JEFX 04 Spiral 2 showcases future of air battle management

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HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. (AFPN) --  Responding quickly to lessons learned in operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, the Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment 04 showcased the future of air battle management command and control.

The experiment, the Air Force’s primary venue for innovative command and control technology and processes, ended its Spiral 2 integration event at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., recently. The event laid the foundation for the experiment’s “dress rehearsal” at Spiral 3 in May, to be followed by the main experiment in July and August. Successful command-and-control initiatives and other innovations will begin entering the field during the next six to 18 months.

“This is the most exciting work I’ve been involved with in my 32 years of service,” said Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, 8th Air Force commander and the experiment’s coalition forces air component commander. “I think we can really deliver some giant steps forward in capability to the warfighters in the field.”

The experiment’s environment, including the experimental combined air operations center at Nellis AFB, was designed and built by a team of military, government civilian and industry engineers from Electronic Systems Center here. It focuses on three main areas: predictive battle-space awareness, effects-based operations and network-centric infrastructure.

Specifically, the experimental CAOC counts among its many innovations a common personal-computer client with “soft-phones,” which provide operators complete secure communications from their computers using a single headset. These and other initiatives help the transition to laptop computers and promise to make future CAOCs leaner, lighter and easier to maintain, officials said.

The coalition network integrates forces from England, Canada and Australia by shrinking the CAOC’s U.S.-only security enclave to a bare minimum and placing the entire strategy, plans and operations divisions into a coalition-releasable environment.

“The way we do coalition operations in the CAOC during peacetime has become a political and military liability,” said Lt. Col. Martin Kendrick, the experiment’s program manager from here. “(The experiment takes) the first steps toward solving these problems. The effect is that coalition partners no longer feel like second-class citizens in the CAOC, and all operators work together as a single, efficient team.”

Despite some initial problems, many officials associated with “rolling out” the new facility at Nellis AFB said the spiral was able to proceed with its two-pronged mission -- to train operators from the 8th Air Force and document new procedures, as well as getting many tools to function together seamlessly.

“This is what marks JEFX as an ‘experiment’ rather than an ‘exercise,’” said Maj. Bob Steindl, ESC’s Spiral 2 team leader. “In an exercise, you might pose an unexpected obstacle to the participants and watch how they overcome it. In the experiment, we run through a known scenario to see if everything plays well together, and [we] test solutions when it doesn’t.”

Extensible Markup Language is playing a central role in integration efforts.

“(The language) allows warfighters to pass information machine-to-machine by using standard sets of data fields, so all the tools know when you are talking feet and when you’re talking meters,” Major Steindl said. “It also vastly accelerates the pace and accuracy of operations by eliminating ‘fat-finger’ errors associated with manual-data entry.”

The spiral accomplished much, Colonel Kendrick said. More than 80 percent of the tools are currently assessed as functional.

“We have a lot of work to do to address the problems we noted in Spiral 2, but we’re confident in being able to complete it,” he said.