Fort Franklin Battlespace Laboratory

Fort Franklin was an on-base encampment at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, in 1994 and 1995, for the purpose of demonstrating new technology.

History
The Electronic Systems Division of the US Air Force had developed many of the radars and sensors used by military aircraft, and had created many of the command and control systems. However, when these systems were deployed for Operation Desert Storm, many did not work as advertised or communicate information to one another. In October 1993, Lieutenant general Charles E. Franklin took over as Commander of the Air Force’s Electronic Systems development center (ESC). ESC was the home of most of the new command and control technologies being sent to the war, but was getting a bad reputation for the lack of quality in the systems sent to the war. He decided to hold a technical exercise to emulate a deployed headquarters using the equipment ESC was producing, and test the reports.

Fort Franklin went live in July 1994. The encampment used a patch of grass near the end of the runway. Using tents, trailers, and communication vans inside a guarded perimeter, the area was quickly dubbed “Fort Franklin.” It was staffed by engineers from every program office and a few eager junior military. Major Steve Zenishek, with recent Desert Storm experience, became the installation “Commander” and was able to show off that the great capability indeed worked fine alone, but unfortunately didn’t play well with others.

Rather than take it as a defeat, Gen Franklin used it as a goad to the staff to rebuild the systems under development to interoperate. And it worked. By the time the second Fort Franklin occurred 1–16 May 1995, systems were beginning to communicate. For the first time, results of calculations performed by one system were transferred automatically to another system for further interpretation or processing.

Not wanting to lose the expertise that had created this success, LtGen Franklin established an ongoing experimentation facility at Hanscom known as the Command & Control (C2) Unified Development Environment (CUBE). CUBE was later renamed the C2 Engineering and Integration Facility (CEIF).

The experience of Fort Franklin was instrumental in development in 1997 of the Air Force's major experiment, the Expeditionary Force Experiment (EFX 98), which became a Joint EFX (JEFX) in 1999.