We need a joint, networked force. This simple declarative statement belies myriad challenges posed to our national security by adversaries like China and Russia.
DOD has long recognized the need for a joint force, but the reality today is that we still face challenges to bringing an end to the stove-piped solutions and siloed services that are baked into a budget process where there’s funding for organizing, training, and equipping the individual services but very little allocated for “jointness.”
DOD needs a new approach built around a joint, digital integrator to create the connected solutions needed for a fully interoperable joint force. This would be a different kind of vendor with a government-focused culture, deep mission expertise, and the right incentives to provide those solutions.
In this Q&A with Greg Wenzel, Executive Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton, we discuss: why the networking developed in the Afghanistan war is not suitable to a near-peer competition; how joint data layers, often known as “data fabrics,” should be established; and why the military services should be incentivized to plug in to a unified, digital enterprise.
Breaking Defense: During the Afghanistan war, the Army and Marine Corps were networked with each other and with coalition partners. How should that network evolve to enable Joint All-Domain Command and Control and multi-domain operations for today’s near-peer competition?
Wenzel: When you say that we were networked together, it took us maybe a decade to do so. For the next fight against near peers where the force needs to be network connected to share data, we can’t afford to take 10 years to figure out how to do point-to-point connection of each one of the services.
We’re conducting point experiments today but what we need to have is a ubiquitous, networked DOD. That means instead of point-to-point networking — tying a Joint Strike Fighter to a Navy ship or an Army Paladin — we must figure out how to take our military assets and with artificial intelligence plan out target pairing for a thousand targets.
That is a different type of networking than what we did during the last two decades. Think of a networked force being more like the Internet where a browser and URL takes you to a website. Here you would have a joint data layer that is available for all services for them to plug-in and create a common taxonomy for how we operate. We need a similar network for JADC2 that allows us to connect sensor to effectors across services.
Breaking Defense: In recent months, DOD networking leadership has been talking about the concept of a data fabric, which will be necessary to develop in order to share data within cloud environments. Is that what you meant when you mentioned a “joint data layer?”
Wenzel: Yes. We believe a networked force is a more survivable and lethal force. It’s information warfare, which goes back to the Sun Tzu proverb — “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Essentially, we want to have all data networked together and Booz Allen is focused on that networking technology. Working in partnership with the Army, we rapidly created the Rainmaker Data Fabric that was demonstrated in Project Convergence 21.
Breaking Defense: Do you view a joint data layer as something that legacy systems can plug into or are we talking about only new, modern systems?
Wenzel: It’s a combination of legacy and modern that can become reality through three elements. First is development of a joint data layer or data fabric for the services to plug into. We don’t need 10 data fabrics. At the worst case it should be three: Army, Navy, and Air Force. Best case would be one OSD-sponsored joint data fabric that the services are then incentivized to plug-in. That’s one of the areas that Booz Allen is focusing on in order to network systems together to achieve information dominance.
Two, provide incentives and disincentives to the services for them to plug-in. I lean toward incentives such as financial support for the services to do so. You know how DOD works; it’s a money problem. But if you carved off $100-$200 million from the RDT&E (Research Development Test & Evaluation) budget and gave it to the services they would be incentivized to plug-in. The joint layer should be an open set of APIs that each service can access. Incentivize them to do so and they’ll pay attention because they don’t have to take it out of their own budgets.
Third, instead of individual efforts — the Army’s Project Convergence, the Navy’s Project Overmatch, and the Air Force’s ABMS (Advanced Battle Management System) — conduct a joint exercise where all the services come together to test it and give feedback on how well it’s working in a joint fashion. I want to see an Air Force sensor transfer data to a Navy C2 system that’s connected to an Army effector. Think of that, the Navy pulling the trigger on an Army system that actually is closer to the target. Joint effects, joint fires, that’s the whole point.
That’s why, I repeat, there’s the need to fund development of a joint data layer, with the services incentivized to plug-in with both legacy and modern systems. You can’t just focus on the new stuff. It’s got to connect the old stuff, too.
And then exercise it. The only way we’re going to have information dominance is when we actually have joint forces truly operating in a dynamic, joint approach — not point-through-point joint. The services need to operate as an enterprise.
We don’t have a decade to figure this out.
Breaking Defense: And you believe that the DOD needs a digital integrator to address the challenge you’ve just described? Because right now it’s the individual services and individual OEMs doing their own thing, which as we’ve seen is not a formula for success.
Wenzel: Correct. Simply put, I would say that the traditional OEMs that have been building IT in the past did nothing wrong. But they build IT the way they build aircraft or ships: shrink wrapped, monolithic, and tightly coupled.
When you look at the digital ecosystem in commercial, you see companies partnering to do things. They all have unique niches but they come together in a new IT system or a company. That’s what we believe the digital integrator can do: create that open architecture and joint data layer, and then help one organization plug in their system as a sensor and another organization consume that sensor data so that they can operate digitally within a kill chain. Think of digital kill chains; digital integrators create digital kill chains. The goal is to create an effect rather than creating an aircraft.
I built systems for three decades, so I get it. But because we have a commercial practice, we’ve already been part of this evolution that the DOD needs to move toward. A good example is how ARPANET was developed. You need open architecture first and then a digital integrator that helps everyone plug-in to the open architecture and joint data layer. That’s basically, again, what Booz Allen is focused on — networking the force and building on the work that’s being done to network the OEMs and the non-traditionals.
We have partnerships with several of them. We have a decade’s worth of investment in standing up innovation centers in San Francisco, Austin, Boston, and Seattle in order to work with and understand some of the non-traditionals.
The non-traditionals have some interesting stuff, as do the traditionals. For both, the job of a digital integrator would be to help them pivot and plug-in to a joint data layer.
Breaking Defense: Final thoughts?
Wenzel: The way we have fought for the past two decades is not the way we’re going to fight for the next two decades or next hundred years. It’s going to be an information war and that requires us to network the services together to gain information superiority.
Follow the money to understand the way services organize, train, and equip, and you’ll see that integration and jointness is an afterthought. We’re recommending that the DOD pivot and develop the enabling infrastructure — the joint data layer — first. Then we can work with each one of the services so they can plug-in and create joint mission threads — in other words, the joint kill chain.
That requires a new type of integrator — a joint, digital integrator, as I’ve said. That’s where Booz Allen’s defense business is focused. We’re mission first because it’s all about survivability and lethality. For those of us that wore a pack, wore the uniform, that’s why we’re here. We don’t sell a product. We solve the problem. And that is the hard problem of JADC2.