Kessel Run Was Built to Replace Prime Contractors. Its Crowning Achievement Is Hiring One.
The software factory would like some software
On 18 February 2026, the Air Operations Center Program Office, Kessel Run Division, published a program announcement asking industry for “innovative solutions” to the Next-Generation Air Operations Center Weapon System.
Read that again. The software factory is soliciting bids for software. Nine years in, its core competency has resolved into knowing who to call.
The system in question is the AN/USQ-163 Falconer, of which the Air Force operates 21 worldwide. It plans, tasks and assesses air operations for a combatant command, and it has done so continuously throughout the entire lifespan of the organization created to retire it. The Falconer has outlasted its own funeral.
The published wish list: artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate decision-making, data fusion and visualization from disparate sources, advanced cybersecurity, and cloud-native architectures. Four entries, not one of which names a capability. All four name a category. This is not a requirements document. It is a mood board.
The schedule, per Air & Space Forces Magazine: RFI February 2026, industry engagement March, draft RFP August 2026, final RFP November 2026, award June 2027. Sixteen months to decide who gets to start. The plan that produced Kessel Run promised delivered capability in twelve. Its heirs now need sixteen for the paperwork that precedes the work.
The garage startup publishes a dress code
Washington Technology reported on 5 May 2026 that a prime systems integrator will lead the effort, with development possibly structured as an other transaction agreement and sustainment procured the conventional way. Bidders need IL6-or-higher cloud, Secret-and-above edge computing, disconnected operations, and a Top Secret facility clearance.
Kessel Run’s founding argument was that the moat around defense software was artificial, that it protected incumbents rather than the mission, and that a small team unencumbered by it could do better. Kessel Run has now dug the moat itself and published the specifications. The requirements read as an itemized list of reasons a company the size Kessel Run claimed to be in 2017 should not bother opening the attachment.
Industry noticed at once. Somebody asked, in writing, how the competition would avoid carve-outs and pay-to-play relationships with a small group of vendors. The government’s complete published answer: “The government is engaging with industry as part of market research and seeks to maximize competition for this requirement.”
Asked on the record whether it had become the thing it was built to replace, Kessel Run answered in fluent boilerplate, without a trace of an accent. Nine years of disruption, and the immune system won without ever appearing to notice it was under attack.
Kessel Run exists because a prime contractor failed
Project Kessel Run was approved at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center in April 2017. Three months later the Air Force terminated its contract with Northrop Grumman to modernize the Air Operations Center weapon system, a program called AOC-WS 10.2. Nothing had been delivered.
The replacement plan was AOC Pathfinder. Working with the Defense Digital Service and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, the Air Force said it would deliver modernized AOC capability within one year.
That one-year plan is now in its ninth year. Measured against the delivery standards Kessel Run spent those years applying to everybody else, it is approaching the halfway mark.
The office chartered to prove that prime contractors were the disease has spent nearly a decade arriving, by every available route, at a prime contractor.
$374 million, twice
Northrop Grumman’s development phase for AOC 10.2 was priced at $374 million in 2013. It grew to $745 million. Its full lifespan was projected to cost taxpayers over $3.5 billion. It delivered nothing. That failure is the entire reason Kessel Run was permitted to exist, and Kessel Run has been billing against the memory of it ever since.
SAIC currently holds the AOC sustainment and modernization contract. It expires in the summer of 2027, conveniently just after the new award. Air & Space Forces Magazine puts it at $374 million. DefenseScoop puts it at $377 million.
Nine years of transformation, audited:
- Same weapon system.
- Same nine-figure contract, to within a rounding error.
- Same species of prime contractor holding the pen.
- Same Falconer still flying the air war.
- One additional organization, which now also requires funding.
Nine years and an unrecoverable quantity of institutional enthusiasm to return to the starting position, having added a payroll.
They called the reversal continuity
In March 2025, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that Kessel Run was abandoning mixed government-vendor coding teams for a model it branded government-led and vendor-managed, one vendor per product portfolio. Col. Richard Lopez, then Kessel Run’s senior materiel leader, explained: “It’s still DevSecOps. It’s still agile… the individuals that are coding are now going to be the vendors, rather than mixed government-vendor teams.”
Still DevSecOps. Still agile. Simply no longer involving Kessel Run writing software. The brand survived the amputation of its subject and did not develop a limp.
Bryon Kroger, who helped found Kessel Run in 2017 and now runs the software firm Rise8, told the same magazine that “it’s the Air Force that failed Kessel Run and the movement towards better software development.” He also agreed the vendor-executed strategy was necessary, because building an organic software capability takes time.
The diagnosis, then, is that the operation was flawless and the patient was defective. Nine years was merely the warm-up, and the Air Force owes an apology for having watched.
The verdict
Kessel Run spent nine years telling the Air Force that the old way was a scandal. It has now written the old way into a solicitation and called it continuity.
Nothing was learned that could not have been learned in 2018. Nothing it built displaced the system it was built to displace. The Falconer still flies the air war. The primes still hold the pen. The contract is still $374 million. The single durable addition to the United States Air Force is an organization whose remaining function is to explain why it should continue.
Kessel Run’s most reliable product was never software. It was the case for Kessel Run.
Sources
The jokes are ours. These are not.