Photo: USAF
For the past couple of years or so, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has been struggling to come up with something called Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS, for short, the program aims to develop the technologies needed to “change the future of combat” by allowing American and allied troops to share information faster and better.
More to the point, the military plans to use networked systems to share information between its branches in real-time so that joint operations could be run effectively “across all domains, such as sea, land, air, space and cyber.“
As part of ABMS, a massive live-fire exercise conducted back in April 2020 made use of Starlink satellites. Later on, in September, USAF also conducted another drill, asking soldiers to detect and defeat efforts to disrupt U.S. operations in space and countering attacks against the U.S. homeland by using things like a hypervelocity weapon and robot dogs.
ABMS is a very comprehensive range of tools, one that also includes the possibility for different-make aircraft to talk to one another using a communications pod.
At the end of last week, USAF announced it is done toying around and will deploy some of the technologies that were developed “into a new and more operational phase.” That means the military branch will begin acquiring specialized equipment to support ABMS and begin real-world testing.
USAF plans to run ABMS exercises every four months. It calls them Joint Onramps, and each is designed to get personnel trained with the new set of technologies and procedures that are integrated into military operations.
So far, there have been three such onramps, the last one in February of this year. So far, USAF managed to convince an F-35 and an F-22 “to pass data over a protected waveform for the first time” and a “Howitzer to shoot down a surrogate cruise missile.”
As part of ABMS, a massive live-fire exercise conducted back in April 2020 made use of Starlink satellites. Later on, in September, USAF also conducted another drill, asking soldiers to detect and defeat efforts to disrupt U.S. operations in space and countering attacks against the U.S. homeland by using things like a hypervelocity weapon and robot dogs.
ABMS is a very comprehensive range of tools, one that also includes the possibility for different-make aircraft to talk to one another using a communications pod.
At the end of last week, USAF announced it is done toying around and will deploy some of the technologies that were developed “into a new and more operational phase.” That means the military branch will begin acquiring specialized equipment to support ABMS and begin real-world testing.
USAF plans to run ABMS exercises every four months. It calls them Joint Onramps, and each is designed to get personnel trained with the new set of technologies and procedures that are integrated into military operations.
So far, there have been three such onramps, the last one in February of this year. So far, USAF managed to convince an F-35 and an F-22 “to pass data over a protected waveform for the first time” and a “Howitzer to shoot down a surrogate cruise missile.”
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