Case Study

The Sudden End of the U.S. Air Force8

"Why does the country need an independent Air Force?" This question is now being asked by the top brass and the civilian lead­ ership at the Pentagon. Many other government agencies, local, state, and federal are asking similar types of questions. New enterprise systems available to government agencies are making them question old ways of doing things and old processes. The need for intelligence agencies to overcome their information silos and share data on potential terrorist threats is constantly in the news. The same information silo problem exists with your local police and fire departments and with many other government agencies at all levels. The Air Force issue is a classic case of what happens when a new IS and information silos meet.

The military still needs airplanes, but what i t needs more are integrated end-to-end processes that connect soldiers fighting on the ground with airplanes supporting them. Military airplanes pro­ vide two important services: They collect data about the war zone, and they drop ordnance on targets. In both cases, these are just

activities within larger processes, processes that until now had to be done by different departments using their own isolated databases.

One process is the Collect Battlefield Intelligence (Bl)

process. Troops currently fighting and managers planning the fighting both need BI. In both cases, the process starts as a Department of the Army request for intelligence. This request is passed to the Department of the Air Force, which then schedules the flight, as­ signs pilots, specifies locations, and collects data. After the flight, the data is then sent back to the Army. The delivery of ordnance goes through exactly the same interdepartmental process; the only difference is that when the trigger is pulled in the airplane, a bomb goes out rather than data corning in.

These processes have worked this way for about 50 years. Recently, pilotless drones have been developed that do the work that manned airplanes did in the past. These drones have much in common with information systems. The plane, the hardware, is con­ trolled by the software that flies the plane. Data is collected by the drone, and the drone has a database of GPS coordinates and data on the height of every obstacle near it. People operate the drone to drop ordnance and collect BI using well-established procedures.

8 Based on Greg Jaffe, "Combat Generation:Drone Operators Climb on Winds o

These flying information systems, these drones, have changed many of the old processes used by the organization in much the same way ERP changes processes. Because they can be much smaller than manned airplanes and much cheaper, drones can be assigned to the Army units doing the fighting. As a result, the process to drop ordnance or gather BJ is accomplished much more quickly. Instead of information silos that separated Air Force and Army data, now the drone can quickly respond to the request and the data can be made available in real time to the Army units that need it. If these new processes are completely adopted, there may be no need for an independent Air Force.

Please read:

As a new leader you are invited to the conference

table with other executive leadership. You must

make a case for or against Pilotless Drones