USAF officials plan to return the airport terminal and air traffic tower at Kandahar AB, Afghanistan, back to Afghan control. But before they do, airmen at the facility have been installing more than a mile of copper and fiber optic cabling to keep communications lines open. Handling the need-this-done-now work are combat communicators of the 451st Air Expeditionary Group. It is not their stock in trade, but the job they did, say officials, saved a special team from Qatar about five days work. The combat communicators, who come from various active and reserve units, also expanded 10-fold the bandwidth capability for the facility by installing new network switches.
Almost a decade ago, the Air Force created Kessel Run in 2017 as a military-commercial partnership and Airmen-led “software factory” in response to the service’s troubled rollout of the Air Operations Center 10.2. New leader Col. Brian Viola sat down recently with Air & Space Forces Magazine to talk about…