Air Force’s Big IT Programs Need ‘Course Correction,’ General Says

The Air Force is reorganizing the office that runs some of its most complex and expensive combat connectivity programs, hoping a fresh start can repair trust with troops after failing to deliver new capabilities to the front lines in a timely manner, the two-star general in charge said this week.

The change reflects the military’s ongoing struggle to move beyond acquisition centered on individual platforms, like planes, ships or aircraft, to a “system of systems” approach that aims to deploy a network of connected equipment to the battlefield as quickly as possible.  

“You could call it a course correction, or you could just call it a refinement of what we’ve been trying to get after for the last three years,” Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey, the program executive officer for command, control, communications, and battle management (C3BM), told Air & Space Forces Magazine Aug. 6.  

The office launched in 2022 to bring roughly 50 programs comprising a future air and space “battle network” under one roof for clearer direction and stronger oversight. But the organization has since ballooned from around 200 staff and a budget of about $250 million to thousands of employees and a multi-billion-dollar budget, Cropsey said.

The service has requested more than $1 billion for the Advanced Battle Management System, its core effort under the C3BM umbrella, in fiscal 2026. That’s nearly twice as much as it sought for the work in 2025.

Last week, the organization unveiled a new strategic framework aimed at putting new tools in warfighters’ hands as quickly as possible, Cropsey said. It’s anchored by three goals: Showing Airmen that the office can deliver the capabilities and tools they need, fast enough; standardizing the digital backbone that troops around the world use to share data; and better organizing the office’s money and staff to deliver new tools faster.

“There’s a track record there on the [command-and-control] portfolio of too much talk and not enough action,” Cropsey said.  

Trust issues are having real consequences for the future of coalition joint all-domain command and control (CJADC2), according to current and former officials. That envisions a networked military that can call up an attack with the swipe of a finger, as easily as summoning an Uber.

Because there’s still no operational enterprise-wide solution for such a network despite years of effort, combatant commands have started to implement their own siloed, bespoke solutions, Miyi Chung, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s technical director for the Pacific, said at an industry event earlier this year.

“Combined, joint, all-domains, it is meant to be enterprise, and it is meant to be global,” Chung said of the vision of networked, on-demand warfare. “Because we have not delivered that enterprise solution, each theater is implementing its own flavor of CJADC2.”

For example, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has created its own kill chain of sensors and shooters to identify, track, and attack targets. The command also developed a secure network where organizations across the military services can share information, Chung said.

“We need to stop developing these siloed applications tailored to each theater,” she added.

Isolated tools that don’t solve the Pentagon’s communication problems as a whole were a foreseeable, if not inevitable, consequence of the way the military is organized, said Frederick “Trey” Coleman, a retired colonel who led the service’s command-and control mission as the head of the 505th Command and Control Wing at Hurlburt Field, Fla.

Thanks to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, each branch of the military oversees its own acquisition programs to build new hardware and software, but it’s the combatant commands that decide how those tools are used in the field each day.

“The combatant commands themselves really aren’t funded well,” said Coleman, now the chief product officer at Raft, a data and AI services company that contracts with the Air Force. “With the funding they do get, they innovate the heck out of things … and the services can’t keep up.”

That equipment is quick to deploy but expensive and difficult to sustain, so the combatant commands turn to the services for help. But the services have their own priorities, Coleman added, leading to multiple incompatible applications developed under different procurement contracts from different agencies or commands.

To reach the office’s second goal, Cropsey wants to focus on deploying the digital infrastructure the military needs to bridge those gaps and wage networked warfare faster.

For instance, military organizations are pursuing their own data-sharing equipment, duplicating expenses rather than combining effort and money, Cropsey said. It’s an attractive option “because then we own it, and we don’t have to worry about coordinating with other stakeholders,” Cropsey said.

That same process happens at every layer of technology, he noted, wasting resources across software development pipelines, cloud services, and connectivity.

“I’m trying to find ways to go out and rapidly build out into the field, at the scale and the speed that we need … at a price point that isn’t going to break the bank,” he said.

Cropsey has tried to get a clearer sense of which updates are most important to troops in the field.

“I ask them to tell me, ‘Hey, what’s at the top of the list for what you need me to get after?” He said.

Then he starts to match resources to those goals to see where he might fall short.

“I can actually figure out how far down the list can I get before I run out of something,” he said.  

Instead of getting bogged down in myriad requirements before shipping a product to the field, knowing when a project will run out of resources shows what it can accomplish, he said, adding he’ll soon brief operators on that approach: “I’m delivering against these top priorities. I can only get this far down the list. What do you want to do?”