The U.S. Air Force is transitioning its program office for the Project Maven artificial intelligence effort into the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) portfolio in a push to expand the latter's warfighting scope, FedScoop reported Monday.
Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, told the publication that the service wants to integrate more AI and machine-to-machine data transmission elements onto the ABMS network.
ABMS will serve as a major component of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) system that will encompass sensors deployed across the land, air, sea, space and cyber domains. The Air Force plans to leverage the AI-enabled ABMS to ingest raw data from the battlefield, according to the report.
“There is no distinction between development systems and warfighting systems anymore in IT,” said Roper. “ABMS and Maven are going to start blurring that line in September.”
Google, the contractor for Project Maven, backed out of its contract with the Department of Defense (DoD) in 2018 due to ethical issues.