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GCN Home > 10/13/03 issue

Battle-tested: Air Force battlelab’s innovations prove themselves

By Dawn S. Onley, GCN Staff

The Air Force Command and Control Battlelab at Hurlburt Field, Fla., may be thousands of miles from Iraq, but the facility helped wage the fight against Saddam Hussein’s forces.

The battlelab’s Master Air Attack Planning Toolkit rolled out to the Combined Air Operations Center in Southwest Asia within 60 days of a directive from the Air Force chief of staff, said Col. Jon L. Krenkel, the battlelab commander.

The kit is now the basis for assigning fighter, attack and bomber aircraft, officials said. It saved time for air planners in Iraq while reducing errors.

That’s all in a day’s work for the battlelab, which began operating in 1997 as one of a half-dozen facilities assigned to identify, develop and implement innovative concepts in 18-month cycles.

Studying applications

The lab tests applications from the Air Force research and acquisition divisions, the Pentagon, and from industry and academia. Some are suitable for rapid deployment and some need more work.

With an annual budget of less than $4 million and about 30 staff members, the battlelab has fielded new technologies to support Operation Noble Eagle for homeland defense, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Krenkel said.

To prove the worth of innovative command and control technologies for joint warfighting, battlelab workers turn to a variety of methods to test and field new systems. Their tools range, for example, from Extensible Markup Language for automated data feeds to speech recognition software.
Col. Jon L. Krenkel
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“No organization has had more success in applying information technology to quickly increase combat capability.” —Battlelab commander Col. Jon L. Krenkel
“No organization has had more success in applying IT to quickly increase combat capability,” Krenkel said. “We look for great ideas in technology, concepts, doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures to improve C2 for aerospace forces.”

In developing and improving technologies, the battlelab often builds on other IT.

The MAAP toolkit was built on the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Web-enabled Temporal Analysis System as a way to fuse information from disparate networks into a single display, said Lt. Col. Doug Combs, chief of the Concepts Execution Division at the C2 Battlelab.

The MAAP toolkit has brought the Air Force planners into the online age.

“The old process for how we used to plan for war was with a map on the wall and targets plotted on a plastic overlay,” Combs said. “It often took hours to plot them all.”

Officers marked up the large maps and made notations on yellow sticky pads that were tacked around the air operations center. Today, the planners have software to match their weapons to targets.

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