Kessel Run's New Project Is Called DUNE. The Air Operations Center Is Still Running Increment 10.1.

A new project, and a new franchise

On 23 October 2026, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that Kessel Run has launched DUNE, the Dynamic Unified Net-enabled Environment. It started in the spring. It merges cloud and on-premises capability for Air Operations Center operators, commanders and the rest of the operational Air Force, and it standardizes how legacy and current software communicates across the Air Operations Center's systems. The magazine notes that it is unclear whether the name is a reference to the sci-fi franchise.

Nobody arrives at "Dynamic Unified Net-enabled Environment" from first principles. You pick the word, then you reverse-engineer a sentence that produces it, then you put it on a slide. Kessel Run has been doing this since 2017. The only development here is that it has run out of Star Wars and moved to a second franchise.

Elsewhere in the department, the same magazine reported ten days earlier that the Air Force is folding more than fifty Battle Network programs into a single $4.5 billion contract vehicle named Megatron. The naming convention is the one part of this enterprise that scales.

The flagship technology is agreeing on what the data is called

Underneath the name, DUNE is about Data Definition Language. The magazine explains the term for its readers: DDL is "a kind of programming language that can create, modify, or delete database structures," and it is what lets legacy and new software communicate. Col. Brian Viola, who took over Kessel Run in June, told the magazine that "Evolving the architectural foundation is vital."

He is right. That is why you do it first. A data definition language is how two systems agree on what a field is called and what kind of value belongs in it. It is the part you settle before anything else, because nothing downstream functions until the program that produces a target and the program that consumes one are using the same word for it. This is not a frontier. It is the foundation, and it is the foundation in the plainest sense: it is what you pour before you build.

Kessel Run was created in 2017 to modernize the Air Operations Center. Its headline architectural initiative in late 2026 is getting its own portfolio to agree on what the data means. That is not a breakthrough. That is week one, delivered in year nine.

"The era of software-defined warfare," per the organization that stopped defining software

Viola's framing for all of this, as printed: "We are rapidly entering the era of software-defined warfare." He went on to say that tactical superiority belongs to the force that can iterate, secure and deploy code faster than its adversary can adapt.

Seven days before that ran, the same magazine published a Q&A with the same officer under the headline "No Longer a Software Factory." In it he described the change at Kessel Run as "the pivot from organic, software delivery, blue-suited developers doing code to a contractor-led model today." The organization does not write the code anymore. It buys it.

So the stated theory of victory is speed of code, and the stated operating model is purchasing. Put those two sentences in the same mouth, one week apart, in the same magazine, and you have Kessel Run's entire 2026 in miniature: it can still describe the race perfectly, and it has left the track.

Vendor lock, diagnosed by the organization that picked one vendor per portfolio

The problem DUNE is pitched against is that the Air Operations Centers were built as isolated, vendor-locked systems. Viola also objects to building a separate answer for each one. "We don't want to necessarily have every AOC be a snowflake," he said, and tailoring solutions by Air Operations Center is "sucking away from the innovation we really want to get after."

Hold that next to the record. In March 2025, Col. Richard Lopez, then running Kessel Run, described the organization as "government-led, vendor-managed" and moving to a single vendor model with each product portfolio run by a single vendor. On who would be writing the software, he was specific: "It's just the individuals that are coding are now going to be the vendors, rather than mixed government-vendor teams." Bryon Kroger, one of Kessel Run's founders, gave that pivot the only review it needed: "The empire struck back."

Kessel Run's cure for vendor lock is fewer vendors. Its cure for software nobody can integrate is to hand each portfolio to one company and ask it nicely to use a common data definition. The thing being diagnosed and the thing being prescribed are the same thing with a new slide behind it.

Nine years of cloud, and the operator can still only use what is on the box in front of them

DUNE builds on AppTX, Kessel Run's Applications Transformation project, which exists to move legacy software applications to the cloud at scale. Parsons, General Dynamics Information Technology and Astrion compete for taskings through it. DefenseScoop reported in February that AppTX and KRADOS are the upgrades being added to the Falconer under the effort called Block 20.

Read the problem statement the magazine prints on DUNE's behalf. Operators today have to choose between cloud-based tools and the legacy hardware they have on hand, and without this standardization an Airman "will only be able to draw from a tool or solution they have in their local network."

That is the argument for the new project, and it is an indictment of the last nine. Kessel Run was the organization that was going to bring cloud-native software delivery to the Air Force. In October 2026 its leader's case for a new architecture initiative is that the people running air wars can only reach what is already sitting on their local network. The cloud showed up. Kessel Run is still working on the extension cord.

The fielded system is Increment 10.1

Here is the sentence in the DUNE article that should have been the headline. The current Falconer system is in Increment 10.1, with the 10.2 upgrade, now called Block 20, in progress.

Ten point one. On 13 July 2017, the Air Force terminated Northrop Grumman's contract to modernize the Air Operations Center weapon system. The development-phase price had gone from $374 million in 2013 to $745 million. The replacement approach, AOC Pathfinder, was going to use agile development and deliver modernized capability within one year of initiation. That is the event Kessel Run was born out of, and that one-year promise is the oldest unpaid invoice in Air Force software.

Nine years on, the magazine that just covered Kessel Run's newest initiative records that the Air Force is still flying on 10.1 and still working on 10.2. The upgrade has been renamed. In February the same publication noted it was "first referred to as 10.2 and now called Block 20." The number did not move. The branding did.

An organization was created, staffed, funded, set up in Boston, written up in every trade publication in the sector, held up as the model for military software reform, copied by every other service, and then quietly converted into a contracting shop. Across all of that, the version number went from 10.1 to 10.1.

The verdict

In our opinion DUNE is not a modernization program. It is a confession printed in a trade magazine. After nine years, a founding scandal, a cultural movement, a leadership handoff and a full pivot to contractors, the systems Kessel Run was built to fix still cannot reliably read each other's data, and the fix for that has been given a name, a logo and a spring start date.

Look at what the public record actually shows Kessel Run producing lately. A renamed solicitation. A renamed upgrade. A renamed delivery model. A new acronym with a movie attached. Every one of those is a label. Not one of them is 10.2.

The Air Force killed the 10.2 contract in 2017 for being late. Kessel Run has been working on it for nine years.

Sources

The jokes are ours. These are not.

Disclaimer: This document is satire. Factual assertions are sourced and attributable to the publications cited above. All characterizations, inferences and contempt herein are furnished by the author at no additional cost to the government.