Kessel Run Was Founded to End Manual AOC Workflows. Its New RFI Says They Are Still There.

Five sentences, and the second one is the whole story

On 28 October 2026, Kessel Run posted a Request for Information to SAM.gov under solicitation number AOC_CADP. The title is "Request for Information: Air Operations Center (AOC) Common Air Defense Picture (CADP)." The posting office is FA8730 Kessel Run, Hanscom AFB. Responses are due 13 November 2026 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern.

The description is five sentences long. The first says the government is conducting market research "to identify existing and emerging software-enabled capabilities" to improve "air and missile defense planning," situational awareness, reporting, readiness analysis, sustainment analysis and decision support. Standard issue. Then comes the second sentence.

"Current workflows require personnel to consolidate information from multiple systems, data sources, and manual processes."

That is the Air Operations Center in the back half of 2026, described in writing by the program office that owns it. The third sentence twists the knife without noticing: the fragmentation "can increase manual workload, delay access to relevant information, and complicate collaborative planning and decision support across command-and-control organizations."

Kessel Run exists because someone decided that sentence should be impossible to write.

The whiteboard, nine years on

The origin story is not in dispute, because Kessel Run told it on itself for a decade. In Air & Space Forces Magazine's account, the thing that embarrassed the Air Force into action was an Air Operations Center planning air refueling "on a whiteboard with tape grids, magnetic pucks, and dry-erase marker lines," with an Airman who "enters data into an Excel spreadsheet." The AOC 10.2 modernization program was terminated in July 2017. The Kessel Run team formed out of that wreckage on what the magazine calls "a hypothesis that by bringing commercial DevOps practices to the Air Force" the hand work would end.

That was the pitch. Not better software in the abstract. The end of consolidating things by hand.

Nine years later the organization has published a market research notice stating that personnel consolidate information from multiple systems, data sources and manual processes, and asking the open market if anybody out there sells a fix.

It gets worse with the receipts. In August 2023, DefenseScoop ran through the nine applications in the Kessel Run All-Domain Operations Suite and described one of them as "Triton, which consolidates information from other applications to create air-tasking orders." Consolidating information from other applications was marketed as a delivered capability. Three years later it is filed as a deficiency. Same organization, same weapon system, opposite press release.

Now read the program's name again

The thing Kessel Run would like somebody to build is called a Common Air Defense Picture. Kessel Run has held the Air Operations Center weapon system since 2017. Producing a common picture is not an enhancement to an air operations center. It is what an air operations center is for. The notice is a signed statement that after nine years, the picture is not common.

Note also who is supposed to supply it. "The Government seeks information on commercial capabilities" that will "improve access to authorized information, reduce manual reconciliation and reporting burden," and "provide authorized users with a more integrated operational picture." Reducing manual reconciliation burden was the slide that built this organization. It is now an item on a shopping list.

The fifth sentence is the quiet one. The capability "should support users operating at multiple echelons of command and control while preserving Government decision authority and existing authoritative command-and-control functions." Whatever industry sells has to sit politely on top of what is already installed, because what is already installed is not going anywhere. Nine years of disruption, and the hard requirement is now that nothing gets disrupted.

The contractor-led model, in two weeks of output

On 16 October 2026, Col. Brian Viola, who took over Kessel Run in June, told Air & Space Forces Magazine "we're no longer a software factory" and described "the pivot from organic, software delivery, blue-suited developers doing code to a contractor-led model today." Here is what the new model put on the public record in the two weeks that followed.

  • 28 October 2026. An RFI asking industry whether anyone has a common air defense picture.
  • 31 October 2026. The Revolutionary AOC RFI, the market research for the flagship replacement of the whole weapon system, was archived. It had been posted on 29 September with white papers due 14 October. It closed with no solicitation behind it.
  • 6 November 2026. An RFI from the same program office asking how interested parties could provide "continued sustainment of the RDS version 2.X (v2.X) baseline to maintain security and functionality." Responses due 17 November.

Add the October notice asking industry how to pull emergency management out of C2IMERA and you have the month. Two requests for other people's ideas, one request for other people to keep a radio distribution system patched, and one flagship market research effort quietly filed in the archive. Not a line of software in the lot.

This is the contractor-led model working exactly as designed. The government writes the notice. Industry answers the notice. Nobody anywhere in the chain is on the hook for the capability itself, which is why it is still missing.

The verdict

In our opinion there is no charitable reading of this document. A program office does not go to the open market for air and missile defense planning tools it has owned for nine years because the tools are working. It does it because the work is still being done by hand in the one building where that was never supposed to be true again.

Kessel Run was created because an Airman was typing into a spreadsheet. Its contribution, nine years and an entire weapon system later, is a SAM.gov notice asking strangers if they know how to stop that.

In 2017 the whiteboard was the scandal. In 2026 it is the baseline. The whiteboard won.

Sources

The jokes are ours. These are not.

Disclaimer: Satire. Every fact above is cited and belongs to whoever reported it. The malice is original.