WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has signed the strategy guiding the massive effort to knit troopers on the front lines to F-35s, submarines, satellites, ships and commanders across the globe, known as Joint All Domain Command and Control.
The approval by Austin “brings order to our efforts in the command and control arena” Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, the head of J6, told reporters at the Pentagon’s briefing room today. His appearance marked the first time a top-level briefing has been held on the topic of All Domain Operations, showing clearly how integral what has been dismissed by some has become a central aspect of American warfighting.
One of the greatest challenges to JADC2, recognized from the beginning, was how to ensure the services, who have acquisition authority over new programs and tend to be wedded to the systems they have in pocket, would design systems that could share data reliably with every weapon and every service no matter what domain they might be fighting in.
“Now,” Crall said, “I can take the strategy and vet it and see what is in compliance and what is not,” in effect giving him a whip hand to force the services and industry to do what’s needed.
“There’s been a lot of writing about what the services are doing, and in some cases it’s been characterized as independent and conflicting. I would correct that and say that the experimentation that they’re doing in JADC2 to date has been very complementary,” he said. “The services have approached both their service and combatant command needs, I think, quite well. It is truthful, I believe though, that if left to go on, at some point of time, without some level of framework or order to that process we could find ourselves at odds with each other, meaning that we may not be interoperable both in procedure, and also in that speed of data sharing. So the timing is right for this.”
(FYI — the secretary actually approved the strategy on May 13.)
Note to services — well done so far, despite some of the kerfuffles, but we’ll be keeping an eagle eye out and we’ve got the Defense Secretary’s approval.
One of the most intriguing things Crall said is that JADC2 will not focus first on building headquarter systems but will focus on the “tactical edge” first: “We’re starting on the tactical edge and working backwards.” This is the approach the Army has been advocating for some time, noting the unique challenges of getting useful information to and from soldiers on the front lines.
As Sydney put it in an earlier story: In a given theater of operations, commanders might need to exchange data amongst hundreds of aircraft and satellites. A single Army combat brigade has to link hundreds of vehicles and thousands of soldiers, all operating at ground level where dust and intervening obstacles – hills, buildings, trees – play havoc with transmissions. That requires a multi-layered and flexible mesh network that can handle surface-to-surface transmissions, surface-to-air, and surface-to-space.
So where does industry come in all this? Crall has not been particularly complimentary about the products industry has offered in some areas of JADC2, particularly those for identity management, the tech needed to ensure a soldier really is who he says he is when he logs in to JADC2.
“We need to be able to do that in a deployed environment, and I have been critical. The industry solutions that we’ve been offered don’t work in the area I need them to work. They work great in the national capital region; they don’t work really well in an austere environment, coming out of the back of an aeroplane or at sea. And that’s where we’re starting.”
More generally, Crall told me industry must “avoid proprietary solutions. We want data sharing. We want to have the ability to fuse data sets together in ways that are nimble, like industry does today, meaning we have to share a little bit of the backside of how those things work.” Perhaps most importantly, “we need solutions that work on the tactical edge.”
The other point Crall made worth noting — and he made it at the beginning of his briefing — is that the US will always fight alongside allies so they have been brought into the development of JADC2 as early and as deeply as possible: “We are sharing as much as we can possibly share.”
Bottom line: “For all the excitement of the strategy (and he did actually look excited), this really starts our work,” he said. “It’s implementation time.”
