General Bowlds delivers first 'State of ESC' presentation

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AFB, Mass. --  Addressing nearly 700 attendees at this year's State of ESC presentation Jan. 23, the center's commander, Lt. Gen. Ted Bowlds, spoke highly of the organization he inherited just over two months ago.

"There's a great talent pool (of senior leaders) here, and below those individuals, there's a world-class team," he said.

The State of ESC and the adjoining New Horizons Symposium are sponsored by the Lexington-Concord Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. Both were held this year at the Newton (Mass.) Marriott.

The general's address, normally conducted as part of a luncheon concluding New Horizons, was done over breakfast Jan. 23 because of the general's competing scheduling demands. "I'll give you the tip of the iceberg, and then during the rest of today and tomorrow you'll hear the below-the-water-line information from the experts who work at ESC," General Bowlds said at the outset.

"This is an incredibly complex portfolio," he said of the programs managed by ESC. "It's a huge tree. Once you start at the top, it just spans all kinds of directions ... but the bottom line is that it's delivering the power of information."

That informational power derives not only from systems that collect, distribute and process information, but from those that enable decision makers to find just the right data at the right time.

"We're finding out that there's lots of data out there, and if we make that data accessible and useable, there's a lot more information that'll help us achieve the things [Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne] has laid out for us," General Bowlds said.

Examples provided included new data fusion technologies, an enhanced intelligence information exploitation system and a user-developed operational picture provided to U.S. Strategic Command and lauded by the secretary of defense. The general also spoke about upgrades to AWACS, which he referred to as a warhorse, and of the 36,000 combat flying hours Joint STARS jets have contributed to efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The general talked too of work done to help counter the improvised explosive device threat in Iraq, as well as critical data link upgrades to existing weapons systems. He mentioned ESC's efforts to establish air traffic control capabilities in Iraq and elsewhere, and discussed critical force protection upgrades the center had placed in theater.

General Bowlds also spoke about great accomplishments on the combat support side of his portfolio, including the Defense Enterprise Accounting Management System. Delivered on schedule this past summer, the system, which consolidates several business systems that previously stood alone, has both impressed and "increased the appetite" of the war fighter, he said.

The general cited accomplishments "closer to home" by the 66 Air Base Wing, which completed a couple of major military construction efforts in 2007, including Hanscom's new, state-of-the-art fitness facility. Other efforts noted included a major network e-mail migration to regional servers, an innovative deployee-return program known as Heroes Homecoming and outstanding Operational Readiness Inspection planning and implementation.

The general pronounced the ESC portfolio healthy and showed budget numbers, up nearly 10 percent from 2006, that reflected ESC work growth.

General Bowlds predicted that this increased workload would continue, but stressed that the overall Air Force budget picture has been and will continue to be constrained. This, he said, means smart acquisition choices based on diligent risk and success-probability analyses are more important than ever.

Much of the general's presentation was devoted to the need to increase acquisition speed. Although he didn't use the now-famous elephant/NASCAR chart favored by his predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Chuck Johnson, General Bowlds did retain General Johnson's Rs/rS description of the inverse relationship between requirement size and delivery speed.

He said the era of large, stand-alone systems is over and that the new more effective model calls for building information systems onto common, base-layer architectures.

"We need to trade stovepipes for services," General Bowlds said, extolling service oriented architectures that, based on the engineering principle of loose coupling, manage software system interactions with simple, generic interfaces. In this way, authorized consumers and providers of information share a small set of universally available interfaces to use or supply information services.

"Everyone's data will be there," he said. "We'll eliminate all those time-consuming point-to-point exchanges."

The general talked quite a bit about cyber acquisition. He said the Air Force and its industry partners need to first fully define the cyber challenge, then keep up with constantly changing needs. They also have to integrate the air, space and cyber domains while being ever mindful of security challenges.

He talked about the value of layered defenses and spoke specifically about the Cyber Control System, or CCS. CCS, to be developed in spirals, will in its earliest phase be able to detect patterns and give operators within the Air Force Network Operations Center near-real-time information about any suspected network disturbances.

General Bowlds was followed to the stage by Maj. Gen. William Lord, commander of the Air Force's provisional Cyber Command, who served as the New Horizons keynote speaker.

"It's great that we have General Lord with us," General Bowlds said. "Our partnership with him is very important because we have to do this right the first time, because in this world of cyber you probably don't get a second chance, or if you do, it's hard to catch it."