WASHINGTON — A new cloud-based capability developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency and US Strategic Command aims to give warfighters and commanders better situational awareness and command and control capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS), according to a DISA official.
“What this does today that warfighters don’t have in their hands is that it provides the ability to bring a number of different information feeds, a number of different data sources together in one picture,” Kevin Laughlin, deputy director for the program executive office for spectrum, told reporters today.
“And that, more than anything else, allows the Joint Force to make sense and act much more quickly,” he added. “So in terms of risk, we’re mitigating essentially the timescales so we can make sense of the information and act more quickly and make decisions faster than our enemies.”
DISA announced the release of the Electromagnetic Battle Management-Joint, or EMBM-J, on Wednesday. Laughlin said that the first iteration of the tool and other planned iterations are primarily intended to provide command and control capabilities in the EMS domain. Essentially, it’s envisioned as an EMS-centric piece of the Pentagon’s sprawling Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control effort to collect, synthesize and act on data from a multitude of sources.
As such, the system is designed to be interoperable with other EMS systems from the military services, according to the DISA press release announcing the effort, including the Navy’s Real Time Spectrum Operations, the Marine Corps’ Spectrum Services Framework and the Army’s Electromagnetic Warfare Planning and Management Tool used by commanders to visualize and control the EMS.
Laughlin said that the EMS has become a “very highly contested and constrained battle space” and maintaining situational awareness of the EMS is critical for commanders.
“There will be other joint programs for the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains, and by utilizing the reference design, the reference architecture, we can address things like zero trust, we can address things like metadata and other tenets,” he said. “So as the … domain capabilities are developed, adhering to those design tenets … will ensure the interoperability and the primary focus of CJADC2 for the Joint Force commanders to make sense and act in these operational environments.”