A top priority for the U.S. military is to better connect disparate forces so that commanders can make more informed decisions in the fog of war.
With a program known as the Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control initiatives, the Department of Defense says it aims to achieve “decision advantage by enabling our military to make informed decisions with greater speed and accuracy than our adversaries.”
But the Department of Defense must focus on more than just the aspirational goals of the Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control initiatives if it is to ensure dominance over potential adversaries.
To do that, the DoD should find pragmatic ways to operationalize the concept, addressing the problems it can solve right now. This will require introspection and a willingness to embrace more agile and innovative solutions.
This also means the DoD must allow servicemembers to adjust in the field quickly, even if that means starting with the proverbial duct tape and bubble gum solutions. Often, those grassroots approaches — forced by the situation—lead to innovation.
The power of practical thinking
The vision of “sense, make sense and act” that CJADC2 promises will be addressed most effectively if the DoD takes a step back and focuses on ways to enable specific CJADC2 threads without losing sight of the broader goals of the initiative.
Despite what big prime contractors say, CJADC2 cannot be solved by developing large new systems. When 10 systems already can’t talk to each other, there’s no sense in building an 11th that faces the same lack of interoperability with the existing ones, no matter how shiny the new system is.
Given the lifecycle of the existing systems, it will take a decade or more for holistic new programs to replace the patchwork of systems we have today. The DoD doesn’t have that kind of time when troops need solutions now.
Focusing on small but urgent interoperability challenges in the field will be the most effective and impactful way of incrementally achieving CJADC2 and creating a culture of quick thinking and iterative action within the armed forces.
The best plan is to work with the systems available and leverage software and limited lightweight hardware to quickly integrate these systems. In addition, the services must develop a rapid ability to push apps out to the edge that combines data from multiple systems and leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to process the integrated data streams.
This will take a modular, open-source approach, combined with a “guerrilla warfare” approach to integration that uses novel techniques to integrate in originally unintended ways. The ability to use commercially available technologies, to rapidly deploy new apps and the government’s ability to make practical use of government purpose data rights are key to this approach.
Connecting on the battlefield
To see how this works in the real world, it’s instructive to understand how much things have changed. While the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq had their challenges, those digital environments were unsophisticated compared to the situation in Eastern Europe over the last three years.
In today’s fight, information is ammunition. Tactics are dramatically changing in the field in real time. Local forces are buying off-the-shelf drones, using additive manufacturing to rapidly modify them for operational utility and applying software to integrate them into a novel command and control construct.
New sensors, data sources and software systems are coming online weekly, not over years. In these environments, solutions to operations problems are often found through rapid, novel integration of systems and technologies that forces already have rather than development of new systems.
A great example is the use of small- to medium-sized drones in the Middle East in the mid-2000s. The DoD acquired many man-portable drones used by special operations forces. These drones would send data back to the ground stations that the forward teams used to pilot the drone but did not send the data back to higher echelons, which had their own decision-making apparatus.
While the DoD recognized the need for a new breed of network-enabled drones, the interim solution was to develop a lightweight add-on kit that simply extracted the video feed from the ground station, transcoded the video and disseminated it to those that needed it. Done quickly, this added capability to a system without the involvement of the original equipment manufacturer, without modifying the original equipment and without long acquisition cycle.
Ultimately, this led to a significant increase in operational utility and gave the existing drones a new capability with which they were not originally designed and on a very short timescale.
Low-cost, speedy solutions
The DoD must be crafty, and it must optimize for time. The Pentagon can do this with software and low-cost add-on kits that don’t require enterprise-wide coordination or typical program of record acquisition timescales.
It’s not sexy, and it’s not a perfect situation, but while others discuss next-generation technology in working groups, warfighters know the data they need, and we can get it to them faster if we open the aperture to these types of solutions.
Sometimes, you must build a little piece of software and jam it in between two things that need to communicate. The indirect benefit of this mentality is that it often leads to novel fixes. In that way, duct tape and bubble gum begets rapid innovation, which results in long-term solutions.
And that’s really the primary goal of CJADC2 — to improve the speed, quality and accuracy with which commanders make decisions, giving them a decisive advantage in deterring conflict and winning a fight.
