NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Air Force is eager to use AI widely but is still struggling with the infrastructure to make it all work, said the service’s top buyer for battle-network systems.
“One of my biggest challenges is the underlying infrastructure that actually makes it all work,” said Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey, the Air Force’s program executive officer for command, control, communications, and battle management, or C3BM, during the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber conference. “It’s just the hard network of figuring out: how do you get the right infrastructure where you need it?”
Interoperability—whether data sharing or linking between systems—remains a challenge.
“With all the different configurations of stacks that are running around out there, getting to an enterprise-level capability is tough,” Cropsey told reporters. “As part of where we’re trying to in our ‘26 priorities, we’re actually looking at how do we build an enterprise battle network, [an] enterprise-wide set of strategies that allows us to go from however many disparate systems are out there today into some rational number of end-to-end capabilities that will allow us to get to the speed and the scale that we need.”
Technical teams are currently developing drafts of those strategies, which will fit under C3BM’s strategic framework announced in July. The Air Force released a separate network modernization document earlier this month.
“As we go into the fall timeframe, we’re going to take those initial internal documents and strategies and start proliferating them out to the rest of the department to get their inputs and then ultimately out for comment to the broader industry base that provides that capability back into us, so that we have a robust strategy around what that end state looks like,” Cropsey said.
But even the best algorithms need good data and management practices to back them up.
“We really struggle, I think, with data integrity and being able to integrate our data…And I think that we go into things with good intentions, we look for [commercial-off-the-shelf] solutions to use, but then we personalize things to the degree that we just can’t get there to integrate,” said Maj. Gen. Michele Edmondson, Air Force deputy chief of staff for warfighter communications and cyber systems. “And from an A6 perspective, if we can’t get the data right, there are so many things that we just won’t be able to do to support Gen. Cropsey in his endeavor. So we’ve got to focus more on the data piece.”
