1 ACOS Commander Discusses Mission Goals, Projects

Maj. Eddie Edwards, USAF, commander of the 1st Air and Space Communications Operations Squadron (1 ACOS), took to the mic in January to promote three things: Take ownership, build partnerships and demand excellence. He encouraged the audience of roughly 50 at the chapter luncheon to "own your small piece of the world" by owning their responsibilities and how they help the mission. Being confident in your area of expertise lends itself to networking with customers and providing other services. By understanding the customer's business, a technician can anticipate the customer's needs better. Maj. Edwards' three focus areas form a foundation for the 1 ACOS five-year mission goals and projects. Tasked with delivering, operating and defending command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) missions, the 1 ACOS employs key secure systems to ensure the flow of information. It supports missions at 14 sites in seven countries, which amounts to 22,000 customers. However, units like 1 ACOS have had to become creative and develop their own processes and systems to navigate restrictive policies and a lack of technological innovations, Maj. Edwards said. Project Diamond was one of these solutions; implementing Distributed Ground System (DGS) capabilities allowed U.S. and allied forces to communicate in near real time. Systems like Project Diamond are proprietary, and training is not widely available for them. New members to the unit must be trained internally, which slows advancement and operation of associated systems and inhibits the ability to create standard procedures across units. It is in response to these issues that Maj. Edwards puts out the call for developers to predict warfighter needs. He compared it to his use of smartphones. Years ago, he used a standard flip phone. It was enough for its purpose and no more. Upon purchasing a smartphone, Maj. Edwards realized there were features and functions that his flip phone never offered and that he never knew he needed. He implores his commercial and civilian counterparts to innovate and engineer solutions that revolutionize the way the mission is accomplished. Specifically, he expressed a need for network circuit mapping, virtualization and resource acquisition solutions. If the military and commercial communities can build this partnership, take ownership of their business and demand excellence of themselves, today's cyber mission can become as reliable, efficient and secure as we need it to be.

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