Rick Kozak / Staff Maj. General Kevin Kennedy is Commander, Air Force Command & Control and ISR Center and Langley Air Force Base.

“An interdependent organization won’t just happen – we’ve got to think about it,” Maj. General Kevin Kennedy, Commander, Air Force Command & Control and ISR Center and Langley Air Force Base, said in a presentation at the 6th annual C4ISR Integration Conference, New Tools for War in Real Time, in Arlington, Va., on November 1.

Speaking about “Reducing Duplication and Increasing Commonality of C2ISR Efforts,” Kennedy said “with a common platform, you can get more and pay less,” because a common architecture frees up money for software that tailors data to a specific users’ needs.

The mission of Air Force C2ISR, he said, was to “help enable decision superiority,” which he defined as “making decisions faster and better than the enemy.” He then added that “the easy part is getting us all linked together,” but that the “concept of operations has to be worked out.”

He added, “Decision superiority does not come with being overwhelmed with facts or data.”

A part of managing the facts and data is to develop a UDOP, or user defined operations picture, that presents data in a format supporting the user’s decision loop. Among current issues, Kennedy said, is the fact that the Air Force’s Air Operations Centers (AOCs) and Joint Space Air Operations Centers (JSpOCs) “don’t necessarily talk to each other.”

One byproduct of the current setup, he said, is that today’s “snapshot” information products “are not always timely or accurate,” leading people to online chats and other real-time ways of data sharing to hone information.

He said one of his tasks is to envision “to be” Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) that can be “deployed within 18 months.” Moving from today’s “theater nodal” operation to a “federated nodal” setup is one of those

CONOPS, he said. Kennedy defined federated nodes as a “global enterprise of regional air, space and cyberspace centers.”

At the same time, Kennedy said, issues can arise: “When you get data level visibility to a whole lot of people, things can get out of hand.”

Kennedy also praised the Air Force’s ability to direct certain operations from remote locations, because such a move reduces the number of people who are forward in a given theater and trims some force protection requirements.

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