How We Get to Captain America-level Battle Speeds
We are on the verge of Hollywood-level fast, but the service branches need cultural change and cooperation for it to work.
By Gen. David Allvin
U.S. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff
July 8, 2021
In the season finale of the Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the new Captain America, a former Air Force pararescueman, uses the fusion of perfect communications, flawless sensors, and artificial intelligence to lead an air and ground operation to rescue hostages and capture a group of global extremists.
While this was entertaining fiction, the fact is that future conflicts will require the U.S. military to make rapid progress toward this and other aspirational visions of command and control, or C2, as I wrote in my recent Defense One article on the Department of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, or ABMS. We are on the verge of a time in which we can collect vast amounts of data from sensors in every domain, share it with troops in every service branch, process that data to provide decision-quality information, and execute operations at a tempo that exceeds our adversary—all within the span of a typical Hollywood action sequence. Deciding and acting at speeds that fast is a decisive advantage in conflict and a powerful deterrent.
Unfortunately, our fascination with technological change tends to ground much public discussion on the future of C2 in our hardware and software. We fantasize often about how we build an AI like Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S., or a command center like the one aboard the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, or a sensor-rich loyal wingman like Falcon’s Redwing.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/07/how-we-get-captain-america-level-battle-speeds/183610/
