while several serve as backups.

The service treats the AOC as a weapon system, meaning that it wants to establish a standardized manner for how the centers are equipped and used and for how personnel are trained and rated to work within them. However, to date, while there has been standardization with the Falconeers, the AOCs still employ different systems and operating procedures and have diverging personal requirements.

"Now our path is to maintain that configuration [of the Falconeers] as well as bring the other AOCs up to that standard configuration," Johnson said.

Accordingly the Air Force brought on Lockheed Martin last September to oversee these efforts. The company, which beat out rival bids by General Dynamics [GD] and Northrop Grumman [NOC], is operating under a three-year, $579 million weapons system integrator (WSI) contract with additional options that give the deal a potential total value of $2 billion over 10 years (Defense Daily, Sept. 14, 2006).

The Bethesda, Md.-based company's AOC WSI team includes Computer Sciences Corporation [CSC], Dynamics Research Corporation,Gestalt, IBM [IBM], Intelligent Software Solutions, L-3 Communications [LLL], Raytheon [RTN] and SAIC [SAI].

Johnson said the process of standardization, while modernizing, and then sustaining the homogeneity of the AOCs is no easy task.

Factors like the speed of technology advancement, the dispersion of the centers around the globe, and the need to factor the input of the other services and coalition partners, increase the challenges, he said.

"As I speak here right now, somebody out there is about to change to a new version of something and somebody else has another new version of something," he said.

The process of upgrade must be such that a change is made to all AOCs at once, he said. The process must be flexible enough to incorporate simple changes quickly, he said, adding "get it in, get it out, just like you do at Jiffy Lube," referring to the chain of quick oil-change stops for cars across the United States. Yet the process must have the rigor to ensure that the modifications are thoroughly tested, he said.

Nearer term goals, Johnson said, are to increase the level of machine-to-machine interfaces within the AOCs for fusing and passing information more quickly, and to add more open architectures as well as develop new software-driven means of encryption and make more intelligence data discoverable in searches.

The Air Force must also determine how the service-wide changes it is instituting to place more emphasis on cyberwarfare will impact the manning and operations of the AOCs, he said.

There is talk, he noted, of consolidating some of the AOCs that perform support functions, potentially reducing the total from 23.

(Archives)