Gen. John Hyten
CAPITOL HILL: The Joint Staff is developing a new Joint Warfighting Concept to define the American way of war by the end of the year, says Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Hyten. A key goal of the concept will be defining Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) as a concept, as well as its requirements.
Hyten stressed that developing JADC2 is one of the highest priorities of Hyten’s boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley. “Gen. Milley says Joint All-Domain Command and Control has gotta be one of his highest priorities. Therefore it’s one of my highest priorities. And Gen. Goldfein (Air Force Chief of Staff) is pushing that hard,” he said today at an Air Force Association breakfast.
On Tuesday, Goldfein told an audience at the Center for a New American Security on Tuesday that JADC2 is his top priority for 2021. “First and foremost, you gotta connect the joint team,” he said. “We have to have access to common data so that we can operate at speeds and bring all domain capabilities against an adversary.”
Hyten said that the Joint Staff have been tasked by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to deliver the new warfighting concept by December, a process that in turn should drive what joint requirements are developed by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) — including those for JADC2. Thus, fleshing out the new warfighting plan is one of the three priorities for this year discussed when the JROC met earlier this week. Ellen Lord, DoD undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, and Mike Griffin, undersecretary for research & engineering were there with Hyten.
“The Joint Staff has to build right now what we’re calling a Joint Warfighting Concept, which is going to be an overarching concept for how we actually fight in the future. Underneath that Joint Warfighting Concept will be capabilities and attributes that we need to be able to fight effectively in the 2030s and 2040s and beyond,” Hyten said. “That should drive from the top what the JROC should be pushing out to services.”
Another key priority for the JROC is reinvigorating itself to ensure that capabilities the services plan to build fulfill the joint requirements of the warfighters in the various combatant commands and eliminate too much redundancy. “We actually have to empower the JROC process to do what the JROC was intended to do,” he said, which is to review the services and “make sure everything is integrated together and it works together in the joint force.” That process is not working right now, he said, with the JROC instead taking a passive role and simply passing on service-developed capabilities.
Hyten said JADC2 was also one of the topics on the agenda at the meeting.
As I reported back in November, the Joint Staff and the Office of Secretary of Defense have created a Joint Cross-Functional Team to thrash out the JADC2 concept. The team includes representatives from the office of DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy, as well as those of Lord and Griffin.
The JROC sees joint C2 as one of the “lost children,” Hyten explained — joint functions that no one service is in charge of fulfilling. (The other two are joint logistics and joint access to information, he said.) Therefore, the JROC has to figure out the processes by which the requirements for those functions can be implemented.
That said, Hyten explained that in the case of JADC2, one service — the Air Force — has taken the rare step of volunteering to lead its development as a joint function. “That’s a big statement for a service to say ‘I will do a joint function.’ That’s difficult,” Hyten said, with obvious pride in his own legacy service.
The question at the heart of JADC2, he said, is simple, but answering it is going to be a serious challenge: “How do we integrate all our capabilities in all our domains, and effectively command and control across the board? It’s going to be a big challenge and it’s not fully understood.”
Hyten explained that key to resolving the challenge is working out how the services can access all the data needed. This is critical, he said, especially if the military is going to benefit from artificial intelligence and greatly speed the decision-making process to meet the speed of the threat. This is why, he noted, the Air Force is concentrating on developing data standardization, data accessibility protocols, etc. as it fleshes out JADC2.
Advanced Battle Management System Overview
As Breaking D readers know, the Air Force is concentrating on developing the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) family of systems as its technology core for enabling JADC2, and is working with the Navy and the Army to develop both the architecture and the technologies required to implement it. As now envisioned by the Air Force, ABMS includes six key technology types or “product areas,” and 28 specific products it intends to develop over time. All of those products, senior Air Force officials say, are being built with open-source data standards and have a suffix of “ONE” to show that development is open to all services.
“If we get the data piece right everything will move forward. This will be most important thing we do in the joint force: to figure out how to do that,” Hyten said. “So the JROC in the not too distant future is going to weigh in, and say ‘OK, how do we actually do that, what are the requirements we need for Joint All Domain Command and Control.
“I don’t know how that process is going to end up, but I can tell you one thing. It’s not going to be a list of performance criteria that you have to do 10 years from now,” Hyten added. “It’s gonna be different. It’s gonna focus on how we do things. It’s gonna focus on innovation in the services, innovation in industry.”
And doing that, he stressed, will require DoD to allow flexibility in development and in operations and testing — and to allow failure. “That’s going to be difficult for the department, but we’re going to push that, push that really hard.”
Goldfein, for his part, said the Air Force is making real progress in developing JADC2 and ABMS, and is including its sister services in the process.
“We ain’t talking about a cloud architecture, we have actually have built one,” Goldfein said at CNAS, referring to the “cloudONE” specialized Internet for multi-domain operations (MDO) that is a critical ABMS node. “We have one. It’s up and running and all the services are connected in.”
“We’re not talking about data architecture. We have built a Unified Data Library and we’re inclusive of al the services moving forward,” he added. The Unified Data Library was first built to security integrate space situational awareness data across classification levels for the Air Force, and is now being expanded into the so-called “dataONE” library that the service hopes will eventually include data from all Air Force and other service sensors.
