The Air Force is returning to the experimentation business and is budgeting $100 million annually, starting with fiscal year 2018, to examine existing technologies and how they can be used to address future challenges.
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Military Deputy, Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch said Wednesday the service has created a council, chaired by himself and Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Requirements Lt. Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, to prioritize future experiments. Bunch said some recent Air Force experimentation projects include ones on close air support and directed energy. 
Bunch said the Air Force is developing experimentation campaigns for “data to decision” and defeating agile and intelligent targets and that these would start in 2018. These campaigns, he said, came out of the Air Force’s Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team (ECCT) effort, a project instituted by former chief of staff Gen. Mark Welsh and approved by Secretary Deborah James.
Bunch said this team focuses on big picture efforts using a wide range of Air Force resources and expertise to examine how the Air Force handles future challenges. One of its first projects was Air Superiority 2030, a flight plan that culminated from a study of how to enable joint force air superiority in the highly-contested environment of 2030 and beyond.
Bunch said after the Air Force performed research and analysis for Air Superiority 2030, the service built experimentation campaigns and focused both research lab efforts and developmental planning for the next few years. Bunch said the next ECCT team effort will tackle multi-domain command and control (C2) and that this will get a big push from Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein.
Bunch said the goal of the multi-domain C2 effort will be to determine how the service can take all the information available in the various domains like air, space and cyber and provide it in a matter that allows for timely action. He also ensured an industry audience at the Unmanned Systems Defense conference in Arlington, Va., that the Air Force would better heed industry’s input for the multi-domain C2 effort.
Bunch also said the Air Force was maybe 30 to 45 days away from releasing the request for proposals (RFP) for its highly anticipated Joint Stars Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) recapitulation program. Bunch and his colleague, Darlene Costello, said in September that the RFP release was on hold while the Air Force worked the congressional defense authorization committees over Senate-approved bill language that would require the program have a fixed price contract for the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) portion.
Costello, in September, said the Air Force currently has a hybrid approach of cost-plus and fixed price portions for EMD. Costello added the fixed price portion of the program is mostly in procurement, but there were some other fixed-price portions in the program (Defense Daily, Sept. 21). Bunch on Wednesday said the Air Force, in essence, is trying to avoid rushing the RFP out to industry and then having to make changes afterward that would further delay the program.