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Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced the Ringleader exercises at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in late February.
The number of U.S. military and intelligence sensors is growing at a whirlwind pace, positioned across proliferated satellite constellations, uncrewed platforms and ground, sea and air systems. Now the Pentagon needs to prove it can fuse the data from those systems rapidly to help warfighters make decisions on ever-shrinking time frames.
The Air Force is launching a series of exercises this year under the moniker Ringleader to probe its ability to pull live data from on-orbit satellites, drones and aircraft, then fuse that data to support operations such as tracking moving targets, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced Feb. 23.
- Exercises launching this year will integrate all available data
- The service’s Distributed Common Ground System is to play a key role in global connectivity
“Over the last few years, we’ve built out the necessary software, hardware and network infrastructure,” Meink said in a keynote speech at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “Now it’s time to test them.”
Ringleader will mark the service’s first attempt to gather and integrate the reams of data collected across its vast array of sensors, as well as data from sister services, commercial platforms and the intelligence community. The goal, Meink said, is to put the nascent Department of the Air Force (DAF) Battle Network—a system-of-systems infrastructure developed to fuse data from disparate sensors and pass useful information on to the warfighter—through its paces in a simulated environment.
While the Air Force already conducts regular exercises with the DAF Battle Network, Ringleader would scale those tests as part of a larger framework, Meink told reporters at the conference. The goal is to help speed up a warfighter’s steps in detecting, identifying, tracking, attacking and ultimately destroying a target—a process referred to as closing the kill chain.
“It’s fairly easy to track one thing,” Meink said Feb. 24. “We need to make sure that we can actually close that entire kill chain.”
One key component of the experiment will be the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), a service spokesperson says. Personnel assigned to the 16th Air Force (Air Forces Cyber) have used the platform for more than two decades to gather and process data from systems—such as the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady or Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk—to create actionable intelligence for combatant commanders or joint forces. Through Ringleader, the DCGS will help ensure global connectivity to the variety of sensors involved in the experiments, the spokesperson says.
The experiments will launch as the service works to migrate its moving-target-indication (MTI) capabilities to spacecraft from air platforms. While Meink highlighted space-based tracking in announcing the effort, he told reporters that the exercises would be much broader than MTI. Ringleader is to be supported in part by funds allocated in the budget reconciliation bill passed by Congress in July, along with prior baseline appropriations, he said.
U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman described Ringleader as a collaborative effort between the two services to put in “reps and sets” in a modeling and simulation environment that can inform future acquisition and operational concepts.
“We haven’t collected this kind of data from a global perspective, with this level of volume of data, and turned it into rapid battle management decisions,” Saltzman told reporters at the conference.
The findings from the Ringleader experiments could prove valuable as the Defense Department works to field the Golden Dome missile defense architecture, which will bring together sensors across every domain. Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Pentagon’s lead acquisition officer for Golden Dome, has said his near-term priority is to deliver an integrated command-and-control system by this summer and to incorporate into it various weapon systems, like space-based interceptors, by the summer of 2027.
That timeline would align with plans to demonstrate an operational Golden Dome capability that could be used against “credible threats” by 2028, Guetlein said in January at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Space Industry Days conference.
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