Welcome to the 56th Annual AOC Symposium and Convention. The JED team is excited to be covering this week's event in the AOC Show Daily – reporting developments from the symposium sessions and providing insight and analysis of each day's events.
The theme of this year's symposium is "Building the EMS Enterprise," and the symposium program will explore the many facets of what this entails. The concept of developing an enterprise approach to how military forces, use, manage and control the EMS is a relatively new idea that really began to evolve over the past few years. While new, it represents an important shift in thinking from less connected and more isolated military operations in the EM Environment (EME) to an aggregated and more integrated approach.
This week, you will hear discussions about the EMS as a warfighting domain, EMS governance and policy, and how our community is approaching EM Battle Management (EMBM). These are important concepts that will help to strengthen and tie together other areas, such as force readiness in the EME; developing new technologies, such as directed energy weapons, Artificial Intelligence and multifunction systems; and training the personnel who will manage constellations of distributed unmanned weapons systems.
One major factor driving this shift to an EMS Enterprise mindset is the growing awareness of the EM Environment as a single contiguous strategic maneuver space in which military forces compete to use it and exert control in it. The increasing range and sophistication of sensors, weapons and communications systems, and our ever-increasing reliance on EMS-dependent battle networks means that the EM Environment presents many new operational opportunities. At the same time, it poses critical strategic challenges that we must identify, understand and address. In order to evolve with these changes and challenges, we will need to expand our EMS understanding from a tactical mindset to a more strategic mindset at the enterprise level.
During this week's symposium, the AOC Show Daily will not only report the news but also shed some light on the context surrounding these developments and how they relate to the need for an EMS Enterprise approach. So, from the JED team, welcome to Washington, DC, and we look forward to seeing some of you and writing for all of you this week. – John Knowles
To reach the editorial team on site, stop by the JED desk n the Crows' Nest on the expo floor or email us via JEDeditor@naylor.com.