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Executive Summary

Since its inception in early 2018, the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) initiative has grown both more vital to US military success and increasingly nebulous to the defense officials and industry partners whom the Pentagon has charged with its implementation. As an effort to better connect sensors, shooters, and commanders, CJADC2 is necessary for countering a peer adversary like China. But CJADC2’s lack of concrete objectives or example instantiations leaves operators and developers to choose their own adventure. Today, each of the US military services is pursuing its own version of CJADC2, while combatant commanders and the Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) are fielding networks to support information sharing and long-range fires between theaters.[i]

In large part, CJADC2’s lack of focus arises because it conflates the goal of joint integration with the technical challenge of achieving communications interoperability. As organizations that focus primarily on developing and managing programs, the DoD and its suppliers have incentives to center their CJADC2-related efforts on networking requirements and capabilities. However, without considering command and control (C2) and its inherently joint nature, efforts like the Navy’s Project Overmatch, Army’s Project Convergence, and Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) fail to address elements of integration beyond networking, such as developing and implementing courses of action (COAs), establishing logistics and protection, or enabling information sharing across services and allies.

By emphasizing communications rather than integration, CJADC2 also fails to address one of the DoD’s main limitations in its efforts to gain a decision advantage against China—the domain- and service-centric nature of deployed US force packages. US military forces generally combine with those of other services for the first time when they arrive in the combatant commander’s theater. In the twentieth century, forces integrated their efforts across services by having common doctrine and procedures, but as the DoD increasingly relies on computerized and uncrewed systems, technical integration of data architectures and decision-making capabilities will be critical to effective joint operations.

To refocus CJADC2 on joint integration, this paper proposes realization of CJADC2’s goal of decision-making advantage by co-evolving its technical and C2 elements through operational experimentation.[ii] To help develop the approach, 91���� Institute and the Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI) of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) hosted a one-day symposium that brought together senior leaders from the government and industry. The event consisted of three panels that covered topics including lessons from the war in Ukraine, DoD organizational responsibilities, and integration of command, control, communication, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C5ISR). 

Building on discussions in the symposium and subsequent interviews and analysis, this paper presents six principles of an approach that would improve the DoD’s ability to integrate joint forces rather than simply connecting their networks: 

1. The DoD could achieve joint integration more quickly by prioritizing requirements for federated integration over universal standards.
2. Interoperability will require the DoD to have a continued emphasis on a data-centric approach over a network-centric one.
3. Preserving adaptability through modular approaches and delegating key decisions and activities to the field would give military forces decision-making advantages over opponents.
4. The DoD would benefit from “on-demand interoperability” via continuous integration and delivery pipelines or tools that allow systems with varying data formats and interfaces to exchange information.
5. The DoD should organize integration efforts around shared mission problem statements, like specific kill chains, rather than broad technological interoperability.
6. DoD organizational and cultural challenges are greater obstacles to advancing interoperability than technical and materiel limitations are.

A bottoms-up approach to integration reflecting these principles would enable the DoD to more quickly realize relevant joint integration than it would by following the department’s top-down requirements and acquisition process. Below are examples of how it might do so:

• By pursuing solutions to discrete near-term operational problems and missions, the DoD could create a DevSecOps cycle in which warfighters and technologists collaborate to promptly determine ways to combine available systems to achieve a desired outcome, metrics that define success, and the resulting interfaces and information exchange needs. In contrast, defining interoperability requirements and standards from the top down could take decades to realize a single kill chain.
• A federated approach to combining systems into effects chains would allow for modularity and the distribution of system-of-system elements among multiple industry partners and supply chains. Depending on where program officials decide to place interfaces and establish modularity, federated approaches to integration could enable the scale production of systems and subsystems independent of the limits that any single contractor, contract, contract action, or government program office faces.
• The DoD could speed and streamline testing and evaluation under a federated approach. Instead of waiting to assemble a complete system of systems to support acceptance testing, it could evaluate systems, platforms, and their software individually—including in a virtual setting—to assess their suitability and effectiveness.
• By federating joint integration for specific missions or operational challenges, the DoD could yield a growing set of options for future system-of-system instantiations. For example, it could recompose or integrate the mission systems, crewed and uncrewed platforms, and weapons that it has combined to support one mission and operational problem with one new component to enable an entirely new mission thread that solves another operational problem. Conversely, it could address the same operational problem by using multiple different mission threads as it integrates more systems through the federated, bottom-up approach. 

Joint operations are historically a source of advantage for US forces. Combined arms warfare helped win World War II, and networked joint operations underpinned US and allied successes in Operations Desert Storm and Allied Force during the 1990s. But in the machine age, joint operations require both technical and doctrinal integration. To retain the historical benefits of joint operations, the DoD will need to reorient CJADC2 from its largely service-centric and top-down pursuit of network interoperability to a bottom-up effort that integrates the kill chains necessary for addressing its highest-priority missions.