Charles Lyons-Burt
“For several decades, the Air Force has been operating with equipment born out of the 1960s and 1970s, which served its missions adequately,” said Lt. Col. Jon Van Nostrand, who serves as deputy division chief of support equipment and vehicles. However, in recent years, the demands of the great power competition with rapidly modernizing nations has necessitated a full-blown makeover of the force’s technology architecture, especially its information technology systems.
A Look Inside the Air Force’s IT Innovation Efforts
The Air Force’s IT strategy includes a number of focus areas, which it is realizing through several massive contract awards.
Electronic Warfare
According to Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and Comptroller Kristyn Jones, electronic warfare is one of four major “cross-cutting operational enablers, or COEs.” Rather than the defensive tact Air Force EW strategies have taken before, the service is concentrated on “offensive electronic attack capabilities to ensure we have a viable delivery method that is battle managed across all domains and levels of warfare.”
Join the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Air Defense Summit to hear speeches and panel discussions from many of Jones’ colleagues at the Department of the Air Force, like Chief Information Officer Venice Goodwine and Under Secretary Melissa Dalton. The event gives you exclusive access to converse directly with these important leaders and it’s a must for all government contractors with Air Force business. Register here for the July 23rd event!
Air Force IT Contract Awards
COMET
A subsidiary of Akima—the Herndon, Virginia-based government technology organization—won a spot on the Communications and Enterprise IT Support Services indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract. Duties under the $750 million, 10-year award include sunsetting and replacing legacy tech and setting up and maintaining an ever-operational service desk that caters to almost 5,000 users on nearly 40 networks, among other tasks.
Forthcoming Cloud Contracts
Sometime in this recently begun third quarter of 2024, the Air Force is set to issue a trio of solicitations for its CloudOne next platform. The resulting awards, which, according to Federal News Network, will be announced in the fourth quarter of the year, will be three single-award blanket purchase agreements, via General Services Administration’s schedules program. The BPAs will fund cloud service provider reseller and software management; architecture and common shared services; and enterprise application modernization and migration.
Enterprise-IT-as-a-Service Wave 2
The Air Force released a request for proposals for the second iteration of its potential 10-year, $12.5 billion cap contract vehicle in April. Winners under the award—which will comprise a minimum of five 8(a) businesses and three HUBZone firms, women-owned companies, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses and other small outfits—will be responsible for retooling, running and upkeeping the network infrastructure at all DAF locations.
Tap Into the Power of IT at the 2024 Air Force Summit
At the Potomac Officers Club’s highly anticipated 2024 Air Defense Summit on July 23, there will be a panel discussion devoted to IT acceleration in the department. During the discussion, a dynamite group of Air Force program leaders will talk through pain points, explain their ambitions and provide concrete solutions to challenges. Don’t miss out! Register here. The panelists are as follows:
Col. Frank Biancardi
As deputy director of the Advanced Battle Management System cross-functional team, Col. Biancardi works with the leader of the team to rethink and build command and control systems, using the needs of warfighters and the pressing threats from rival nations to modernize. (ABMS is the Air Force’s contribution to the Department of Defense’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, effort.)
Col. Biancardi has been a part of the Air Force for over 20 years as an active duty pilot, and most recently as military assistant to the secretary of the Air Force.
Col. James Crocker
Col. Crocker will be able to speak directly about the upcoming aforementioned cloud contracts at the event, as he is chief technology officer for the Cloud One program, which is a $3 billion effort with 125 applications and 700,000 users. He came aboard the Air Force in 1999 as a software developer and though detoured briefly in the intervening period as an intel systems developer and crypto specialist at the National Security Agency, has been a dedicated enabler of DAF’s mission for the majority of his career.
Among his accomplishments are founding and overseeing Air Force’s Business and Enterprise Systems Product Innovation, a.k.a. BESPIN, and playing a key role in standing up the Air Force Digital University.
Pat Kumashiro
Kumashiro, who serves as a senior advisor for the F-35 program in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment, will be able to offer a different perspective on IT matters from his fellow panelists. He has cultivated this unique outlook via his current duties supplying expertise to senior Pentagon officials about the F-35 Lightning II weapon system, as well as from his industry experience at LMI, where he was director of the USAF market. Kumashiro also has put in the time in the more traditional avenue, with 27 years spent in Air Force aircraft maintenance and logistics and active duty.
Bob Ritchie
Who better to lead a panel discussion on Air Force IT than SAIC Chief Technology Officer Bob Ritchie? The experienced software engineer will root the conversation in his private sector-honed, extensive knowledge of the most rigorously modern technology possibilities on the market and in development. His expertise spans cloud, agile methods and full stack dev tech.
