Top Air Force general defends Advanced Battle Management System from critical report

A report by a government watchdog that slammed the Air Force’s major command-and-control program did not include key classified information and was outdated by the time it was released last week, the service’s top general said Wednesday.


On Friday, the Government Accountability Office delivered a scathing report on the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, which seeks to overhaul the U.S. military’s command-and-control infrastructure so that any platform will instantly and seamlessly be able to share data with another weapon system on the battlefield.

The problem, according to the GAO, is that the Air Force has not provided enough detail on exactly what technology it needs, how it plans to field it and how much it will cost. But speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein said the agency did not have access to key information that may have fleshed out the service’s plans.

“There is a bit of latency to the reporting,” Goldfein said. “Two things I would offer is that they were not able to get to our December ABMS demo. So they didn’t actually … see in real time what we were connecting.”