Brig. Gen Luke Cropsey, Head of Air Force Command, Control, Communications, Battle Management.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

Over the last year, the Air Force has reorganized offices and personnel to meet the demands of the Defense Department's joint all-domain command and control initiative, or JADC2. The concept is to "sense, make sense and act" by linking sensors to command centers to "shooters."

Each service has marched out on efforts to solve the JADC2 puzzle, and the Air Force's main initiative has been the Advanced Battle Management System. Last fall, the service established the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, or C3BM, which merged the Advanced Battle Management System acquisition authorities from the Rapid Capabilities Office and Chief Architect Authorities under the leadership of Brig. Gen Luke Cropsey. National Defense interviewed Cropsey on June 23. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q. What's been the learning curve and the journey since [taking on the position]? And what have you found both on the bureaucracy and process side of things and on the technical side of things?

A. I characterize the problem space in kind of three big integration chunks. There's the technical integration problem, right? That is kind of the one that everybody thinks about first, it's how you can actually make the beeps and squeaks work. The physics part of this gets a vote.

So, how are you going to put the right waveforms, the right apertures, the right processing, the right apps, the right all of those kinds of things--which by itself is a wicked hard problem--but it's not the only problem you have to go figure out how to solve.

In some ways, the bigger problem is actually how you do the authorities and the process integration, and what I'll call the corporate side of this. So, we basically built a structure on the department side of the business that is largely built to do platformlevel integration, organic kill chains.

The scenario that we're in now is with the kind of highly contested environment that we're expecting to see in a future fight. Those organic kill chains, those individual platforms that we've designed for like the last five decades, aren't actually going to be able to get to the target to do their job the way that we've designed them to do. So, what happens is you have to figure out how you engineer at the next level. And that next level is how do you do a systems integration out across those platforms, extend those kill chains and be able to get out there and touch the enemy at ranges that before we've never had to really think about it.

And now you get into the long-range kill chain problem. And that requires a whole...