Wing commander speaks of support for warfighters, American citizens

  • Published
  • By Monica D. Morales
  • 66 ABW Public Affairs
HANSCOM AFB, Mass. --  Despite the challenges of delivering capabilities, the 350th Electronic Systems Wing has developed solutions and taken proactive steps to not only get the right tools to warfighters, but also to support the lives and livelihoods of all Americans, the wing's commander said this morning.

Speaking before an audience of government and industry representatives during the Military Affairs Council breakfast at Max Stein's restaurant in Lexington, Col. Rob Dominguez said his wing is also focused on restoring confidence and re-enforcing compliance in the acquisition environment

"And we're doing things in an innovative way to integrate across the enterprise in a rapid, agile fashion," Colonel Dominguez said.

While the vision and mission of the organization are clear, the colonel said that numerous challenges remain in delivering the wing's capabilities.

Deliveries sometimes come too late and at too high a cost, he said.

At the same time, the responsibility remains to address modernizing the infrastructure of C2ISR.

"There are more demands on us, more mission needs and more expectations from our warfighters," Colonel Dominguez said.

Additionally, contending with traditional stovepipes yields another challenge -- finding ways to integrate across capabilities and adopt integration.

Despite these potential roadblocks, Colonel Dominguez said the wing has taken great strides in responding to obstacles and, in some cases, working to take pre-emptive steps to reduce foreseeable conflict.

Among those accomplishments is the Foreign Military Sales Division's Iraqi Air Base Information Technology Infrastructure Project, which recently contracted an Air and Space Operations Center framework to provide a video wall, voice teleconference and Voiceover Internet protocol capabilities.

"We did that all in five weeks after getting our funding and did it in concert with our user representatives," the colonel said. "It's a great example of how when the team comes together, you solidify your requirement, understand its traits and you can get the work done rapidly."

In the area of enabling Service Oriented Architecture, the wing aims to transfer databases loaded with air resource information and migrate the data to make it more accessible to users. Though still in the planning stages, Colonel Dominguez said that these recommendations alone can provide greater capability.

"We think this will allow us to see the benefits of open architecture and implement recommendations that were made by the AOC team that evaluated how we could move forward with this development," he said.

As for integration, the wing's partnership with the Joint Space Operations Center has laid out the task of consolidating differing Air Force Space Command capabilities from several disparate programs. Using the AOC as a vehicle, this "hodgepodge" of more than 50 services required configuration management. It's that task that the 350 ELSW has been tackling.

"We're still not totally there yet ... but we're undertaking this important challenge because programs continue to develop as stovepipes, unfortunately, and we need to find ways to better build bridges between the programs and the resources to get that done," the colonel said.

The dynamic nature of the wing's Distributed Common Ground System sets the stage for ever-changing requirements and acquisition strategies. In order to embrace further capabilities during its transition from fielding of its version 10.2 to the Block 20 upgrade, the organization is taking proactive steps before the user requirements are fully defined.

That translates into moving out the new version sooner than anticipated thanks to tackling the system architecture before Preliminary Design Review.

"That's consistent with DOD 5000 , and we think that will enable risk reduction that is very significant for this program," Colonel Dominguez said.

And while Net-centricity and SOA are often presented as viable solutions to meet all warfighter capabilities, Colonel Dominguez cautioned that that isn't always the case.

"We will probably have to move in steps to deliver Net-centricity goals and service oriented architecture may be an enabler, but it's not going to be the only game."