F-35C
WASHINGTON: After two years of relative silence about All Domain Operations, the Navy is throwing more weight behind the Pentagon’s effort to link everything from submarines to drones flying high overhead on one shared network, assigning a group of admirals and a team from the defense industry to tackle the problem and find ways to link into the Joint All Domain Command and Control initiative.
The Navy’s vice chief of naval operations, its top acquisition official, and the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps issued a memo that lays out the plan to develop Project Overmatch, the Navy’s answer to building a digital foundation for pushing more real-time data everywhere at once between the five services.
The Oct. 1 memo, obtained by Breaking Defense, lays out the structure of the Navy-wide effort to develop and field these new technologies, and names Rear Adm. Doug Small, chief of the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, as director of the various working groups.
Vice Adm. Mike Moran, principal military deputy in the Navy’s acquisition office, underscored that the push is one of the Navy’s top priorities during a virtual San Diego Military Advisory Council discussion last week. Budgets, he said, might have to be tweaked to “reallocate resources across programs to get at that interoperability piece; it may change the architecture of some of these things that we’re designing today,” to ensure that common systems can move data.
One of the key network and sensor issues in the past has been that different tribes within the Navy have gone about their business without focusing enough on how to operate with one another, leading to gaps in sharing data and targets as quickly as might otherwise be possible.
“We can’t have proprietary networks. We’ve got to be able to build applications and share data and work together,” Moran said. “We’ve got to do it across all of our systems, all of our programs, because that’s been our failure in the past. We’re trying to make interoperability part of the requirements set for delivery, but we haven’t been effective at it.”
During a virtual event hosted by Center for Strategic and International Studies on Friday, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Trussler, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said that while the Navy has been less public about their efforts than the Air Force and Army, they’re pushing hard.
Recent exercises like RIMPAC and Valiant Shield have tested some of these data sharing ideas, and “there’s a couple of ships on the bottom of the Pacific right now from those exercises that were demonstrating some of those concepts that we’re trying to get after,” he said.
Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is expected to unveil a Joint Warfighting Concept next month. A key goal of the concept will be defining Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) as a concept, as well as its requirements.
The Air Force is developing the Advanced Battle Management System as the backbone for connections required to build a military Internet of Things (IoT). The Army is pursuing Project Convergence to move targeting data from satellites in space to troops on the ground. Those efforts have generated hundreds of stories in the last year from the two services. But the Navy has been very quiet about JADC2 and related efforts. “We just don’t talk about it that way,” Trussler added.
The Oct. 1 memo makes Rear Adm. Small the Direct Reporting Program Manager spearheading the Navy’s work. It establishes a Three-Star Advisory Council made up of the (N9) Deputy Chief for Warfighting Requirements and Capabilities; the (N2/N6) deputy chief for information warfare; the Chief Information Officer, and James Geurts, the Navy’s acquisition chief.
The document also establishes a panel of industry advisors from the defense sector and academia to assist in understanding the art of the possible, and how to get there quickly.
In October, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday called for an initial plan for Project Overmatch by December, a timeline that aligns with other major changes happening within the service that will likely add hundreds of unmanned ships to the fleet in the coming years.
The Navy is going it alone in developing its network, which it then plans to tie in with the Air Force and Army’s efforts. But Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown has said he has spoken with Gilday about a possible accord to cooperate in developing a joint command and control network for future all-domain operations — along the lines of the MoU he signed Oct. 2 with Army Chief James McConville.
“We’re trying to link sensors, platforms, shooters, across the service – agnostic of the paths to get there, agnostic to the platforms and source. And that’s not just something somebody woke up and thought about last year. All the services were already working,” Trussler said. “It’s about taking the systems we have – the legacy systems we have, making them work together – and for all future systems we roll out and develop, they’re going to be built that way.”
