Air Force Space Command recently made a huge step towards integrating onto the joint information environment “and nobody noticed,” said Gen. John Hyten, commander of Air Force Space Command, at AFA’s Air & Space Conference in National Harbor, Md., Sept. 16. With the help of the Army and the Defense Information Systems Agency, AFSPC moved the Air Force network onto a joint regional security stack, “the fundamental gateway for the joint information environment,” Hyten said. The move is a big deal for the command, but also for the entire Defense Department, he said. “We are all-in on building a joint information environment in the Air Force,” Hyten said. Once the transition is complete “in the very near future” it will finally “allow us to defend cyberspace the way that we need to,” added Hyten. The joint information environment is an DOD and DISA initiative designed to realign, restructure, and modernize the department’s IT infrastructure by consolidating and standardizing the design and architecture of all DOD networks.
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…