Army graphic illustrating JADC2
WASHINGTON: US allies will get their first hands-on taste of the new American way of war this fall during the annual Bold Quest multinational exercise led by the Joint Staff. Pandemic permitting, of course.
“We currently expect participation in varying degrees from Canada, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden,” a Joint Staff spokesperson tells Breaking D in an email.
In particular, US planners have been working “to incorporate and demonstrate” elements of Joint All-Domain Command and Control ( JADC2) — the capability to link sensors to shooters across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace — into Bold Quest, the spokesperson said. “This will mainly be accomplished in conjunction with BQ sensor-to-shooter interoperability objectives.”
“Bold Quest 20.2” currently is being planned for Oct. 13 through Nov. 6 at Camp Atterbury and the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, Indiana National Guard facilities also known as Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations, or AMCCO, he added.
Last year’s Bold Quest, one of a series of Joint Staff “Coalition Capability Demonstration and Assessment events,” took place in Finland. According to a Finnish Defence Forces press release, the goal of the annual exercises “is to demonstrate and assess the command and control interoperability of joint fires sensors and related systems in a multinational operating environment. The event tests and demonstrates the functional and technical interoperability of ground, sea and air-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and joint fires systems.”
As Breaking D readers know, the Air Force was charged by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley to lead development of JADC2, and service leaders — from Vice JCS Chair Gen. John Hyten to former Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein to Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, commander of Air Forces Europe and Africa — have stressed the US will need to be able to incorporate allies into the future network.
Bold Quest is jumping off a set of earlier experiments led for the Joint Staff by the Air Force Warfighting Integrating Capability (AFWIC), Maj. Kevin Peel, an Air Force reserve officer detailed to AWFIC and the Joint JADC2 Cross Functional Team, said in an interview.
The experiments were essentially simulations using the Air Force’s Shadow Operations Center at Nellis AFB in Nevada (tapped by the Joint Staff last year as the lead JADC2 test lab) and other service test-beds and battle laboratories. For example, the Army linked in nodes at its Fires Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate Battle Lab at Fort Bliss; the Mission Command Battle Lab at Fort Leavenworth; and the Regional Hub Node Experimental at Fort Gordon, among others.
The first experiment aimed at, for the first time, linking all service C2 networks together. In the second, the Air Force brought representatives from the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) to observe, Peel said.
“I think that was eye-opening for a lot of them as well,” he said, “because, you know, we say the next fight is going to be joint — no, it’s going to be coalition.”
AFWIC had planned a third one early this summer that would have included hand-on allied participation, linking in their own C2 networks. It was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Peel said.
Peel said the experiments didn’t involve creating new nodes or capabilities. Instead, the team worked to find ways to connect the various labs in ways they normally are not.
“So, basically what we were tasked to do is show exactly what it would take to connect the Joint Force, right now,” he said. “It showed us that, if we were to try to do this today, we could do it. It would be a little more cumbersome than we would like to think, but we could do it.”
This focus on tying together current capabilities, using currently available equipment, differs from that of the Advanced Battle Management System “on-ramps” being led by the Air Force’s Chief Architect, Preston Dunlap. Those are are aimed at developing new technology to enable commanders to direct combat operations seamlessly in real-time, Peel explained.
“What we knew going in was that a lot of these different systems speak different languages — right? — and operate on different networks,” he said. “So, what we had to do is figure out first, a way to get all of these things on the same experimental network. And then, how we could get things speaking the same language, or find a way to translate between languages and systems.
“The results from everything we’ve done have gone to the ABMS team, to the services and the entities that participated, and to the Joint Staff as well,” Peel added.
Members of the 290th Joint Communications Support Squadron board a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., April 8, 2019, for exercise Bold Quest.
Army Lt. Col. Jeremy Conner, Network and Cyber Branch Chief at the Army’s Joint Modernization Command’s JADC2 section, said the AFWIC-led experiments exposed “gaps” that will need to be filled in order to make JADC2 a reality, according to the Army’s press release detailing its participation.
The experiments also highlighted bureaucratic and policy hurdles to creating a joint experimental C2 environment, the Army’s JADC2 division chief at JMC, Col. Bert Shell, says.
“Right now, the majority of networks have a bureaucratic process that people must go through that makes it very cumbersome for experimentation,” Shell said in the Army press release. “An experimental network — particularly for capabilities that are at lower maturity levels — if we don’t allow them to come on a controlled environment and experiment, then we’re not going to learn the lessons needed to enable Multi-Domain Operations as quickly as we need.”
So, the Army is working to create a “persistent” experimental environment that will let allies join and test the compatibility of their own C2 networks and capabilities with those of the US services and other allies, Connor said. “If the United Kingdom comes out with a new system and wants to make sure that it’s compatible, we’ll have that capability to test it immediately,” he said.
Lastly, the Army’s press release says, the experiments made clear that the services do not now have a common operating picture (COP) — that is, each service receives differing data and information from its own C2 sensor networks, meaning that service views of the battlefield don’t always match up.
How bad was it? “If JADC2 Experiments 1 and 2 were real, and there was a JADC2 Commander, the ineffectiveness of the COP would have prevented the JADC2 Commander from driving the operations process,” Maj. Brett Gilbert, Plans and Integration Officer in JMC’s JADC2 division, said in the Army’s press release.
While the upcoming JADC2 demonstration in the Bold Quest exercise will be “different in scope, scale and content from the AFWIC-led” events, the Joint Staff is confident they “will enhance ongoing sensor-to-shooter interoperability development and inform expanded demonstration of JADC2 concepts in future BQ events and elsewhere,” the Joint Staff spokesperson said.
(Indeed, Peel almost apologetically explained that each entity leading different JADC2 activities is using different terms of art that reflect their slightly different goals: AFWIC undertook “experiments;” the Joint Staff is doing “demonstrations;” and ABMS is doing “on-ramps.” Which makes us wonder if someone ought to also be developing a common dictionary of all-domain related terms.)
Officials say the current goal is for JADC2 to reach initial operating capability (IOC) by 2028, and full operational capability by 2035.
Meanwhile, the Joint Staff and the services are buckling down to wrap up the operational concept to guide future all-domain operations, the Joint Warfighting Concept, by the end of year. At Milley’s instruction, each service is taking the lead on a different piece of the effort: the Air Force for JADC2, the Army for ‘logisitics under attack,’ and the Navy for global and joint fires. The fourth piece of the puzzle is how US forces achieve “information advantage” over high-tech adversaries in future wars. While this hasn’t been publicly specified, it’s likely the lead on this line of effort is the Marine Corps.
