JADC2, as envisioned by defense contractor Raytheon. (Raytheon)
Ask five people in Washington to define JADC2 and how much it costs, and you might get ten answers. In the following op-ed, Travis Sharp of CSBA tries to provide a clear estimate for how much the Pentagon is spending on the effort, and argues that the confusion around JADC2 might not be a bad thing for its future.
The defense budget, a window into the Pentagon’s soul, contains several hints about why senior policymakers are concerned about sprawl within Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the Defense Department’s approach to developing an interconnected joint force that senses, makes sense, and acts on information quickly.
In the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2023 budget request, approximately 30 JADC2 initiatives together requested somewhere between $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion, according to my research. That’s roughly one-third more than in FY22. Despite confused messaging about what JADC2 actually is and how each branch of the military will handle it, the services increased their share of that funding while more programs claimed to support JADC2 — perhaps in a bid to justify their budgets.
Facing trends like these, senior Pentagon officials such as Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks have endorsed additional centralized controls to help focus JADC2 initiatives across and within the services and defense agencies. The urge to rein things in is understandable. No one wants unproductive disarray.
Yet, senior leaders should not constrain the JADC2 sprawl too much. Messiness often precedes successful innovation. Curtailing initiatives too early risks turning stakeholders into opponents, and JADC2-related spending, even if higher than estimated, seems defensible given the importance of improving joint force connectivity. For these reasons, senior leaders should embrace a modified Elsa strategy toward JADC2: keep watch, but let it go.
Estimate Of Requested Spending For JADC2
JADC2 lacks a single program or line item, so any effort to understand where the money is being spent means analysts have to make judgement calls on what is and isn’t JADC2-related, before summing the costs of relevant activities.
Key initiatives, in the view of most experts, include [PDF] the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), the Army’s Project Convergence, the Navy’s Project Overmatch, and several others. Searching budget requests for those keywords yields between 28 and 31 activities whose budget justifications convey, in my judgment, that they support JADC2. (The range expresses uncertainty about whether several activities provide direct or indirect support.)
For FY23, these core JADC2 initiatives together requested between $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion, with about 90 percent of the funds for R&D and the rest for procurement. Total requested funding increased from $1.5-to-$2.0 billion in FY22 and $0.9-to-$1.2 billion in FY21, indicating growth of about $650 million annually. For FY23, the services requested around 80 percent of the total funding, up from closer to 50 percent in 2021. The number of programs claiming to support JADC2 increased, too. As a simplistic example, albeit one illustrating a deeper truth, a key Air Force budget volume mentioned JADC2 14 times in FY23 versus only six times in FY21.
The estimate above is conservative and likely underestimates, perhaps significantly, the funds flowing to JADC2, especially through classified and indirect support programs. Still, it jibes with other public information about JADC2 spending. First, Govini estimated that JADC2-related funding prior to FY22 varied between $2 billion and $5 billion, a finding in the same ballpark as the estimate above. (Again, the range reflects how much indirect support is included). Second, the Navy revealed that it requested $195 million in FY23 for Project Overmatch. My estimate above calculated $188 million for Overmatch, quite close to the reported figure.
Although imprecise and inelegantly derived, this estimate provides a reasonable starting point for JADC2 cost-benefit assessments – at least until the Defense Department releases official figures or somebody gets busy with FOIA.
Three reasons Not To Constrain JADC2
When a program starts getting real money, it means those funds are coming from someone else’s pocket — and the campaign against JADC2 sprawl has arrived right on cue. No major Pentagon undertaking can avoid debating centralization versus decentralization, the chief dilemma [PDF] of defense governance. Three arguments support leaning toward decentralization to a greater degree than indicated by recent policymaker comments.
First, successful R&D often requires messiness and errors early to avoid them later. As Thomas McNaugher concluded in his classic study of weapons acquisition, “The conundrum of R&D, it might be said, is that unless one is willing to waste money early, one is likely to waste much more money later […] It is easier to stop and start projects in their early stages, but of course such choices are made on the basis of cost and performance information that is almost always wrong.” If JADC2 “is really a software-centric enterprise problem,” as Hicks stated, then software-style innovation — bottom up and iterative — might outperform the top down and directive approach ingrained in Defense Department culture.
A critic might counter that JADC2 has little excuse for messiness because several initiatives are not early stage. Rather, they conglomerate long-running efforts that previously had different names. In this view, for example, ABMS is a rebranded continuation of older programs. If these efforts should have been fielded in some form already, or been cancelled due to infeasibility, then continuing to develop them under JADC2 is pig’s lipstick, a gussying up of R&D ugliness (no offense, pigs).
Fully addressing this technological maturity critique requires consulting scientists, engineers, and classified information, which we cannot do here. It is worth noting, however, that senior leaders, including those who have left government, have not really criticized JADC2 as unnecessary even though they have incentives to stop wastefulness. Instead, they have lamented its amorphousness. As Hicks said, “If you ask any two people what they think JADC2 is, you’ll probably get different answers.” Observers could interpret this comment different ways, but it seems more indicative of the early problem-defining stage when messiness is a virtue, not a vice.
Second, constraining JADC2 too much risks alienating stakeholders and wrecking the advocacy network that currently supports the effort in principle, but views its ambition and nebulousness skeptically. Numerous JADC2 initiatives are conducting experimentation and exercises. Experimentation will intensify if Congress has its way. History shows that if senior officials pick winners and losers before experimentation has produced results, key stakeholders may revolt against the entire undertaking. No leader wants to lend their credibility to a sham process.
Given this risk, senior officials should not over-prune JADC2 until initial experimentation has progressed further. Determining how much experimentation is enough represents a judgment call, but successful efforts historically have taken at least a few years.
Third, the JADC2 spending I have estimated above seems defensible relative to its important goals — and in the context of the Pentagon’s $773 billion budget request, which seems guaranteed to go up once Congress sorts its budget out. JADC2’s basic thrust, improving the joint force’s connectivity in contested environments, represents a critical objective worth spending money on — even if JADC2 is encrusted by nonsensical jargon (as are most defense projects). Strengthening connectivity will yield operational benefits even if certain JADC2 initiatives never pan out. JADC2 is not an all-or-nothing proposition, though the Defense Department may present it that way to encourage internal bureaucratic unity and discourage external congressional tinkering.
Even if annual JADC2 spending exceeded the estimate above fivefold, falling around $12 billion after adding classified and indirect support funding, that amount – at less than $0.02 of every dollar the Defense Department spends – seems justifiable if JADC2 is as important as Pentagon leaders say it is. With Defense Department spending growing 2 percent above inflation each year since 2016, on average, and that trend likely continuing, there is no pressing budgetary reason to trim JADC2.
Pardon my parent-addled brain, but I am with Queen Elsa: Trying to control everything rarely works out the way a leader hopes. Senior Pentagon officials should let JADC2 go for a while and see what our enterprising specialists come up with.
Travis Sharp is a fellow and the director of defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
