Integrating the DAF Battle Network
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Brig. Gen. Luke C.G. Cropsey:
Well, good afternoon. Welcome to the panel today. I got to say, every time I show up to one of these,
and this is I think number four for me since I started, I'm always amazed that people keep coming back
for them. And I'm reminded actually of a quote that I heard General Colin Powell say once, he said,
"Hey, if people aren't following you because of your leadership, they should at least follow you out of a
morbid curiosity about what's going to happen next." So I'm wondering which side of this we're on some
days.
But I think we actually have a really good panel for you this afternoon. I'm going to let each of the
panelists introduce themselves here in a minute, but before we started, I just wanted to give everybody
some scene-setter context for what follows, and a little bit of an update on where we are across the
department when it comes to the C3BM and the DAF Battle Network. And I told you, I think, back in the
September AFA that it's here and now. It's not a future construct. It's capability that we're hitting key
milestones on. We're delivering key capability right here, right now. And so I just want to give you a
couple updates on that.
First, the cloud-based command and control capability that we are putting into various air defense
sectors is now operational at the Eastern Air Defense Sector. And we put that in in October. And it's now
also operational at the Canadian Air Defense Sector, which happened last month. And we're just going
to keep rolling it out, and we're just going to keep adding capability to that suite of tools so that we're
providing our air battle managers and the folks defending the homeland with the tools that they need to
keep us all safe. So that's super exciting.
The other thing that's already happening is we are delivering digital infrastructure out to the field today.
Since we talked at AFA in September, we have now delivered 16 Tactical Operations Center-Light into
the field. They're experimental units that we're using right now to kind of flesh out the details around
what that looks like and how we're going to use them moving forward. And we'll talk some more about
that in the Q&A coming up.
But I wanted to let folks know that there's real capability out on the street right now on the DAF Battle
Network front. And it's not just theory at this point, it's happening and it's happening. In large part
because of the absolutely incredible support and teamwork that we're getting between the government
and our industry partners, and you're seeing three of them up here today.
As we're moving forward we're continuing to make contract awards. We recently just awarded track
fusion, a set of contracts to Lockheed in Connecticut, as well as to SyTech. So they're on a six-month
sprint right now looking at track fusion capabilities, and more to follow. So lots going on in this space,
it's very dynamic. There's a lot of things that are happening in various exercises and events that are
occurring across the department. We'll unpack some of that for you this afternoon as well.
So as we start in here, I've asked each panelist to just provide a couple minute brief intro in terms of
who they are, what they're doing, and then we're going to dive into some, I think, really good
conversation around the current state of affairs. I have over here to my right, Jon's going to kick off
here, and then I'll pass the baton over to the next crew.
Jon Rhone:
