Air Battle Manager - Responsibilities

Responsibilities

Air Battle Managers (ABMs) are primarily responsible for command and control. Their primary duty is to ensure the day to day air mission is executed. These duties depend on the overall military operation. For air to air engagement, using either airborne or land-based radars, ABMs ensure combat aircraft find, identify, and destroy their targets by providing the pilots with a "big picture" that increases their situational awareness. ABMs can provide early warning for inbound enemy aircraft and direct friendly assets to intercept them. As their title implies, ABMs control the air battlespace. To ensure the air mission is completed, ABMs aid the fight, they keep track of all the assets in the area of operations to ensure deconfliction, safety of flight for all friendly aircraft. Although ABMs do not—and are not qualified to—serve as air traffic controllers, their role in deconfliction and flight safety makes air traffic control the closest civilian analogue to the ABM's role. Most if not all countries that have a ABM equivalent in their military also have ABMs be dual-qualified in civilian Air Traffic Control. This is true in the Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air force. In a few cases where there was a lack of air traffic control services in a combat environment, Air Battle Managers have picked up this additional duty with commercial aircraft. ABMs are trained to control the fight and ensure mission execution, not the traffic pattern or solely deconfliction and flight safety. Additionally, ABMs plan, organize and task air combat operations. ABMs must be well versed in all combat aircraft systems and tactics; this includes U.S built aircraft and foreign built aircraft as well as their respective munitions, and as well as ground based threats to aircraft as they may be assigned to work with any weapons system at any time. As a result, their expertise is often called upon in an advisory role by the Air Force's sister services or other allied military forces.