The Department of War is making its acquisition leaders accountable for mission outcomes. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth set the tone in November 2025, when he announced an overhaul of defense acquisition at the National War College. He said contracting officers...
Kessel Run
After decades of building isolated, vendor-locked systems to run the Air Operations Centers that serve as the Air Force’s “combat brains,” the program office tasked with creating the next-generation AOC is working to fold those systems into a new cloud-based system.
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 ...
Defense industry leaders say the Air Force needs to be able to update the software on its munitions multiple times a day, not every few months, and a new Pentagon instruction released last week could enable that.
The Air Force has issued a $100 million contract to combine its long-disjointed systems for managing aircrew readiness with software that is expected to reach initial operational capability next year, starting with the T-6A Texan II and the C-17 Globemaster III.
Most government software programs that fail never had a software problem. They had an acquisition problem. Bryon Kroger, founder and CEO of Rise8, traces his career path to a single incident. As a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer running targeting...
The Air Force’s Kessel Run software factory is launching an effort to create the “next generation” of the service's Air Operations Centers, used to command, control, and coordinate aircraft movements around the globe.
Kessel Run is pivoting. The Air Force’s original software factory, which brought modern digital application practices like agile development and DevSecOps to the military, is changing the way it does business.
The Air Force's network of software development teams has grown prodigiously in recent years, with 17 software factories, three software engineering groups, and two enterprise services spread across the U.S. Now, however, USAF is reconsidering how it wants to organize those teams—having them work more ...
How a handful of Airmen brought DevOps to USAF, then used it to save more than 123,000 lives.
As part of a continued overhaul of the Air Force’s approach to software acquisition, the Kessel Run software factory signed a user agreement with Air Combat Command last month. The new agreement is a significant milestone in how the MAJCOM and the software factory will ...
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. is fashioning a fighting force to match what he describes as the “changing character of war,” one where all domains are contested and capabilities matter more than numbers. As the United States moves away from the Middle ...