WIDOW Press Release

PRESS RELEASE: June 9, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic will have lasting effects on the U.S. military and how it operates in the future. Hundreds of airmen completing the U.S. Air Force Weapons School’s (USAFWS) rigorous coursework were left without a way to collaborate in real time while planning the final capstone exercise. The U.S. Air Force Weapons School Integration (WSINT) exercise is a series of complex, large-force employment missions, converging over the Nevada Test and Training Range. WSINT previously necessitated co- location of all participants at Nellis AFB. BrainGu is a cutting-edge software innovation lab 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. WIDOW exceeded mission and operator needs, enabling WSINT participants to plan in a modern and collaborative environment.

COVID forced the Weapons School to execute our first distributed tactical-integration exercise with participants from more than ten geographically separated locations across the CONUS. WIDOW helped synchronize mission planning to ensure safe and effective execution of highly complex air, space, and cyberspace operations designed to solve our toughest potential tactical problems. The threat may force us to operate from distributed locations in the future. WIDOW is helping the Weapons School prepare the force to WIN! - USAFWS Commandant, Col Jack "Winder" Arthaud

WIDOW, built on PlatformOne, is a streamlined mission planning tool. It is purpose-built to give mission planning cell chiefs, mission commanders, and their teams time back to focus on lethality instead of admin. It makes administrative tasks more efficient across disparate teams of mission planners. In order to meet these timelines, BrainGu and the USAF relied on PlatformOne and the automated software tools provided by the DOD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative. PlatformOne allowed BrainGu to meet the tight deadlines in a secure, flexible, and interoperable manner. During WSINT the BrainGu team completed 246 front end deployments, and 94 backend deployments during live usage (with zero downtime)— all powered by the CI/CD pipeline on PlatformOne.

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.

Distributed mission planning is a brutal reality, but WIDOW significantly decreases the amount of time we spent working on admin and formatting excel sheets. This allowed the bulk of our focus to be spent refining the tactical plan. I loved it. I think WIDOW is the future of mission planning. Literally click one button, and it builds the product for you. It couldn’t get any easier or faster. - Capt Alex "Tuna" Plonk, 8th Weapons Squadron

BrainGu is an innovation lab with an overarching mission to dream of, incubate, and scale technology around capabilities that advance the state of the art. As a company, we combine critical analysis, creativity, and technology to transform and scale existing workflows by an order of magnitude.