26 Jan 2018

AFLCMC ‘entwined’ with senior leader goals

HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. -- Air Force acquisition is battling the pincer effect of shrinking workforces and expanding portfolios, according to Lt. Gen. Robert McMurry, who spoke at a defense industry event in Bedford, Massachusetts, Thursday.  McMurry, commander of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, which oversees the total life cycle

15 Dec 2017

How to speedily procure secure software. Really.

Developed in 2016, the three-month Advanced Tactical Acquisition Corps program selects up-and-coming acquisition professionals across the acquisition community and charges them to develop solutions to the biggest problems in military procurement. The team tackled how to acquire software using agile methods, while adhering to stringent and necessary cyber security requirements.

3 Nov 2017

Cheyenne Mountain sees better satellite picture

UEWR primary missions include missile warning and missile defense, where radars spot missile launches, track them and send data to the Ballistic Missile Defense System. These primary missions enable ground-based interceptors to launch and eliminate incoming threats. The secondary mission is space surveillance, which includes tracking the increasingly crowded skies for manmade objects in orbit. “Our radars track and identify a lot of space-based objects. But, in this case, important information wasn’t getting to the people who needed it to make timely decisions,” said Col. Todd Wiest, senior materiel leader, Strategic Warning and Surveillance Systems division, referring to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex Combatant Commanders’ Integrated Command and Control Systems.

24 Aug 2017

Supercomputing weather with ‘Thor’

Thor models global weather patterns and provides individual air bases and army units with specific forecasts for areas as small as 17 square kilometers. The computer system is comprised of nearly 1,000 individual blade servers. Thor’s increased capacity allows weather Airmen at Offutt to generate initial conditions and process them. Locally produced baseline data, combined with Thor’s increased processing speed, results in forecasts reaching the warfighter in half the time. This gives forecasters and mission planners up to three extra hours to exploit forecasts.

7 Jul 2017

Acquisition as wargame

The Pentagon’s Air Force acquisition office challenged teams to protect nearly 1 million users from dangerous malware during a pilot wargame held June 26-30, 2017, at the Hanscom Conference Center.The wargame scenario was ripped from the headlines and one of the three participating teams was required to abide by the strictest interpretations of

8 Feb 2017

Combat runs on BACN

The Battlefield Airborne Communications Node will reach 10,000 combat missions within the next month, hitting a significant milestone just as the program office here works to expand the current fleet to eight combat-ready platforms.