By Murray A. Hansen, Brig Gen (Ret), USAF — Executive Vice President, American Data Solutions
September 3, 2026 — As we prepare for the 2026 Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, I have been thinking about this year's particularly appropriate theme:
"Advancing Air & Space Dominance: An Urgent Call to Build and Sustain the Forces."
The words build and sustain belong together.
The United States is investing extraordinary resources in increasingly sophisticated aircraft, weapons, sensors, mission systems, software, and emerging technologies. But combat capability is ultimately determined by more than what we acquire.
It is determined by what we can generate, maintain, repair, return to service, and keep mission-ready—at scale and under operational conditions.
After 33 years in the Air Force and now working in defense technology, I believe one of the major opportunities before us is modernizing the digital environment supporting the maintainer.
In too many cases, extraordinarily advanced weapon systems are still supported by technical information spread across static publications, separate repositories, legacy viewers, multiple applications, and disconnected data environments.
The maintainer should not have to become an information-retrieval specialist before becoming a troubleshooting specialist.
Beyond displaying the manual
At American Data Solutions, we have spent years working on this challenge.
Our Multipurpose Digital Data Viewer (MDDV) is a Class 6 Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) and digital sustainment platform designed to turn authoritative technical data into an interactive maintenance environment.
That means moving beyond simply displaying an electronic technical manual. It means enabling capabilities such as:
- Configuration-controlled authoritative technical information
- Interactive troubleshooting and diagnostics
- Intelligent search and navigation
- Wire, system, and component tracing
- Maintenance decision support
- Embedded multimedia and training
- Connected and disconnected operations
- Integration with existing engineering, logistics, and enterprise systems
- Analytics that can help organizations understand how maintenance is actually being performed
But the technology itself is not the objective.
Readiness is the objective.
The goal is to enable a maintainer to find the right information faster, understand the problem sooner, execute the correct procedure with confidence, and return the weapon system to mission-ready status more efficiently.
The AI foundation question
There is another reason this matters now.
Nearly every defense organization is examining how AI can improve logistics, maintenance, engineering, training, and decision-making.
AI will unquestionably be part of the future. But AI cannot compensate for fragmented, inaccessible, outdated, or poorly structured technical data.
The foundation matters.
Before we can fully exploit AI-enabled sustainment, we need authoritative, configuration-controlled digital technical data that can be securely accessed, understood, connected, and acted upon.
That is one of the discussions we look forward to having with Air Force senior leaders, program offices, acquisition professionals, logisticians, maintainers, OEMs, and industry partners at AFA.
The question is no longer whether military sustainment will become more digital. The more important question is:
How quickly can we give our maintainers the digital advantage they need to improve readiness today—while establishing the technical-data foundation the Air Force will need tomorrow?
If you will be at AFA and are working on weapon-system sustainment, technical orders, maintenance modernization, Digital Materiel Management, or lifecycle support, I would welcome the opportunity to compare notes.
See you at National Harbor — AFA Booth #152.
Attending the conference? Request a meeting in advance to see a live MDDV demo.
Murray A. Hansen is Executive Vice President of American Data Solutions. A retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General and Master Navigator with more than 3,200 flight hours, he brings 33+ years of aerospace and defense experience to ADS's work in technical data, maintenance, and logistics modernization. This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
