Battlefield Airborne Communications Node

Because of its flexible deployment options and ability to operate at high altitudes, BACN can enable air and surface forces to overcome communications difficulties caused by mountains, other rough terrain, or distance.

On 22 February 2010, the US Air Force and the Northrop Grumman BACN Team received the 2010 Network Centric Warfare Award from the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.

[9] In 2005, the USAF's AFC2ISRC and ESC created BACN as an Objective Gateway technology demonstrator to provide voice and data interoperability between aircraft in a single battle area.

These flight characteristics are critical in providing unified datalink and voice networks in the mountainous terrain encountered in the current theater of operations.

[14] BACN payloads have also been developed, installed, and operated on special variant EQ-4B Global Hawk aircraft to provide unmanned long endurance high altitude communications coverage.

This is caused by a number of issues including the personality clashes between the service people who conceived the project back in late 2004 and the traditional acquisition bureaucracy.

Second, the BACN effort presupposes that the capability will initially be "outsourced" to commercial companies that will provide an "airborne network" as a service to the DOD for the foreseeable future.

With the increasing likelihood of a contested electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) in an era of great power competition, the idea of a "BACN-mesh" was proposed by Professor Jahara Matisek (and former E-11 BACN pilot) at the US Air Force Academy, as a way of pursuing new multi-domain war-fighting options against near-peers.

For example, in the Pacific – where infrastructure is limited – a “BACN-mesh” concept could be employed to create real-time battlespace pictures, proving useful when a near-peer adversary attempts localized jamming across the EMS.