WIDOW Bridging Operational Gap Between Air Force and Navy

For the first time, Naval Aviation units embarked at sea and Air Force units based on land were able to plan collaboratively and in real time. This was made possible during Northern Edge 21 by the WIDOW mission planning software developed by BrainGu.

For two weeks in May, over 10,000 service members across all branches of the armed services gathered in Alaska to participate in Northern Edge 2021 — a training ground for large scale, multi-domain operations. Coordinating over 300 aircraft covering upwards of 60,000 square miles of airspace is no easy feat, and this is where WIDOW stepped up to the challenge optimizing planning tasks to enable warfighters to focus on tactics and enhancing lethality.

WIDOW demonstrated at WSINT that a collaborative environment enables warfighters to optimize planning tasks between receipt of the Air Tasking Order and mission execution. These extra hours are invaluable to refine tactics and enhance lethality.

Operators on USS Makin Island, USS Theodore Roosevelt, and at Eielson AFB, Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson, and many outlying stations all planned collaboratively in real time — the first time this has been accomplished across branches. WIDOW builds products like Communication Flows, Tanker Plans, and Altitude Blocks that were previously slowly developed by sending files back and forth over email. Initially skeptical Naval Aviators communicated how impressed they were of the quality of the software and how big of an advantage it was to be able to see missions planned in real time on the carriers, and not be in the dark until the last moment.

WIDOW is hosted on DoD Platform One, which allows BrainGu to develop and release upgrades at the speed of relevance on NIPR, SIPR, and JWICS. BrainGu had a number of engineers onsite during the exercise interfacing directly with operators to gain real-time feedback and often deployed the requested changes within a day or two. Over the course of Northern Edge, the BrainGu team implemented over 60 upgrades that were pushed to SIPR daily thanks to the CI/CD pipeline powered by DoD Platform One.

BrainGu is a cutting-edge software innovation lab with a strong mission focus that supports operators across the DoD. BrainGu partnered with the USAF in order to produce the Web-based Information Dominant Warfare (WIDOW) Mission Planning Software within only five weeks. In the year since its inception, WIDOW has planned hundreds of missions, coordinated over a thousand assets, supported 6 large scale exercises, and been designated the official USAF Mission Planning Cell Tool.