New Vice Chief: Air Force Failing to Exploit ‘Decisive Advantage’ Offered by Data
Feb. 29, 2024 | By Shaun Waterman
The U.S. Air Force is struggling, and in important ways failing, to deal with the deluge of data that new digital flight systems are producing, missing out on the “decisive advantage” it could supply if properly utilized, the service’s vice chief told industry leaders Feb. 29.
In his first public comments since being sworn in Dec. 29, Gen. James Slife offered a negative assessment of the service’s tools, processes, and skills to take advantage of its own data—at the expense of potential benefits to training, operations, maintenance and logistical systems.
“We’re not at all organized, educated [or] trained, … we don’t have the right policies, we are wholly out of position to be able to take advantage of this,” Slife said at a lunch event hosted by the D.C. chapter of the defense vendors’ trade association AFCEA.
As a result, he said vast quantities of uncategorized, unindexed data were being dumped into the service’s cloud-based data lakes. “These data lakes have more unusable data than that which is actually usable,” Slife said, adding that, as a result, they’ve “become data swamps … with more uncategorized, uncatalogued information than any machine or human could use.”
Slife gave three specific examples of these failures, saying the Air Force could not:
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/new-vice-chief-air-force-advantage-data/
