AFA WARFARE SYMPOSIUM — The Department of the Air Force is launching a series of exercises to learn how to stitch together disparate sensing capabilities, Secretary Troy Meink told reporters today.
“We spent a lot of time developing the various weapon system sensors. Now we need to make sure that we can actually close that entire kill chain, fuse all that data, and then also operate the systems,” said Meink, who first revealed the new set of exercises called “Ringleader” in a keynote address Monday.
Essentially, Ringleader will use a burgeoning infrastructure known as the DAF Battle Network — the Department of the Air Force’s contribution to a larger project known as Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control — to experiment how it will function in operations. Ringleader will also leverage sensors from the joint force and the Intelligence Community to test out how to fuse and disseminate data from different sources for battle management.
“If you look at the sensors, space, air, ground and others, it’s, ‘How do you take all that data, fuse all that data at speed and scale?’” Meink explained, noting that systems under consideration include commercial data. “How does a warfighting community utilize those and develop tools and learn how to do that at speed and scale? And that’s what Ringleader is designed to do.”
Meink said the Ringleader effort includes baseline funding, but he “expect[s]” reconciliation dollars will be funneled towards it as well.
Meink did not discuss President Donald Trump’s signature Golden Dome initiative by name, but it’s possible there is a tie-in between that effort and Ringleader.
The Space Force’s sensor systems to track missiles and its satellite networks to rapidly transmit precise targeting data to interceptors are going to be foundational to the success of the effort to create a comprehensive missile shield over the American homeland. For example, the service is working on developing payloads for both ground and airborne moving target indication (GMTI/AMTI).
Funding in the Space Force budget request for moving target sensors in general was, until fiscal 2026, under a classified effort called Long Range Kill Chain. In FY26, funds for the GMTI program being developed in cooperation with the National Reconnaissance Office were moved into a separate program, budgeted at $1 billion.
Meanwhile, the Long Range Kill Chain FY26 funding line slated $1.9 million in discretionary funds for “auxiliary payloads,” along with $1.2 billion in “mandatory (reconciliation)” funds for a total of nearly $1.3 billion. Further, the first public mention of funding for AMTI has come in the plan the Pentagon sent to Capitol Hill for spending the FY26 reconciliation funds, which slated $2 billion for the program.
The Pentagon’s Golden Dome czar, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, has said that his top priority is establishing a command and control network by this summer, and integrating interceptors into that network by next summer.
Speaking during a separate roundtable, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman elaborated that Ringleader is “really saying, ‘How does battle management work? How do we do targeting at scale?’ We haven’t collected this kind of data, you know, from a global perspective, with this level of volume of data, and turned it into rapid battle management decisions.”
Saltzman also said the effort is meant to be a “collaborative effort.”
“I’m not sure exactly whether it’s fair to say the Space Force is leading or the Air Force is, not at this point. We’re just all going to collaborate and figure out what best practices are,” he said.
Update on E-7
In other Air Force news, Meink during the roundtable appeared to suggest that the Air Force would finish producing two rapid prototypes for the E-7 Wedgetail program, an effort the Pentagon attempted to kill in fiscal 2026 but was subsequently rescued by Congress. That would have represented a win for contractor Boeing and its supporters on the Hill hoping to keep the Wedgetail going.
However, Meink later clarified his remarks to reporters to spell out that he was only committing to follow congressional direction for funding the rapid prototyping efforts and deliver a plan to transition to engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) aircraft, without fully committing to funding Wedgetail going forward.
“Deliver a plan does not mean we’re going to put it in the budget,” he said.
