During a tour in the Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Qatar, the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) with Chairman Eric Schmidt (the thenexecutive chairman of Alphabet, Inc.) was surprised to see that these critical aerial refueling operations were being planned manually on a physical whiteboard.
The local USAF team was using Excel spreadsheets to input relevant data and then copying the data to a whiteboard using dry erase markers and magnets to organize the information and plan missions for the day. This was an 8-hour process for 6 people and, if any of the data changed during the day or was even partially erased accidentally, they would have to erase the whole whiteboard (see below) and start again from the beginning.
… Immediately after the visit to the CAOC in Qatar, DIUx connected Pivotal with an Air Force product team and directed them to focus their efforts on the tanker planning tool the DIB had just witnessed. Shah and others were confident that if the DIUx team sent their team of software engineers, product managers, and designers, together with Pivotal experts, to work side by side with Air Force personnel, they would be able to deliver a solution within months.
Less than four months later, the solution – named ‘Jigsaw’ – was in production. This new tanker planning software changed the manual ‘Gonkulator’ process — 6 people using magnets and a whiteboard and 8 hours of work — into a simple touch-screen interface. The new technology instantly improved operations by taking only one person 3 hours to complete. The Air Force was able to use fewer aircraft saving money and fuel every day. “The efficiencies it had created was saving about 400,000 to 500,000 pounds of fuel each week and they were accomplishing their missions with one less refueling aircraft. This saved the Air Force $750,000 to $1 million every week.”
Today, Kessel Run includes more than just the AOC program office. Kessel Run encompasses what was the former Targeting and GEOINT program office, supports the F-35 joint program office and F-22 special program office, and enables others, via its all domain common platform (ADCP) and enterprise other transaction authority (OTA).
That was a working paper from MIT and Kessel Run folks including Dylan Brown and Nick Setterberg, Kessel Run: An Innovation Opportunity for the US Air Force.
And here is a nice addition from David Rothzeid on LinkedIn:
Certainly a nice article and it gets several broad brush strokes correct, but this was far messier than the article articulates. Following the success of the DIUx led Tanker Planning Tool (JigSaw), which planted the acorn for Kessel Run, (what the story fails to mention) is because Congress did not agree to fund the AF’s Above Threshold Reprogramming (ATR) request for AOC 10.2, (mind you after JigSaw was deployed), that the Air Force leadership decided to cancel AOC 10.2 and the funding went away with it. The small DIUx team, along with a few AFLCMC renegades (Bryon Kroger, Tory Cuff Adam Furtado) had to go find money across several stakeholders and cobble together what would be come the AOC pathfinder project which eventually gave way to Kessel Run.
This also glosses over the critical contracting infrastructure DIUx put into motion, namely the CSO, which allowed Kessel Run to scale as more funding, and people arrived because it leveraged OT authority. No doubt there are other critical details that could have derailed the effort, but Kessel Run succeeded in large part because enthusiastic action officers (civilian and military) figured out how to get to yes, and leadership stayed out of the way.
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