The Air Staff’s director of information services and integration, Maj. Gen. William Lord, told Government Computer News that the Air Force information technology personnel he spoke with during two town hall meetings “appreciated the candor” of being told they would be among the first to face personnel cuts. Lord arranged the town hall sessions during the recent IT conference in Alabama where the news broke about IT personnel being very vulnerable as USAF cuts some 40,000 personnel over the next few years, principally because much of their efforts have made it possible for USAF to streamline its business functions. Lord also told GCN that IT has shifted its focus from refining business practices to “solving warfighting integration issues.” One would think there is still a lot of work to do for IT wienies.
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…