NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Department of the Air Force Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management leadership discussed the criticality of collaborative work with the Advanced Battle Management System Cross Functional Team during the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Sept. 18, 2024.
Over the past two years, the ABMS CFT, supporting DAF PEO C3BM from its office in Air Force Futures, has assisted the integration of the DAF BATTLE NETWORK by working with combatant commands, joint force decision makers, other services and industry partners to generate operational requirements. The DAF BATTLE NETWORK is the Air Force’s contribution to the Department of Defense’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, initiative.
“The Air Force and the Space Force are moving together down this journey, and we are also integrating our joint partners and coalition allies as well,” said Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey, C3BM program executive officer. “A lot of the dialog over the last couple of days has been about integrating — integrating better, integrating faster, and integrating more. A lot of that conversation is stemming directly out of the experiences that we have generated over the last two years not just in a technical sense, but also between acquisition and operational requirements.”
The Air Force and Space Force have dedicated program executive offices that collaborate to ensure those services are aligned and synchronized in their efforts to realize the DAF BATTLE NETWORK, the integrated system-of-systems connecting sensor, effector, and logistics systems providing resilient decision advantage to the joint force.
Maj. Gen. Bob Claude, Mobilization Assistant to the Chief of Space Operations, and ABMS CFT lead, stated that C3BM is pulling together roughly 50 programs of record into one cohesive network, which doesn’t happen without cooperation and collaboration.
“C3BM has been doing a fantastic job at working with the operational community, validating theories and concepts through experimentation,” he said. “There is always work to be done and there is always something new happening, but C3BM is here to work with the operational community to meet Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s requirements while folding the (operational community) into the system.”
During a media roundtable at AFA, Cropsey also highlighted how the work C3BM and the ABMS CFT have been doing together is informing discussions around great power competition.
“A lot of the GPC conversation around integration is built off the kind of work that the C3BM PEO and the ABMS CFT have been doing together over the last number of years,” Cropsey said. “Getting to Gen. Allvin’s (Air Force Chief of Staff’s) point on ‘One Air Force’ means looking at the air side and the space side and seeing how we collectively move together.”