Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, J6 director at the Jan. 26 JADC2 Data Summit

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s crucial strategy for Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is expected to be sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin within days, says Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, whose J6 shop in the Joint Staff spearheads the effort.

Both Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks have reviewed the draft strategy, which will lay out how commanders will manage future All Domain Operations on a global scale, Crall told the 2021 C4ISRNET Conference today.

“We’re making some final decisions on that draft, and it should move quickly from Gen. Milley through the deputy, since both have already established their support for it, and then on to the secretary. So once we get our edits done … I’m hoping in days we should be able to move that forward.”

Crall noted that the draft strategy also has been briefed to key congressional staff.

The draft was crafted by the Joint Cross Functional Team led by the Joint Staff J6, Command, Control, Communications, & Computers/Cyber, directed by Crall. It went to Milley for his chop in February.

As Breaking D readers know, the strategy has five lines of effort — that cover things like data standardization, integrating allies and partners, and improving networking capabilities across the military ecosystem.

Crall elaborated today that those lines of effort included the “nuclear command and control apparatus.” Details about that will be classified. Much of the strategy, however, will not be; indeed Crall said that an unclassified version is ready for release as soon as Austin signs off.

The strategy also includes milestones for the services and DoD agencies to meet in its implementation, and a new process for the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) to ride herd on that process.

“The most important aspect, which we’ve already started to fill out, is the implementation plan. Everything that happens to the left of the implementation plan is just planning,” Crall said. It includes “the plan of attack and milestones, the very specific delivery dates, and what type of delivery we’re expecting and when. So, really the rubber meets the road in that document.”

The Joint Task Force has just started to identify leads for putting the implementation plan in place, Crall added.

In addition, Crall told the conference today, the posture review the Joint Task Force began in January is almost complete. That will identify the gaps between the JADC2 strategy’s goals and the ability of the services to meet them. It also is designed to inform service budget decisions.

“If the strategy is that benchmark of what you want to do, the posture review is that document that comes back and says, ‘Here’s what you’re missing in order to get there.’ That’s a pretty significant requirement for funding plans to make sure that these things are resourced properly.”

As Crall explained back in February, that effort is part of move by the JROC, led by Vice JCS Chair Gen. John Hyten, to take more control of the requirements process as the military moves toward a new Joint Warfighting Concept. This will be necessary to ensure that the new joint needs for battling highly advanced peer adversaries are being met. To that end, the first goal of the JADC2 strategy is to create a so-called ‘common data fabric’ that will allow current service C2 networks to plug in and share data to create a ‘common operating picture’ for joint force commanders.

Perhaps more importantly, the JROC hopes to prevent service overlap in building sexy new weapon systems to implement the JWC. (Indeed, this problem has already begun to crop up, with the ongoing Army-Air Force jostling over new hypersonic weapons for long-range attack — prompting intervention by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.)

Crall said that while the JADC2 strategy is still a draft, the Joint Task Force has chosen 14 test cases to demonstrate capabilities to prove the proposed lines of effort. These will help the military “learn by doing,” he said.

Crall said the Joint Staff has been working with two of the Combatant Commands to integrate use of some of these prototype capabilities into already-planned exercises to allow “proof of principle.” As examples, he mentioned using artificial intelligence to pull data from different data repositories into a unified cloud domain to then create a common operating picture; and, integrating real-world threat data into response calculations. The first of these real-world efforts “to stress test our ideas” is coming up within the next two to three months, he said.

“We’re going to burn those fires bright,” he added, “so we’re really excited about that.”

Finally, Crall confirmed that DoD is working with Congress to figure out how funding authorities might be reshaped to allow more rapid development of JADC2-related software and hardware.

“I know that Congress has reached out to us and has discussed options that they’re looking at — in the crudest sense, I would probably say something akin to an investment capital fund which DoD doesn’t have. Money that could be earmarked multi-use money, so it’s not too specific” so it could quickly spent on new tech.

“I think that there might be some appetite to explore things along those lines,” he added.