Air Force rethinks air operations centers

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  • By Master Sgt. Scott Elliott
  • Air Force Print News
The Air Force needs to start thinking of its air operations centers as weapon systems if the service wants to remain the best in the world, the deputy chief of staff for air and space operations said.

"The AOC is fundamental to what makes us great as an Air Force," Lt. Gen. Ronald E. Keys said. "If you have a group of airplanes but you don't have an AOC, you don't really have an air force. You have a flying club."

An AOC is a command and control center that plans, executes and assesses aerospace operations during a contingency or conflict. While acknowledging the technological strides that the service has made since Operation Desert Storm, Keys said there is more to be done to achieve predictive battle-space awareness.

"We need to know what's going on to be able to react before an adversary can act, to be able to mass the right systems against the right situation to create the right effect," he said.

The general has identified three targets to achieve that goal: developing and fusing technology, training and managing command and control workers, and standardizing the centers.

One of the challenges for technology, Keys said, is to develop ways to eliminate administrative work in AOCs. The goal, he said, is to free people from record-keeping tasks so they can concentrate on strategic thinking, planning and dynamic re-tasking.

"Not long ago, it took an average of about one person per sortie ... a 1,000 sortie air tasking order took at least 1,000 people," he said. "We're driving that down. We need technology to do all those repetitive and cataloging tasks so we don't need as many people. ... We want to get to where each person, in effect, generates three sorties or more."

While Keys said it is important to reduce the manning "footprint," it is more important than ever to be able increase the speed of mission planning.

"We've got to have a command and control arrangement that allows us to adapt to changing operations," he said. "As we've seen during the global war on terrorism, the payoff is being able to ... move resources to certain areas, to shift to a different target more quickly, with more accuracy. Ultimately, we know more about our adversary's situation than he does, and we act before he can."

According to Keys, for the AOC to be truly viewed as a weapon system, the proper training and management of people is just as important as technology.

"We will have people who will go to an actual training unit en route to the AOC, (and) we'll keep track of these people with special duty identifiers," he said. Previously, those assigned to command and control positions within a center received on-the-job training.

The general used an aircraft squadron to illustrate the importance of pre-training workers.

"I don't send people to an F-16 (Fighting Falcon) unit and then (teach) them to fly," he said. "First they go to pilot training, then to fighter lead-in training, then through F-16 training, so they show up qualified."

The third element is to standardize the five centers.

"We're an expeditionary Air Force, and we move all over the world," Keys said. "(If) I'm from the Pacific and I deploy with an air and space expeditionary force to Europe, the position I go to (should) look and operate like the one I left."

The problem, the general said, is those goals are more easily said than done.

"As we grew, different bits of technology were added to different AOCs to do specific jobs. But we lost control of interoperability as we did that. We lost control of standardization," he said. "We've gotten that back. Our full operational capability will be in place around 2005."

After bringing all three parts of the plan together, the general said, the center configuration would be "frozen" for a few years as operators work out any bugs in the system.

"What we expect to see is a combination of great interoperable technology and well-trained people that will teach us some things that we hadn't thought of," Keys said. "Once you get people at the point of delivery, they always come back with new ideas."

Ultimately, the general said, teaming of trained command and control professionals and state-of-the-art, fused technology, will dazzle the world.

"The Air Force is the gold standard of command and control of air and space forces," he said. "We do that better than anyone in the world, but we're not satisfied. We're always trying to make it faster, better, more accurate and more flexible.

"We've named our AOC weapon system 'Falconers' because falconers control birds of prey," Keys said. "If you're going to control air and space operations, what better name for it?"