Putting the IT in "Mobility"

Written by AMC/A6 Director's Action Group

MIT 2009 Volume: 13 Issue: 8 (September)

Air Mobility Command's Communications Directorate
Provides Integrated, Responsive, Reliable and
Secure Communications and Information.

Our mission is to provide global air mobility—right effects, right place, right time. AMC’s airmen are put in harm’s way every day to deliver troops, cargo and fuel with velocity and precision. On a typical day, we plan 900 sorties, move 2,000 tons of cargo and transport 6,000 passengers. This operations tempo equates to, on average, a mobility aircraft departure every 90 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In the past year, AMC flew 66 percent of the total missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Within AMC, the Directorate of Communications (A6) community supports AMC by providing integrated, responsive, reliable, and secure communications and information; providing services and policy for managing information as a strategic resource for optimum customer support; and serving as AMC’s chief information officer, formulating policies and guidance on the strategic planning, implementation and sustainment of information systems.

We provide this support not only to Headquarters AMC, but also to its 12 bases, the 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center (TACC) Air Operations Center, and U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM). A6 is made up of four divisions: capabilities and integration; command and control mobility systems; operations; and plans, policy and resources. Through our directorate, we plan, design, develop, test, deploy, operate, and sustain numerous information technology systems/programs designed specifically for AMC.

This article will discuss several of these systems/programs, including Senior Leader Command, Control and Communications System-Airborne (SLC3S-A), In-Transit Visibility (ITV), and Enterprise Information Management (EIM). It will then briefly discuss how A6 has creatively leveraged Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century (AFSO21) and developed several solutions to offset severe manning reductions across AMC.

SENIOR LEADER COMMS

The SLC3S-A program provides worldwide airborne communication capabilities for our nation’s top senior leaders, including the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, director of national intelligence, secretary of the department of homeland security, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the combatant commanders. We also manage the ground network interface for these airborne assets, known as the Executive Airlift Communications Network, which provides connectivity to the Department of Defense’s Global Information Grid.

Additionally, we’re pursuing related efforts to modernize our commercial and military satellite and line-of-sight systems to bring higher capacity connectivity for national command and control capability. AMC is leading the effort to keep our national senior leaders connected and protected, even while traveling in airborne assets.

We also manage AMC’s command-unique C2, ITV, operations and business system programs. The C2 and ITV systems we plan, design, develop, test, deploy, operate and maintain provide support across the Mobility Air Forces (MAF) and the USTRANSCOM mission spectrum from initial planning through execution and completion. The C2 systems are responsible for all AMC mission planning, including identifying the appropriate aircraft and air crew and optimizing the flight path.

The ITV systems track the people and cargo on these missions from origin to destination. Both the C2 and ITV systems are crucial to AMC’s airlift, aerial refueling and aeromedical evacuation missions, and used daily to fly our sorties. Our business systems provide for the contracting of the commercial reserve air fleet and accountability of airlift mission budget and costs between government entities.

We provide the systems to integrate global mobility enterprise C2 and ITV capabilities, supporting an average of 900 sorties a day around the world; enhance the velocity and precision in AMC’s airlift capabilities and USTRANSCOM’s supply/delivery chain; and plan, execute, track and account for nearly 4,000 pallets, more than 2,000 loose pieces of cargo, and over 6,000 passengers daily. These systems improve the ability to estimate fuel and optimize the routes of flights to make the most efficient use of fuel; enhance the capability to contract with commercial airlift providers; and provide the means of accounting, budgeting and analysis for over $7 billion.

These systems collectively support more than 34,000 users worldwide. They have been used and continue to be used by the 618th TACC Air Operations Center at Scott Air Force Base , Ill., to manage MAF operations, by planners and operators in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and by those responsible for planning and executing the day-to-day mobility missions, exercises and contingencies wherever they occur to support peacetime, humanitarian and wartime operations.

Along with standard network and application technology, we leverage different technologies to constantly improve system capabilities. We use a multi-mastered replication scheme, across diverse locations, to synchronize enclaves, provide maximum performance, ensure data quality and integrity, and significantly enhance reliability and survivability. Our air cargo and passenger system is undergoing a major upgrade to extend and add new services and capabilities supporting the Worldwide Port System’s sealift capability.

We have adapted network, wireless and automated information technology to extend capabilities directly to the air and water ports, flight lines and warehouses. This new capability enables USTRANSCOM and AMC to track passengers and cargo not only in the air but also on the ground, and extends our systems to our joint community. Our teams continue to improve on our initial development and fielding of a service-oriented architecture capability targeted at improving data exchange and reducing reliance on system-to-system interface.

WEB-BASED SERVICES

The HQ AMC deployment of EIM was one of the largest IT enabling initiatives we’ve fielded. EIM is essentially a collection of Web-based services that use Microsoft SharePoint as the underlying technology. Over the last two years, our team has stood up one of the largest SharePoint environments in the world. The result is a single, centralized enterprise environment hosting over 73,000 users and their data, enabling an unprecedented level of warfighter collaboration.

We’ve established an EIM deployment team that reached out to 12 AMC bases to identify their unique organizational structure and data requirements and then built team sites for all their units. We also expanded our services to support USTRANSCOM users at Scott AFB. EIM has become the cornerstone of our daily ops; commanders live by it and users say they love it.

Through our EIM deployment process, we’ve identified and automated many EIM process workflows and benchmarked those throughout the command. To date, we’ve added over 70 solutions sets to our EIM catalog of services. Two of our most-used solutions are the task management tool and an electronic performance report system. These EIM services have totally revolutionized the way AMC does business. Building on our success, this year we are working to move all the Reserve wings on our network onto EIM, bringing the number of EIM users to over 100,000.

Finally, the communications and information (C&I) community has experienced a decline in resources due to Air Force-wide manpower reductions. Our airmen and civilians have found ways to minimize a loss of nearly 9,000 Air Force C&I resources, of which 1,200 were within AMC, while experiencing a 6 percent increase in Air Force deployment requirements. Through IT initiatives like EIM, we’re leveraging AFSO21 to automate processes to help offset our reductions in force and increasing deployment tempo.

We’ve developed two initiatives to help reduce and consolidate manning: client service administrators (CSAs) consolidation and a theater deployable communications (TDC) restructure. The CSA initiative targeted administrators working at every AMC unit and squadron and consolidated a number to the base communications squadrons, effectively reducing the number of CSAs in the command from roughly 1,600 to about 200, which represented nearly an 85 percent decrease and saved AMC $28.9 million annually. This action took workload away from the noncommunications units and better enabled the communications community to manage network requirements such as vulnerabilities and fixes.

Our second initiative redirected our TDC to a contingency capability structure, reducing existing manpower requirements by approximately 80 percent and reapplying those positions to existing AMC priorities, a win-win for all parties. Both initiatives not only streamlined manpower resources, but reduced monetary requirements for training and equipment by nearly $1 million per year.

The communications community plays a crucial role in supporting AMC’s overall mission. In today’s very demanding, IT-intensive world, we continually strive to meet and exceed AMC’s needs through the very best in IT programs and systems such as the SLC3S-A program, ITV and implementation of EIM. Even while faced with resource reductions, we implemented several creative initiatives to offset these losses and maintain the same level of service to AMC customers and continue to look for targets of opportunities to streamline our processes.

Colonel Bradley K. Ashley, director of communications, summed up the work of his organization this way: “AMC/A6 puts the IT in ‘mobility.’” ♦

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