Air Force's AI ambitions mean simplifying its tangle of networks (www.defenseone.com)

The Air Force’s top buyer for battle-network systems, Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey, announced an initiative to simplify the service’s sprawling, bespoke network stacks into a smaller, “rational number” of interoperable, end-to-end capabilities to enable widespread AI use. Technical teams are drafting enterprise-level strategies under the C3BM strategic framework (aligned with the service’s ’26 priorities) and building on a recent network modernization paper; those drafts will be circulated across the department and to industry for comment this fall as the Air Force moves over the next year to consolidate disparate systems and accelerate decision-making speed and scale. Leaders emphasized this is about more than algorithms: data integrity and integration are bottlenecks. Maj. Gen. Michele Edmondson warned that heavy customization of commercial off‑the‑shelf solutions has fragmented data and hindered interoperability, undermining AI utility. The implication for the AI/ML community is clear—operational gains will require standards, common stacks, robust data engineering, and lifecycle data governance to feed models reliably. For industry, the effort signals procurement and architecture shifts toward enterprise-wide interfaces, shared services, and plug‑and‑play data pipelines that can support AI at scale in contested, mission-critical environments.