Air Force balances urgent needs, long-term goals: programs will require closer coordination between government organizations and industry.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The Air Force has begun an aggressive campaign to change business practices, in an effort to accelerate technologies needed to meet pressing requirements, senior service officials said.

The results, so far, have been encouraging, said Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Reynolds, commander of the Aeronautical Systems Center. "We are getting better at enterprise leadership, at horizontal integration," he said in an interview during the 2003 National Aeronautical Systems and Technology conference, in Dayton, Ohio.

Reynolds oversees a quarter of the Air Force's product development capability. "I have been given responsibility to operationalize enterprise leadership," he said. "In a sense, we are transforming how we fight and transforming how we are equipping ourselves to fight."

Out of ASC's $19 billion budget for this fiscal year, $15 billion is for Air Force programs, and $3 billion is for foreign military sales. For fiscal year 2004, Reynolds is projecting a budget of $14 billion.

He said that the Air Force is trying to get better at coordinating projects across the Air Force Materiel Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Air Combat Command, as well as the logistics centers, the test centers and headquarters.

"We are figuring out how to do this," he noted. "It is paying us back in terms of our ability to deal with cross-enterprise issues, such as GPS jamming, combat ID and time-critical targeting."

"We are learning how to take advantage of the liberating policy that we have that takes down some of the low or non-value added bureaucracy that has worked its way into the acquisition process," he said.

The overarching guidelines for developing future capabilities and improving integration with joint forces come from seven task forces created by the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. John P. Jumper.

The seven task forces quickly are becoming the "touchstones" of what Reynolds calls enterprise leadership. The task forces are responsible for developing concepts of operations in the following areas: global response, global strike, air and space/C2ISR, homeland security, nuclear response, global mobility and air and space expeditionary.

"In the product development world, using enterprise leadership, we bring to bear the resources that we have to plan and experiment and define solutions to fill those gaps," he explained. "We present those as options and options sets to the Air Force requirements community both at the Pentagon and the major commands, and they choose to adopt them or reject them, depending on their own internal prioritization process."

The process is simple to conceptualize, but it is "very difficult in application," Reynolds said.

When it comes to delivering urgent war fighter...