PENTAGON: In a sweeping shift in how the military decides what weapons it will buy, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs plans to upend the existing requirements system.
Gen. John Hyten told me the move is driven by the need for a new American way of war, one using a vast system of sensors and secure communications reaching from the depths of the ocean to the heights of space — a concept known as All Domain Operations. The initial focus will be on building the digital nervous system for this future force, called Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).
The new approach will be a a top-down one, where the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) will set the attributes of JADC2 and the services will build to those, Hyten said in an interview. Today, the system is largely a bottom-up approach, where the services come up with what they consider the necessary capabilities and technologies, and the JROC reviews them for suitability and duplication. The system, Hyten said, will change to one that sends a “demand signal” to the services.
“The service then will be responsible for building the pieces and coming back to us, and then we have to make sure it fits all together,” Hyten told me in his spacious E-Ring office here. “That’s what the JROC is supposed to do, [but] that is something we haven’t done yet.”
This won’t require changes to the laws and regulations guiding the JROC and the services, the general stressed, just a different approach to running the existing process.
“The JROC tended to be a receiver of requirements from services, not a generator of requirements for the services to meet,” he said. “That’s not what was intended by Congress when it was established, by the processes we put in place, but that’s what we’ve come to. And so that’s going to require some discipline at the senior level to make sure that we are actually putting the demand signal out.”
At the same time, Hyten said, the JROC can’t be overly prescriptive, as requirements have tended to be in the past. “The second piece that is going to be difficult is [that] it requires the JROC not to actually document system specifications, which is what most of the requirements documents we blessed look like,” he said. “Instead, it’s going to have to be to bless the attributes of the capabilities that we need to have and then monitor the service’s ability to build that.”
That sounds more like goal setting, I said. Is it?
“That’s not a bad description. It’s not complete, but that’s not a bad description,” he replied. “It just requires discipline from the top down to make sure we follow through in our roles and responsibilities.”
The process has begun to take shape, with a memo going out “to all the services and the commanders that are involved” in JADC2, Hyten told me.
Since this is a truly joint effort, it’s important to note that all four services’s vice chiefs sit on the JROC with Hyten: “And so you have everybody at the table, saying, this is what we expect this joint capability to be.”
That said, it’s important to have a single authority responsible for the program, so the Air Force was recently named to be the lead service for JADC2. His service has taken on a demanding task, since, as Hyten said, “they’ll have to build it to meet Army requirements, to meet Navy requirements, Marine Corps requirements — as well as Air Force requirements.”
The Air Force will be accountable for meeting the Army requirement, he said. Air Force Secretary Barrett and Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force Chief of Staff, have told him, “Yep, we get that. We will step up to meet that requirement,” Hyten recounted. But the Army is worried that if something hasn’t been documented, they can’t trust the process.
That became very clear in our coverage of the program at the core of JADC2, the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). At a classified conference on All Domain Operations in late January, Army generals told their Air Force counterparts that ground troops can’t just adopt what the Army Chief of Staff has called an “air-centric” command system for future all-service operations.
“One of the messages I think the Army was trying to communicate to the Air Force was that ABMS cannot be the sole solution, because it doesn’t account for, in some cases, the scale or the unique requirements of all the other services,” Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, chief of the Army’s Futures & Concepts Center, said. “It certainly is a start point of a framework, [but] Army scaling issues have to be considered in any kind of framework that’s put together in the future. Other services might be looking at the scale of hundreds, where the Army is looking at a scale of thousands.”
Another Army general made the point more bluntly. “One service does not have all the answers to Joint All-Domain Command & Control, okay, regardless of what you read about [how] one service may have the solutions,” said Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, director of the hand-picked Cross Functional Team for network modernization at Army Futures Command. “It’s got to be a joint fight, and what may work for one of our fellow services may not necessarily work for the Army. What will work, we’re going to incorporate.”
So, we know the three other services will have to work with the Air Force as it builds JADC2. But the skeptics of the world would look at past “joint” and multi-service projects, note the comments by the Army leadership, and wonder how likely it is that each one will just go off on its own path, jealously defending their budget, turf, and concepts of operations. I asked Gen. Hyten what sticks he had to wield.
“So, you think about the way this building works — and you’ve been in this building for a long time — there’s really only four processes that matter in this building” he said: “Ops, budget, acquisition and requirements.”
Hyten knows what he faces. “All of these integration functions (for JADC2) are going to require alignment between those four processes, and the people at the head of those processes” will each have sticks to enforce jointness. So, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Tank handles operations, the Deputy Defense Secretary and the Deputy’s Management Action Group Doi the budget, the heads of acquisition and research and development do that. and they are all joined by Hyten who handles requirements.
Those four power centers will keep pressure on the services. And in the JROC itself, Hyten said, he’s going to order the different Functional Capabilities Boards (FCBs) to “look at the different elements of these capabilities and provide an integration function to make sure that the services are meeting all those pieces.” (If you can handle it, click on this link to try and understand just what the JROC and the FCBs are supposed to do.)
An FCB for command and control and an FCB for sensors and integration will comb through those “goals” we talked about above.
So you’ll have the sticks from above, and the FCBs from below, plus one more factor: a Joint Warfighting Concept, which Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered last fall be delivered by December this year. It will, Hyten said, “describe the capabilities and attributes necessary to operate in this future all domain world. That’s the top-down piece.”
So, you have four services trying to build a global system no one has ever built before. You have a fundamental reworking of how the requirements process will function. You have dozens, if not hundreds, of companies that will be involved in all this.
It’s a daunting challenge. But Hyten has approached this with some care. “I didn’t create any new processes. I didn’t create any new organizations. I didn’t create any new services. It’s all in the construction that we have,” he told me. “But what we have to do is, we have to be disciplined and use the process that we have, correctly.”
