The US Air Force’s 10th Flight Test Squadron recently took delivery of the first B-52H Stratofortress to complete a refit through the Combat Network Communications Technology (CONECT) program. It's an effort to bring the Cold War era heavy bomber into the 21st century way of warfare—or at least up to the 1990s, technology-wise. While the aircraft received piecemeal upgrades over the past 50 years of flying, CONECT is the first major information technology overhaul for the Air Force’s B-52H fleet since the airplanes started entering service in 1961.

A total of 30 B-52s are due for the CONECT upgrade, at least based on the funding allotted for this fiscal year. The most visible part of the upgrade is the crew’s workstations. New “multi-functional color displays” (MFCDs) replace the analog instruments and monochrome displays previously used by aircrew.

The workstations, which have keyboards and trackballs, are connected through an onboard network that allows each console to control multiple onboard systems through a client-server architecture. Another part of the onboard network is the new “digital interphone” system for internal communications.

While much of this sounds like capabilities from the Clinton era, it’s important to remember that the network systems are designed to “survive and function through the nuclear environment.” But the real heart of the CONECT upgrade is the satellite and tactical network improvements they deliver to the B-52, which add data links to the aircraft that make it more relevant in an era of precision bombing and flexible targeting for close air support. In the past, aircrews had to write down mission details on paper and then manually enter them into systems for targeting. Now, mission plans and weapons systems targeting data will be able to be sent to the aircraft's systems while it's inflight.

The new networks will turn the B-52 into a node on the DOD’s network, allowing machine-to-machine communications to handle the on-the-fly retargeting of JDAM guided bombs and conventional air-launched cruise missiles. Imagine a B-52 casually orbiting over Afghanistan, waiting for some ground spotter to tap his BATMAN Google Glass and say, “OK Glass, bomb that ridge.”