–The U.S. Air Force is examining how artificial intelligence (AI) will aid military forces in rapid targeting within the Indo-Pacific theater.
While Operation Desert Storm in 1991 had 40,000 to 50,000 aim points, a campaign against China could involve greater than 100,000 aim points, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, has said. Deptula was a principal planner of Desert Storm’s air campaign.
“Should you have a look at the high-end fight within the Indo-Pacific, there’ll absolutely must be some level of automation, some level of ability to keep up goal custody at a scale that may require either automation or some level of artificial intelligence to give you the option to maintain up,” Steven Wert, the Air Force’s program executive officer (PEO) digital at Hanscom AFB, Mass., told reporters last week in the course of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s (AFLCMC) annual industry days conference here.
Along with his PEO digital position, Wert is the co-lead for Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s third operational imperative–moving goal indication at scale, which was the topic of an offsite classified briefing for AFLCMC industry day participants on the morning of July 31.
“Much of that within the Air Force is just not automated today,” Wert said last week in the course of the query and answer session with reporters when asked a few timeline for the combination of battle management and ground moving goal indication (GMTI). “There was quite a bit of study done taking a look at Long Range Kill Chains. You go from sensing to sense making, to having the ability to maintain custody, to having the ability to discover a goal, but you find yourself with just a whole lot of manual process.”
The Air Force requested about $26 million in fiscal 2024 for the Long Range Kill Chains Prospect
research and development effort to make use of all domain data to enhance targeting (, June 29).
Last September, on the direction of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, service acquisition chief Andrew Hunter appointed Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey because the Air Force’s first integrating PEO for command, control, communications and battle management. The mixing of Long Range Kill Chains is under Cropsey’s purview and “will involve nearly every program executive officer within the Air Force,” Wert said last week.
Space and the Air Force’s future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) are to be key components of Long Range Kill Chains.
The U.S. Space Force desires to transfer $243 million in fiscal 2024 to the National Reconnaissance Office to construct a Long Range Kill Chain satellite payload (, March 23).