C4ISRNET

The Air Force is ramping up its efforts to test and field a suite of new hardware and software that will become the military’s command and control backbone.

Since February, the Air Force has published three separate broad area announcements seeking technologies that could be funneled inside the Advanced Battle Management System, the service’s effort to seamlessly connect all of the Department of Defense’s equipment and pool together its data to form a complete picture of the battlespace.

Then, in May and July, it awarded the first two mega-batches of ABMS contracts, with 46 companies in total winning $1000 and a chance to compete for more money down the road.

“We want a wide variety of companies, and we definitely want fresh blood in the ABMS competition,” Will Roper, the Air Force’s acquisition executive, told reporters on May 14. “There is a lot that can be contributed from companies that are commercially focused, that know a lot about data, that know a lot about machine learning and AI and know a lot about analytics. Those are going to be the most important parts of the Advanced Battle Management System.”

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