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

WASHINGTON: The Joint Staff hopes to soon wrap up its gap analysis to guide implementation of DoD’s new Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy, says Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, de facto lead for the complex effort to link all sensors to all shooters to enable future All Domain Operations.

“We’re into the posture review, which is making its final rounds, which shows the gaps,” he told the Defense One Tech Summit today. “We have a lot more gaps than we can cover. I mean, that’s probably not a surprise to anyone. Despite all the capability that we have, there’s a pretty long list of things that we believe we need to improve upon and really fulfill.”

That posture review is classified for the obvious reason that the US military does not want to provide potential adversaries with a road map for attack, Crall explained. However, he said some lacunae in current DoD capabilities are fairly obvious, such as in the broad arena of information sharing “at speed.” For example, he reiterated his concerns that as of now there are no good solutions available from industry for providing   identity credential and management (ICAM) software that can verify a user is who they say they are and that they have rights to access the JADC2 meta-network.

The JADC2 strategy, signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month, has five ‘lines of effort’ considered crucial, covering things like data standardization, integrating allies and partners, and improving networking capabilities across the military ecosystem.

The next step will be for the Joint Staff to figure out which of those capability holes to prioritize, explained Crall. As director of the J6, the directorate for Command, Control, Communications, & Computers/Cyber, he spearheads the JADC2 strategy’s development and implementation.

“It starts with making sure you’ve got the right priority. Prioritizing those gaps is what the Joint Staff does fairly well,” he said. “Everything may be important, but everything may not be important now. There are certain things that we have to do that will lead us to fulfill those things that are important, but they’re necessary undergirding or foundational structural work that has to take place to make sure that future investments are safeguarded and they make sense when we onboard them. So, that’s taking a little mental prowess and power for us to snap that chalk line where it makes sense.”

As part of the process for filling the gaps in joint capabilities, the Joint Staff will look at how to “incentivize” the services to speed up any nascent efforts initiated based on service-specific needs that match up with those identified in the posture review, he said.

He stressed that while this requires cooperation among the services, he is confident that will be forthcoming. “I’ll just say that in my many years of working on projects, either this one specifically or ones like it, I have never seen a time when the services are more cooperative in looking at ways to solve these problems, because they’re complex, in many cases they’re expensive, and we can’t do it all and we certainly can’t do it all alone.”

Crall stressed that in order for JADC2 to be successful, a holistic effort is necessary — starting from the top at the secretariat level and going all the way down to the individual services at the acquisition level.

“So, it’s about using the processes in the building to find that common win on how we get out of this what we need for the department’s success,” he said. “And if we get our processes set up right, it should lead us to a fairly successful conclusion. So who’s responsible for delivering JADC2? My answer is: ‘yes’.”

This is why chartering the JADC2 Cross Functional Team, which includes all the myriad stakeholders, was such an important first step, Crall explained.

“This is a DoC, OSD collaborative. It involves Combat Commands, services, letter groups inside the Pentagon, and a few others. We have a very wide audience with interest and responsibility, so we had to get that right.”

Once joint priorities are set, Crall said, the next step will be “defining what that implementation plan looks like. It’s a rather complex challenge to get started. Who does what, where, when? Budgets are in different places in the services, and we’re going to need services to take leads in areas where their efforts align quite nicely with that of JADC2, and where they already have some of those financial resources put in place — basically, interest, money and momentum. That is where we’re going to start.”

Another key part of the implementation plan is injecting a new focus on rigorous testing of networking capabilities related to JADC2 during upcoming joint and service exercises, he said, explaining that in the past challenges to connectivity during routine exercises essentially have been hand-waived away.

From now on, the plan will be to test C2 links and “exposing  and revealing” challenges as “outcomes during the exercises, so they’re captured, just like you would any other lesson learned,” Crall said.

“Not after the fact. Not in a special IT forum. Not with just the CIOs,” he stressed, “but in front of the warfighters to say: ‘Here’s the impact this move would have had.’  And so, normalizing that and elevating it to command level, that’s what’s new.”