As advancements in artificial intelligence capabilities proliferate, the Air Force is using a series of capstone events in 2025 to serve as a proving ground for how the technology can be incorporated into future battle management operations.
Led by the 805th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, the biannual capstone allows the service to test new tech and assess their applicability for battle management and tactical command and control. After a successful iteration at the end of last year, the unit is poised to continue experimentation and rapid development of new capabilities and concepts to support the Defense Department’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort throughout the next year.
Although effective execution of CJADC2 involves countless technical and bureaucratic challenges, the 805th — also known as the Shadow Operations Center – Nellis (ShOC-N) — used its most recent capstone event in December 2024 to understand how AI-enabled technologies could assist battle managers in conducting dynamic targeting.
“Modern battlefields are exceedingly complex and require the ability to distill an immense amount of information into a cohesive, actionable amount,” ShOC-N commander Lt. Col. Shawn Finney told DefenseScoop. “The emergence of artificial intelligence in warfighting applications potentially gives battle managers the ability to focus on the most salient aspects of the operational area by reducing the volume of information they must evaluate.”
At the recent Capstone 24B event, the unit experimented with advanced prototypes across three lines of effort: human-machine teaming; international partner and allied integration; and cloud-based C2 decision advantage.
The capstone simulated multiple “combat-representative” scenarios, including offensive counter-air, defense counter-air, electronic warfare and special operations, Finney said.
Notably, officials tested artificial intelligence platforms such as the Maven Smart System and Maverick AI application. The tech allowed battle managers to conduct “tactical control, execution, and assigning” of both friendly and adversarial assets within a common operating picture, according to an Air Force news release. The AI was also able to ingest planning data to give battle managers insights into complex and evolving scenarios.
During the event, the Maven system was for the first time successfully integrated into the Air Force’s new battle management kit, known as the Tactical Operations Centers-Light (TOC-L), at a live exercise.
TOC-L is a mobile, scalable C2 kit embedded with different software and applications that creates a single air picture from hundreds of fused data feeds. The service began prototyping it in 2022 and has since delivered 16 kits to different units around the world — including to ShOC-N — so they could be used in experimentation efforts.
The program is “constructed in a way that we can quickly deliver these prototypes, get them in the hands of our operators, and inform future TOC-L requirements — and really inform, more broadly, the control and reporting center weapons system,” Lt. Col. Carl Rossini III, deputy chief of the deployable systems branch at the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System Division, said in an interview.
Battle management teams used the TOC-L system and AI capabilities during Capstone 24B to simulate a dynamic targeting cell, able to rapidly identify and defeat assets that weren’t planned for during operational planning. Rossini said they gleaned insights from the event that ranged from very technical procedures to broader concepts.
“One was how well that [dynamic targeting] cell could operate with some other systems we were evaluating for operational command and control, and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] for how we manage dynamic targets and authorize those targets for prosecution,” he said. “We also had good learning on the construct of that [dynamic targeting] cell in particular, like the roles on that battle management team.”
The Air Force is developing an integrated “system-of-systems” called the DAF Battle Network to support the Pentagon’s goals for CJADC2. Broadly, the concept looks to connect disparate sensors and weapons operated by both the U.S. military and foreign partners under a single network to enable rapid data transfer across all warfighting systems and domains.
Steve Ciulla, TOC-L program manager, told DefenseScoop the Air Force is investing in the AI-enabled toos featured at ShOC-N’s recent capstone as a way to accelerate decision-making.
“Those are the specific things they were looking at, in terms of testing some of those cutting-edge software capabilities and speeding up the process of identifying striking targets — the dynamic targeting — and looking at how AI could help do some of those things, [and] also some human-machine learning as well,” Ciulla said.
While both Maven and Maverick AI successfully demonstrated automated capabilities during the capstones, Finney noted that the 805th will continue to experiment with them to mature the technology further.
“The human-machine team concept continues to evolve as we uncover new and better ways to unlock the potential of both the hardware and software while also understanding where software still has gaps that humans must perform,” he said.
Moving forward, the 805th plans to execute an experimentation campaign series throughout 2025 comprising four experiments — three of which will contribute to the Air Force’s Bamboo Eagle exercise and the Army’s Project Convergence — culminating in a final capstone event. Finney described the series as taking a “building block approach” in how the team uses lessons from previous events as baselines for subsequent experiments.
“This approach exposes large training audiences of warfighters to experiment results in a rapid and iterative fashion. We firmly believe in the experimentation-to-exercise process,” he said. “Through this, potentially immature capabilities can gain significant reps and sets within a single calendar year.”
As for the TOC-L team, Ciulla said they are focused on exercising the systems in the Indo-Pacific region over the next year. The goal is to conduct as much joint and international integration as they can across multiple exercises — including Project Convergence 25, Bamboo Eagle, Return of Forces to the Pacific (REFORPAC) and others.
The exercises will help inform the Air Force’s next iteration for TOC-L acquisition, expected to kick off by summer. The service intends to improve on current kits and scale the number of systems globally, Ciulla said.
“It’s not going to just end with this phase one experimentation effort,” he added. “We’re still going to be getting this feedback loop [and] user data coming in to support our development, design for the next iteration of the system to tell us what the biggest risks are, what’s working [and] what’s not working.”
Written by Mikayla Easley
Mikayla Easley reports on the Pentagon’s acquisition and use of emerging technologies. Prior to joining DefenseScoop, she covered national security and the defense industry for National Defense Magazine. She received a BA in Russian language and literature from the University of Michigan and a MA in journalism from the University of Missouri. You can follow her on Twitter @MikaylaEasley
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