Fireside Chat: Connecting and Empowering Weapon Systems
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Heather Penney:
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to this fireside chat on connecting and empowering
weapons systems. I am Heather Penney, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace
Studies. We all know that modern air warfare relies on rapidly gathering information, and pushing it out
to the battle managers and the war fighters who are quarterbacking and executing the air campaign.
This requires tightly integrating the sensors, the battle managers, the shooters, and the weapons
through robust and survivable data links that are empowered by advanced decision aids.
To discuss how to best connect and empower our weapon systems to defeat adversary threats, we're
lucky, no pun intended, to be joined by two remarkable Air Force leaders. To my far left, we're delighted
to welcome Brigadier General Luke Cropsey. General Cropsey is the Department of the Air Force's
program executive officer for command, control, communications and battle management. In this role,
he oversees the delivery of the DAF Battle Network, an integrated system of systems delivering decision
advantage to the joint and coalition force.
We're also very happy to have Brigadier General Daniel "Flak" Clayton. General Clayton leads the Air
Force's advanced battle management system cross-functional team. And in this role he guides the
modernization of command and control systems to improve decision-making advantage in competition,
crisis and conflict.
Gentlemen, this is such a rich topic, let's dive in. But the first thing that I'd like to cover is terms of
reference. Because I think too often we've conflated C3BM, the systems, the actual technologies and the
networks that we use, computers, with the functions of command control and battle management.
Because the operational architecture, how we wage war, and the functions, the decision and the
information architecture, they rely on the technologies. Because they're so closely married, we've often
conflated those. Can we get down to some terms of reference? Like I said, in the Venn diagram they
often overlap, but we have to be careful to not muddle them. Can you please describe and differentiate
command from control, battle management, and then describe the DAF Battle Network? This is really
important because it gets into the work that you've done with modeling the network.
Brig. Gen. Daniel C. Clayton:
All right, Luke, I'll go ahead and start with this one. Thanks for the question, Ms. Penney. I think it's
probably an appropriate time to take a little bit of a journey over the last 25 months to answer that
question. I'm not specifically going to differentiate between command and control just yet. But in
January of 2022, Secretary Kendall charged the advanced battle management system cross-functional
team with giving him specific measurable improvements to command and control. And so, that was the
charge that we were given, and that's the path that we've been on for the last two years or so.
As part of that, we did a literature review, market research. We scoured the interwebs to figure out
when people say command and control, what does that really mean to them? There is a definition in the
DOD dictionary for command, and there is one for control as well. That's the theory. But the practice for
how the different service cultures employ that is vastly different. As this journey has gone along, I've
also recently learned that in addition to religion and politics, you shouldn't talk about command and
control outside the family. Because the second that you do, you'll get emotional, visceral responses from
the other side, saying that's not how you do command and control.
