Kessel Run Awarded $100 Million to Replace Aircrew Scheduling Tools the Air Force Already Built

One hundred million dollars for a scheduling app

From the Department of Defense contract announcements for 28 July 2026, reproduced here in full because the prose does not need help:

“Vivsoft Technologies LLC, Herndon, Virginia, was awarded a $100,000,000 firm fixed price other transaction agreement for the Aerospace Readiness Enterprise System requirement. This agreement provides for modernization of the Department’s aircrew scheduling, training management, and standardization and evaluation capabilities. The location of performance is Herndon, Virginia, and is expected to be complete by July 22, 2030.”

Three offers were received. Of the hundred million, $3,530,268 was obligated at award, which is three and a half percent. The contracting activity is the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Hanscom Air Force Base. The program office is Kessel Run.

So: a hundred million dollars, and four more years, for aircrew scheduling. Deciding who flies which airplane on Tuesday.

In 2020 the Air Force said seconds

Here is the part that should end the conversation. ARES is not new capability. It is a replacement. The Air Force has named what it replaces: the Graduate Training Integration Management System, Patriot Excalibur, and Puckboard.

Puckboard is a scheduling application built by Airmen. It came out of the 15th Wing’s software team in Hawaii and Pacific Air Forces’ TRON effort, and it went live on real C-17 data in 2020. ExecutiveGov, reporting the rollout that year, described what it did to the old workflow: it replaced “an old several-day process where airmen would manually shuffle pucks to set schedule matches,” and “the new software automates the matching process that now only takes seconds to complete.”

In 2023 Puckboard won an R&D 100 Award in the Software/Services category, entered by MIT Lincoln Laboratory with the Department of the Air Force among the co-developers. Its award entry billed it as the first government-accredited, web-based, algorithm-backed collaborative scheduling application accessible to Department of Defense service members over the internet with a Common Access Card.

Now read what Kessel Run promises ARES will do, from its own announcement of the award: ARES “is designed to reduce multi-hour scheduling tasks into minutes.”

Seconds in 2020. Minutes in 2030. One hundred million dollars in between.

Both of those figures are the government selling its own software to the public, which means at least one of them is marketing, and there is no version of that where Kessel Run comes out of it well. If the 2020 claim was honest, Kessel Run has signed a hundred-million-dollar agreement to make aircrew scheduling slower. If it was not, the Air Force has been publishing fiction about its scheduling tools for six years and is now asking to be believed about a fresh one.

Well? Which one is it Kessel Run? Either the Airmen who built Puckboard really did get it down to seconds, and you are charging a hundred million dollars to walk that back to minutes, or the Air Force has been overselling its scheduling software since 2020 and expects the 2026 press release to be taken at face value anyway. Pick one. There is no third answer, and both of the available ones belong to you. Nobody made you print the number.

The fast one

Kessel Run’s release wants credit for speed. This is the paragraph:

“Because the software was already rigorously tested and approved by actual operators during a prototyping phase, this specialized agreement allows the Air Force to bypass the lengthy, traditional defense-bidding process. By transitioning directly into a production agreement, the service can rapidly scale the user-approved software across the entire enterprise, delivering modern capabilities to the flightline in a fraction of the time.”

Bypass. Directly. Rapidly. A fraction of the time.

The request that started this went to industry on 11 December 2025. The contract is expected to be complete on 22 July 2030. That is four years and seven months, and that is the accelerated version, the one that skipped the lengthy traditional process, the one written up as a fraction of the time.

Kessel Run turned nine this year. A child born the week Kessel Run was founded will be a teenager when the aircrew scheduling software is done.

There is no version of this where the fast route to a scheduling tool runs through 2030. Kessel Run is not selling speed. It is selling the paperwork that speed used to require, at full retail, on a schedule long enough that nobody who approved it will still be in the billet when it lands.

Development partner

The release ends with the standard block describing who Kessel Run is. The boilerplate is where these documents keep their honesty, because nobody edits it and nobody reads it. This is how Kessel Run described its role in ARES:

“Kessel Run, the development partner for the ARES program, is a division within the Department of the Air Force’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management.”

The development partner. Not the developer. The partner of the developer, who is in Herndon, Virginia, and has a hundred million dollars.

This is not a slip of the pen. In March 2025, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported Kessel Run ending its mixed government-vendor coding teams in favor of a model it calls government-led and vendor-managed, in which vendors write the code. Kessel Run was created in 2017 on the argument that the Air Force had to write its own software instead of buying it. It now buys software and describes itself as a partner in the buying.

The release does name one thing Kessel Run itself will do. Quoting it exactly: joint teams from Kessel Run and VivSoft “will soon launch user research trips to Air Force bases nationwide,” where “by shadowing and interviewing personnel in their daily environments, developers can translate real-world flightline feedback directly into rapid system updates.”

Read the tense. Will soon launch. The production agreement is already signed. The going-and-talking-to-the-Airmen part, the entire founding methodology, the thing Kessel Run was built to be good at, is scheduled for after the hundred million dollars was committed.

They put the discovery phase downstream of the purchase order and printed it as a feature.

Four pillars, no floor

The release lists what ARES will consist of. It has four core capability pillars. There is a Mission Engine with an AI-assisted interface. There is forward-looking intelligence with predictive modeling to forecast training pipelines months in advance. There is seamless integration so historical records migrate smoothly. There is tactical resiliency on a Zero Trust architecture, engineered to keep scheduling online in contested and degraded environments.

Every one of those is a real engineering concern and every one of those is also a slide. Kessel Run has AI, prediction, Zero Trust and contested-environment survivability in the announcement, and a delivery date in 2030. The pillars are finished. The building is not started.

Patriot Excalibur, one of the six systems ARES retires, has been supported since the program’s inception in 1998, and poorly supported since Kessel Run took it over, which its own contractors were advertising as settled fact by 2022. PEX has been “Going Away” for at least half of its life. If ARES lands on time in 2030, the Air Force will have spent sixteen years replacing it, and the last four and a half of those will have been the fast part.

The verdict

Nothing here is a scandal. That is what makes it worth writing down. Nobody stole anything. The competition was real and drew three offers. The vendor is presumably competent. The Airmen who will use ARES need better tools than the six they have.

What happened is duller and more expensive than a scandal. The Air Force built itself a software organization in 2017 so it would stop paying contractors a hundred million dollars and waiting four years for basic enterprise software. In 2026 that organization’s achievement, announced by its own public affairs shop with pillars and adjectives, is paying a contractor a hundred million dollars and waiting four years for basic enterprise software. It has become the thing it was funded to prevent, and it has kept the name.

In our opinion, that is not a pivot, a maturation or a lesson learned. It is a nine-year, publicly funded demonstration that the Air Force can absorb any reform, given time and a big enough press release.

Kessel Run once promised to make the Air Force fast. Its position now is that scheduling a Tuesday flight will take minutes, in 2030, for a hundred million dollars. Airmen already did it in seconds, in 2020.

Sources

The jokes are ours. These are not.

Disclaimer: Satire. We know the citations make it look like journalism. The sources are real, the sneering is ours, and any resemblance to a fair and balanced assessment is purely coincidental.