An Air Force Brigade Accelerates Digital-Intelligent Transformation (数智转型) to Improve the Quality and Efficiency of Airlift Support
"Urgent tasking: 30 engineering and technical personnel will depart overnight for a certain base to conduct support operations — available airlift slots must be matched…" During the dog days of summer, a dispatch center of an Air Force brigade received a sudden pop-up command on its lightweight airlift resource scheduling system. The duty officer tapped the electronic screen, and the system automatically verified personnel qualifications and intelligently matched aircraft types, generating a transportation plan in just a few minutes.
The brigade's leadership told reporters that since this lightweight airlift resource scheduling system went online for trial operation, airlift coordination plans can be generated intelligently, and dispatchers need only review and verify individual anomalous data points within the plan. This has driven the unit's air transportation and delivery to shift from "manually planned airlift capacity (人工筹划运力)" to "intelligently coordinated airlift capacity (智能统筹运力)."
"In recent years, cross-regional exercises and training, as well as mobility taskings, have continued to increase, and demand for air transportation and delivery has risen sharply. The traditional dispatch model of 'human memory plus paper ledgers' has become increasingly unable to keep up," the brigade's leadership explained. In the past, because airlift resource data was siloed, information barriers existed between the headquarters element and the various support units, and departments had difficulty grasping each other's mission plans in real time, leading to recurring problems such as airlift conflicts and resource mismatches. Each time a mission was executed, dispatchers had to go back and forth between different units to cross-check information — low efficiency, slow speed.
To break through this bottleneck, the brigade established a dedicated research-and-development team and placed the development workstations directly on the dispatch frontline. During the day, technical personnel followed dispatch staff officers through the full workflow, meticulously recording the various chokepoints and bottlenecks encountered in manual dispatching. At night, they concentrated on debugging code, simplifying the complex logic of airlift allocation into intuitive, easy-to-use operating menus. After a sustained period of continuous effort, this scheduling system — closely tailored to actual combat requirements — completed development and entered trial use.
At a dispatch simulation exercise site, reporters observed that by relying on this "cloud-based dispatcher (云端调度员)," airlift data from all units is shared in real time, resources are uniformly allocated, and airlift matching and plan generation are fully automated. The time required to process taskings has been significantly reduced, and airlift capacity losses have been markedly decreased.
"This is a microcosm of our efforts to accelerate digital-intelligent transformation (数智转型) and improve the quality and efficiency of airlift support," the brigade's leadership told reporters. Combining this with the reality of accelerating evolution toward informatized and intelligentized warfare (信息化智能化战争), they have adhered to the principle of demanding combat power from science and technology innovation, continuously cultivating a force of "military-camp makers (军营创客)," and accelerating the pace of the unit's intelligentized development. Over the past several years, they have coordinated and optimized the force's structural layout, directing lean technical talent toward data and software teams; established a "Data-Software Co-Creation (数软共创)" workshop, routinely conducting skills training in application development, data governance, and related areas; proactively interfaced with higher-level headquarters and neighboring units to take on major research topics in digital-intelligent development; and tempered their talent pool through actual combat exercises and training missions, continuously enhancing the unit's new-domain, new-quality combat capabilities (新域新质作战能力).
To stimulate officers and soldiers' vitality for innovation and creation at their posts, the brigade has also studied and issued a series of incentive measures: establishing a supporting mechanism for officers and soldiers to submit innovation research topics, receive resource support, and convert results into applications; providing both funding and technical support for "micro-innovation (微革新)" projects with strong practical utility and a clear enhancement to combat power; breaking down barriers of position, specialty, and organizational structure by establishing a paired-collaboration model between noncommissioned officer (NCO) backbone personnel and technical officers; regularly organizing innovation results exchange meetings; and encouraging officers and soldiers to put forward ideas, carry out innovations, and drive development based on the needs of their posts.
As a series of practical measures have been implemented, a cohort of "NCO makers (军士创客)" who understand equipment, understand operations, and understand technology has emerged. Recently, Staff Sergeant First Class (二级上士) Liu Zhiqiang of the brigade led his team to develop an "Equipment Information Resource Allocation and Management System," significantly improving equipment maintenance efficiency.