ВВС США модернизируют систему связи, отказываясь от громоздких комплексов в пользу мобильных решений

WASHINGTON — The Air Force is modernizing how it conducts command and control (C2) and edge communications, moving away from a decade-old model that proved cumbersome and ineffective during Operation Epic Fury, according to the officer who oversees the service’s communications and cyber system implementation. “We were operating under a model where we deploy big comm packages that took 10 pallets, about 20 tons, about 40 people to deploy. We can’t do that anymore,” Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Phillips, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for warfighter communications and cyber systems, said in an interview with Breaking Defense. “We have to be more agile and mobile and we need a case that is carriable by one person and can be run by one or two people.” RELATED: Army Cyber created an ‘integrated fire’ cell for Epic Fury Moreover, real world operations brought to light a startling reality for the Air Force, Phillips added: the service only had a primary means of communications with no redundancies. In military-speak, a PACE plan is a mechanism to prepare multiple means of communications in case one is denied or there are technical issues preventing it from working properly, referred to as a Primary, Alternate, Contingency and Emergency plan. “We learned that we didn’t have the A, the C, and the E. We had the primary model that we were used to playing with for 10 years. We were building that alternate and that contingency on the fly,” Phillips said. A team of combat communications experts from European Command and Central Command recently gathered at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., to identify important lessons from the war, Phillips said. “We locked them in a room with a couple pizzas and said, ‘hey, figure out what lessons we learned from [Epic Fury],’” Phillips added. “And that was one of the lessons that came out, that we didn’t have the alternate, contingency and emergency parts to our PACE plan.” The service is beginning to integrate those recommendations into its exercises, Phillips said. Phillips, whose number one priority is delivering resilient and reliable communications capabilities, is about two months into the role. His job was only created in July 2025 after the Air Force split its A/26 directorate, which was responsible for intelligence, cyber effects and IT. One of the reasons given for a dedicated and standalone A6 was to be more prepared for a fight against a sophisticated China threat. Considerations like PACE will be a much higher priority in a fight against Chinese forces, whose doctrine insinuates US communication lines are first on their target list, unlike the mostly permissive environment against technologically inferior adversaries during the War on Terror. When it comes to the airframes themselves, Phillips said one of the goals he shares with the A3, who handles operations, is figuring out ways to integrate beyond-line-of-sight communications capabilities. Some beyond-line-of-sight kits were employed successfully by aviators during recent operations, he added, noting the Air Force is now trying to proliferate them across the entire aircraft inventory. “There’s not a one-size solution that fits all of our different aircraft, but a lot of those capabilities rely on commercial satellite capabilities that exist that we need to leverage. We can’t rely on all MILSATCOM anymore. There’s not enough of it,” he said. “I want to be able to use whatever transport we need that’s available to us. It could be 5G, it could be commercial SATCOM, could be MILSATCOM, or it could be terrestrial.” One of the big focus areas during Epic Fury, Phillips said, was to provide edge connectivity for troops at frontline airfields and other forward positions who might be using a ruggedized laptop or radio, but it took too long to get communications kits into theater. Initially, US airmen had to partner with the intelligence community to use their deployable Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System kits, which are smaller and more agile than Air Force kits. Those smaller IC kits provided connectivity relatively quickly, Phillips said. Among other lessons, Phillips said, “we have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Gone are the days of massive, fixed airbases with reliable amenities and regular schedules. “We have to train our airmen to operate in some really stressful conditions … getting away from those fixed base constructs that we’ve been comfortable in the past. We have to get comfortable in a new way of employing our forces,” he said. “There might be a day where you’re operating out of one location and then that location is not viable anymore, so you have to move to a new location.” Phillips said the construct for his new office is working. There’s now a dedicated general officer who can offer direct guidance to the Air Force secretary on communications and enterprise IT matters, and Phillips’s C2 goals have senior leader buy-in. Other efforts Phillips and his team are looking at include using software-defined networking capabilities to collapse their four or five independent networks into one that is classification- and transport-agnostic, making the user experience seamless. The Air Force is also beginning to look at bandwidth more like a commodity, Phillips said, similar to fuel, bullets and food. “That’s one of the questions that’s being asked: ‘do we have enough bandwidth to do what we want to do at this location,’” he said. “For years we relied on [Defense Information Systems Agency Standard Tactical Entry Point] sites to connect back into the network and a lot of those were dependent on connectivity to MILSATCOM. The MILSATCOM capabilities that we were using just didn’t provide enough bandwidth to do things like C2 at the edge.”