U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Matt Strohmeyer, the Commanders Initiatives Group (CIG) deputy director, speaks with reporters about the new innovative Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) Onramp 2, Sept 2, 2020 at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Daniel Hernandez)
TECHNET AUGUSTA 2022 — The new head of the Joint All Domain Command and Control Cross-Functional Team (JADC2 CFT) wants people to start thinking of the infamously nebulous JADC2 effort as an “ecosystem” and that all the disparate efforts from the services are “aligned,” despite recent comments from Pentagon officials that seem to contradict that notion.
“JADC2 is an ecosystem. When we see in the press that the services aren’t aligned behind JADC2, I cringe,” Rear Adm. Susan BryerJoyner said Thursday at the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference. “Because at the end of the day, what each one of the services is doing is absolutely part of JADC2. They’re approaching different pieces of the problem that need to be solved. They’re not incompatible. They’re complimentary.”
There have been long-held concerns about the overall complexity of the Defense Department’s effort to “connect sensors to shooters” known as JADC2 — essentially how the military will get information from any one of a myriad of sources quickly and clearly to decision-makers so they can act upon it in real time. DoD released a public version of its JADC2 strategy in March which left more questions than answers as to how the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military services were going to accomplish the goals defined in the document.
Each service has its own JADC2-aligned effort: The Army has its annual Project Convergence sensor-to-shooter campaign, the Navy has Project Overmatch and the Air Force has its Advanced Battle Management System.
In July, Doug Bush, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, suggested there wasn’t enough coordination between the services and floated the idea of a new, high-level JADC2-focused office, which seemed to be a more robust arrangement than the JADC2 CFT, along with a large-scale exercise to help coordinate DoD’s efforts.
He likened his envisioned office to the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft System Office, which is overseen by the Army, saying an organizational body like the JCO could be useful in terms of making sure requirements are stacked and prioritized.
Following Bush’s comments, Wanda Jones-Heath, principal cyber advisor for the Air Force and Space Force, reiterated the idea of a centralized JADC2 office. She said that between the three disparate efforts across the services, no one is thinking about how to be interoperable and that “someone needs to just push us where we need to go.”
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Jones-Heath told Breaking Defense at the sidelines of the Potomac Officer Club’s Air Force Summit July 27 that she doesn’t believe the JADC2 CFT is pushing the amount of interoperability DoD needs.
“How much are they driving to make sure there is interoperability and that we get the capabilities that we need, putting those programs side by side and just figuring out what capability can each service bring, what are the best of the breed of the different capabilities, and then how do we integrate those?” she said.
Both Bush and Jones-Heath pushed for a large JADC2-focused exercise that involves all the services, bigger than this fall’s anticipated Project Convergence, which will be the first joint integration of the exercise involving the Army’s coalition partners.
It’s not just officials within the Pentagon who want more clarity on JADC2. A congressional subcommittee in its mark of the fiscal 2023 defense authorization bill stated it was concerned with DoD’s progress on implementing the JADC2 concept.
But BryerJoyner suggested Thursday that people were thinking about JADC2 the wrong way.
“So JADC2 is large and we hear people wanting to understand what’s in JADC2, what’s not JADC2,” BryerJoyner said. “If you accept my premise, my hypothesis, that it’s about a different way to compete and fight, almost everything is JADC2.”
She added DoD needs to figure out a way to “iteratively field things” to manage risk but at the same time understand they won’t be perfect solutions and will continue to improve. What JADC2 means in the tactical environment is going to be “something slightly or possibly very different” than what it would mean at a combatant command headquarters and experimentation — between the services and elsewhere — will be key moving forward.
“We can’t wait a full year. Look at the way we organize exercises today,” she said. “We have disparate training objectives that may or may not be connected to other training objectives throughout the year. If I want speed and I want agility, I need the ability to pick a thread and pull it through a series of exercises or demonstrations and they don’t all have to be by a certain service, or a certain combatant command. Pick the ones that make sense and take that particular capability gap filler through every one of those so we can iteratively stress test, develop and get it ready to deploy.”
