Kessel Run Asks Industry How to Pull Emergency Management Out of C2IMERA

Kessel Run would like the emergency response taken out of its emergency response application

On 14 October 2026, Kessel Run posted a Request for Information to SAM.gov under solicitation number FA8730-26-RFI-C2IMERA-WARDEN. The subject is DAF EMIS, the Department of the Air Force Emergency Management Information System. The stated purpose is to "decouple and transition installation Emergency Management (EM) capabilities from the current" Command and Control Incident Management Emergency Response Application, "C2IMERA."

C2IMERA is Kessel Run's own. The notice says so in the same breath: "As a portfolio within Kessel Run, C2IMERA leverages industry best practices." It is, by a wide margin, the best travelled thing on the organization's record. It is at 70 Air Force installations and more than 100 forward operating bases. Air Combat Command ordered its installations to use it.

Now read the request again. Kessel Run is asking industry, in writing, how to get emergency management out of the application whose name is Command and Control Incident Management Emergency Response Application.

Expand the acronym and the RFI reads as a demolition permit. Take the incident management and the emergency response out of C2IMERA and what is left is C2 and a brand.

What it cost to arrive at this notice

The C2IMERA development work has sat with Leidos since January 2019, when task order FA8730-19-F-0012 was awarded under NETCENTS-2. Kessel Run later added two option years to it. In September 2021, with the application at more than 40 installations, Air Combat Command directed all of its installations to adopt it, and its commander, Gen. Mark Kelly, explained why: "Our bases are air power projection platforms that require real-time installation and resource awareness."

In March 2024 Kessel Run handed Leidos the follow-on to keep building and spreading it: a six-month base period, four one-year options, two six-month options, and a value of $158 million if all options are exercised. Leidos said at the time that it "is dedicated to supporting Kessel Run's vision for C2IMERA proliferation."

Thirty-one months later, the vision is to decouple the emergency management out of it.

Nobody writes a market research notice asking the public how to remove a core function from software that is going well.

The replacement has no code and already has a superlative

Two sentences from the notice, both about a system that does not exist. The first: "DAF EMIS will be the U.S. Air Force's premier, Government-owned software." The second: "The PMO intends to develop a System of Systems solution leveraging the best of the current fielded C2IMERA capabilities."

Premier. There is no product. There are two attachments, an Area of Interest and a Statement of Objectives, both dated 14 October 2026, and a capability that has been awarded a ranking before anyone has written a line of it. The adjective arrived before the software. It usually does here.

And "leveraging the best of the current fielded capabilities" is the phrase a program office reaches for when it is starting over and would prefer not to file the paperwork that says so. It is a salvage clause. You write it about a system you are stripping for parts, not a system you are building on.

Then there are the requirements. DAF EMIS "must be able to operate reliably during intermittent or denied communications without data loss." It needs a "distributed architecture capable of local data caching and edge execution." It "must dynamically ingest authoritative on- and off-base map layers and web feature services." It "must provide a secure, platform-agnostic mobile/edge interface to support dispersed Airmen." It "must be architected to meet DoD Impact Level 5 (IL5) and Impact Level (IL6) security standards."

That is a sound list. It is also, item by item, a list of things the emergency response application fielded at 70 installations apparently does not do, published by the office that has been fielding it since 2019. Every "must" in a market research notice is a confession about the present tense.

One more detail, because it is the detail. The notice asks for software "natively deployed within the DoW software ecosystems" and, a few lines later, for a system that deploys "within designated Department of Defense (DoD) cloud." One short notice, two different names for the department writing the check. Kessel Run wants a single authoritative data layer for base emergency response, and it could not hold a single authoritative name for its own employer across two paragraphs.

Sixteen days to respond, and the government's answers landed on day fifteen

Responses were "requested to be submitted no later than 1700 EST 30 October 2026." Sixteen calendar days from posting. Eleven business days.

Industry did what industry does and submitted questions. Kessel Run answered them at 18:54 UTC on 29 October 2026, in a modification whose entire description is "This update is to address Industry Questions that were asked via the Comment Resolution Matrix (CRM)." The attachment is named "WARDEN RFI_Comment Resolution Matrix_29Oct2026." The deadline did not move.

So vendors got one business day to read the government's clarifications and rewrite their white papers around them. If you wanted to design a process that collects responses from firms large enough to keep a proposal shop on standby and no one else, this is the process. The Air Force then calls the resulting pool the market.

Note the time zone, too. The deadline is written "1700 EST." On 30 October 2026 the eastern United States was on daylight time, and the notice's own structured deadline field says UTC-04:00. The notice was modified on 29 October. The wrong time zone survived the edit. This is the office asking industry for a system that keeps working through denied communications, and it published its own cutoff in a time zone that was not in effect.

The whole thing is filed, per the notice, "in accordance with Part 10 of the Revolutionary Federal Acquisition Regulation Overhaul (RFO)." Kessel Run now has a Revolutionary Air Operations Center program and files its paperwork under a Revolutionary acquisition regulation. The word is working harder at Hanscom this autumn than anything in the repository.

Fourteen days later, another notice asking who has an air picture

On 28 October 2026, Kessel Run posted a second Request for Information: "Request for Information: Air Operations Center (AOC) Common Air Defense Picture (CADP)," solicitation number AOC_CADP, responses due 13 November 2026. The Government is "conducting market research to identify existing and emerging software-enabled capabilities that can improve air and missile defense planning, situational awareness, reporting, readiness analysis" and sustainment analysis.

Count the autumn. On 29 September, an RFI for a Revolutionary Air Operations Center. On 14 October, an RFI to break emergency management out of C2IMERA. On 28 October, an RFI asking who out there has software that can assemble an air defense picture. Three notices in thirty days, all asking the same question, and the question is: what exists?

Kessel Run is the program office for the Air Operations Center weapon system. The air picture is not an adjacent interest. It is the product. An AOC exists to know where the aircraft and the missiles are and to decide what to do about them. Posting a notice to find out whether anybody sells software for air and missile defense situational awareness is not market research. It is a nine-year-old program office announcing, on a federal website, that it does not know.

For the calendar: the February 2026 program announcement put the Final RFP for the Next-Generation Air Operations Center in November 2026. It is November 2026. What Kessel Run has in the market this month is a questionnaire.

The verdict

In our opinion this is what it looks like when an organization stops building and starts shopping and has not yet noticed that the two activities produce different documents. A software factory ships releases. A buying office publishes questions. Kessel Run spent October publishing questions, including one about the software it already owns.

And it is worth being precise about what is being asked for. Not an upgrade. Not a release. A decoupling. The verb in the notice is the verb you use when a capability has to be extracted from the thing it is currently stuck inside, and the thing it is stuck inside is Kessel Run's.

C2IMERA is the strongest item on Kessel Run's record. It took Leidos to build it, nearly eight years to spread it, and a contract worth up to $158 million to scale it. In October 2026 Kessel Run went to the open market to ask who could help take it apart.

Sources

The jokes are ours. These are not.

Disclaimer: Satire. Not one fact above is invented. There was never any need. The opinions are ours alone.