Reader's Note: This is the first in an exclusive series of articles running this week that will piece together the history and costs of recent U.S. Air Force efforts to safeguard the skies.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Air Force has been trying to fund and field a modern mobile air defense system to secure battle zone skies. Such a command and control (C2) system is considered to vital to safe and successful tactical air operations at home and abroad.

As this year closes, the Pentagon is deploying just such a new mobile system to Iraq - the Battle Control Center CENTAF (BC3) - to replace the outdated system currently there. That new $30 million system is being administered by the Army, with the Air Force providing funding (See related chart p. 7).

Not that the Air Force has forsaken the mission of securing airspace. Indeed, the service's price tag for its own mobile system effort, known as the Battle Control System-Mobile (BCS-M) - could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, according to interviews with Air Force officials, program documents and other records obtained by Aerospace Daily under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

But despite the investments made in BCS-M, when the Pentagon needed to replace its old, unreliable and unsafe system in Iraq, it found another at a fraction of the cost and time.

Interim system

The Air Force originally chose an interim system for Iraq, said Col. Gerard Gordon, chief of Ground C2 systems at Air Combat Command (ACC), in an interview earlier this year. "This is a stop-gap measure, specific to this theater," he said, until BCS-M is ready to field. The interim system won't be as robust as BCS-M, the Air Force says, but the service didn't want to overburden the BCS-M staff.

BCS-M would take nearly two years to get into the field and would still need to be reworked. The system chosen for the job, BC3, took only two months short of a year.

Yet, even though the Air Force would be paying for the new system, and though the service acknowledges the "urgent need" to deploy it quickly, the service arm responsible for BCS-M, Electronic Systems Command (ESC), still wanted to deploy BCS-M, even though it would have taken longer.

But Central Air Force (CENTAF), which is to deploy and operate the C2 system in Iraq, could not wait. It went through the Army to procure the more quickly deployable and less expensive BC3, which, at its heart, includes the same technology that ESC rejected in 2003 for the C2 system used to protect U.S. skies.