Air Force Overhauls Command and Control for Agility After Epic Fury

The U.S. Air Force is fundamentally restructuring its command and control (C2) and edge communications strategies, abandoning a decade-old framework that proved inadequate during Operation Epic Fury, according to the officer overseeing the service’s communications and cyber implementation.

“Our previous approach required massive communication packages spanning 10 pallets, weighing roughly 20 tons, and necessitating 40 personnel to deploy. We can no longer operate this way,” Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Phillips, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for warfighter communications and cyber systems, told Breaking Defense. “We must become more agile and mobile, utilizing equipment that a single person can carry and one or two can operate.”

Furthermore, real-world operations exposed a critical vulnerability for the Air Force: a lack of redundant communication systems.

In military terminology, a PACE plan establishes multiple layers of communication—Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency—to ensure connectivity if one method fails.

“We discovered we lacked the Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency components,” Phillips explained. “For ten years, we only had the Primary model and were improvising the Alternate and Contingency plans on the fly.”

Recently, combat communications specialists from European Command and Central Command convened at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, to extract key lessons from the conflict.

“We locked them in a room with a few pizzas and asked them to identify what we learned from [Epic Fury],” Phillips added. “One major takeaway was our lack of alternate, contingency, and emergency capabilities in our PACE plan.”

The Air Force is now integrating these findings into its training exercises.

Phillips, whose top priority is delivering resilient and reliable communications capabilities, has held the role for about two months. The position was established in July 2025 after the Air Force divided its A/26 directorate, which previously managed intelligence, cyber effects, and IT.

Establishing a dedicated A6 directorate aims to better prepare the force for a potential conflict with a sophisticated adversary like China. PACE planning will be a much higher priority in such a conflict, where Chinese doctrine targets U.S. communication lines as a primary objective—unlike the permissive environments faced during the War on Terror.

Regarding the aircraft themselves, Phillips collaborates with the A3 operations directorate to integrate beyond-line-of-sight communication capabilities. While some beyond-line-of-sight kits were successfully utilized by aviators in recent operations, the Air Force is now working to proliferate them across its entire fleet.

“There is no single solution that fits all our different aircraft, but many of those capabilities rely on existing commercial satellite systems that we must leverage. We cannot rely solely on MILSATCOM; there isn’t enough capacity,” he stated. “I want to use any available transport—whether it is 5G, commercial SATCOM, MILSATCOM, or terrestrial.”

A major focus during Epic Fury was providing edge connectivity to troops at frontline airfields and forward positions, but deploying communication kits to these locations previously took too long.

Initially, U.S. airmen had to partner with the intelligence community to use their smaller, more agile Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System kits, which provided connectivity much faster than traditional Air Force kits, Phillips noted.

Among other lessons learned, Phillips emphasized the necessity to “be comfortable being uncomfortable.” The era of massive, fixed airbases with reliable amenities and predictable schedules is over.

“We must train our airmen to operate under extreme stress, moving away from the fixed-base constructs we have historically relied upon. We must adapt to a new way of employing our forces,” he said. “A location might be operational one day and uninhabitable the next, requiring immediate relocation.”

Phillips confirmed that the structure of his new office is functioning effectively. There is now a dedicated general officer who can provide direct guidance to the Air Force secretary on communications and enterprise IT matters, and his C2 objectives have secured senior leadership support.

Phillips and his team are also exploring software-defined networking capabilities to consolidate four or five independent networks into a single, classification- and transport-agnostic system, creating a seamless user experience.

The Air Force is also beginning to treat bandwidth as a commodity, similar to fuel, ammunition, and food.

“A key question being asked is whether we have enough bandwidth to accomplish our tasks at a given location,” he said. “For years, we relied on Defense Information Systems Agency Standard Tactical Entry Point sites to connect to the network, many of which depended on MILSATCOM connectivity. The MILSATCOM capabilities we used simply didn’t provide enough bandwidth for edge C2.”

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