Congress Adds Funding to the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System

The Department of Defense (DOD) is striving to digitally connect its assets and platforms across all domains – air, land, sea, space, and cyber – to help military commanders more effectively communicate, share information and make decisions in real time. The DOD has dubbed their initiative to gain all-domain command and control (C2) capabilities the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) construct. The Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) will be the service’s contribution to the overall JADC2 campaign.

ABMS Progress Report

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released its latest review of the ABMS effort, Battle Management: DOD and Air Force Continue to Define Joint Command and Control Efforts, assessing, in part, the extent to which the Air Force has developed plans for ABMS.

Under a previous ABMS assessment in April 2020, GAO found the Air Force had not developed a complete plan for the system. GAO recommended then that the Air Force take steps to make progress with documenting its acquisition and planning efforts, including developing plans to mature technologies, developing cost estimates, and conducting an affordability analysis for ABMS.

In the new report, GAO highlighted as examples of progress the Air Force’s acquisition planning for the first phase of two current ABMS efforts:

• Capability Release #1 (Airborne Edge Node (AEN)) intends to enable F-35 data connectivity with command and control (C2) centers via communication systems on KC-46 refueling tanker aircraft. The Air Force plans to deliver prototypes in 2024.
• Cloud-Based Command and Control (CBC2) intends to integrate a variety of air defense data sources for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to support homeland defense. The Air Force plans to establish a cloud-based command and control network that enables on-demand access to shared computing resources, with plans to deliver initial capabilities in 2023.

ABMS Budget Projections and FY 2023 Appropriations

The Air Force requested $231.4M in Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) funds under the Advanced Component Development & Prototypes (ACD&P) budget activity area. Congress authorized that amount in the FY 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed in mid-December.

To further pave the way, Congress actually appropriated $10M more for the program as part of the FY 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act (a.k.a. omnibus), bringing the total FY 2023 budget for ABMS to $241.4M. Looking ahead, the Air Force has estimated the need for the ABMS budget to more than double in FY 2024 and to continue to grow strongly year-to-year through FY 2026. (See chart below.)

FY 2023 Planned Efforts

According to the Air Force’s FY 2023 budget documentation, they have set forth plans for the current fiscal year for the two ABMS areas noted in the latest GAO report.

Capability Release #1 Airborne Edge Node (AEN) FY 2023 plans include:

• Complete integration of capability on the KC-46 and conduct flights for test, military utility assessments, and Concept of Operations experimentation
• Complete development of a palletized compute and store enclave with local cloud storage, cloud synchronization, and network management functions
• Complete build of additional podded systems to meet quantities in the requirement
• Maximize use of digital engineering, modern software development practices, and open architecture principles; develop Technical Data Package to enable potential follow-on development and integration activities

Cloud-Based C2 (CBC2) FY 2023 plans include:

• Continue design development activities focused on developing a scalable and extensible data-cloud architecture that leverages artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) applications and produces a common operating picture
• Continue developing shared visualization of multiple sources: automated & fused 2D/3D representation of air domain
• Ingest, fuse, and analyze data from military, government, and commercial sources to multi-classification cloud environments
• Continue to develop automated and operator-selectable tasking of assets, voice, data and C2
• Continue integrating new and existing development teams with ABMS Software Integrator to create a micro-services Cloud-Based C2 system for NORAD & NORTHCOM (N&NC) that is fully government owned
• Continue building micro-services based software applications that will enable Cloud-Based C2
• Continue efforts to design and build infrastructure pieces to support Cloud-Based C2 to include but not limited to platform, cloud, cloud outposts, data transport, tactical data bus, identity management, zero trust network, cyber defense and data storage solutions
• Continue Quarterly minimum viable product (MVP) releases, iteratively building out the Cloud-Based C2 application/software baseline, targeting minimum viable capability release (MVCR) to N&NC by the end of FY23.
• The Cloud-Based C2 application/software baseline is the starting point of Air Combat Command's (ACC) Common Battlemanagement Interface (CBI), which is the foundation of ACC's Battle Management Command & Control (BMC2) Roadmap.

Contractor Implications

ABMS, and related JADC2 efforts across the DOD, will continue to provide contract opportunities for innovative solutions in cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), cybersecurity, software-defined networking (SDN), and other technologies.

About the same time as the GAO report was released, the Air Force ABMS program awarded a $112M task order to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) as the ABMS CBC2 software integrator. Earlier in January the Air Force published a solicitation under the Commercial Solutions Opening for Joint All Domain Command And Control (JADC2 CSO) for industry input on software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technologies to support ABMS. A contract award in this area is anticipated in the late spring. GovWin IQ subscribers may track these and other ABMS contract opportunities through the GovWin IQ portal.