The progress comes amid a concerted push in the last year from senior leaders pushing strategies and policies to treat data as an enterprise resource across the department. Data sharing is particularly important as the department embarks on a massive network modernization initiative called Joint All-Domain Command and Control, in which data is passed across services and warfighting domains to give commanders full understanding of the battlefield.

“People recognize that it’s not an option, that we all will share department data,” said David Spirk, the Pentagon’s chief data officer. “And two, it’s not just about big data, it’s about good data. And we’re taking active steps to begin that conversation and ensuring that that’s the way forward.”

In October last year, the department released a data strategy that focused on enabling joint war fighting and senior leader decision making. In May, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks outlined “data decrees” directing Pentagon components to make their data shareable and designated Spirk the Pentagon’s top policymaker for the department’s data.

In an interview, Spirk said that a “cultural movement” is afoot in the department, driven by senior leaders like Hicks mandating changes to the way the department handles data and adding that under secretaries and assistant secretaries are using data-driven decision-making.

Earlier this summer, Hicks announced the Artificial Intelligence and Data Accelerator initiative that would place operational data teams with combatant commands to work on improving data management to help prepare for artificial intelligence and data-driven warfare. Those teams will help catalogue, manage and automate data at all the combatant commands.

“All of them [combatant commands] [are] now asking to take part and jockeying for who comes first in the rollout of the operational data teams,” Spirk said.

Still, the department has several challenges that it needs to overcome for data-driven warfare. In the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, senior leaders realized the department had “grossly underestimated” the department’s problem with gaining access to authoritative data sources, according to Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, chair of the JADC2 Cross-Functional Team.

“We have some real work to do on some big challenges that are out there, [such as] getting access to authoritative data sources [and] having the right policy in place to allow us to share that with our partners,” Parker said at the Sept. 8 Defense News conference.

Spirk also said the Afghanistan exit highlighted some data difficulties, including messy data and systems that couldn’t automated their data feeds, making it very difficult to provide live data updates to senior officials.

“We have a lot of systems that we now need to go back and prioritize and understand that they just weren’t built with the capability to move this fast on our data. And so we’ve got to go back and do that,” Spirk said. “I think that really is probably the biggest challenge we have right now. Again, it goes back to the systems weren’t generating great data and the ones that did, didn’t do it so that it could be an automated machine-to-machine read to go faster. So we’ve got to go back and clean up a lot.”

Spirk also said that one of the lessons learned from the exit was the “power” of using the same data management and analytics platforms that use an open standard architecture— which eases interoperability — from the tactical level up to the strategic.

In the interview, Spirk also said the most common needs he hears from combatant commands are “access to data talent and the platforms that others have found the most useful.” Combatant commands need “human capital that understands how to begin engineering their data into these systems so they can understand what the art of the possible is,” he said.

While the department has set some foundational policies in place, such as its data cataloguing memo, sufficiently skilled personnel need to be in place across the department, services and combatant commands in order to actually institute the mandated data policies. One of the next steps as the department’s top data official is boosting data literacy across the department, Spirk said.

“We need them to understand the opportunity of good data driven technology, have more reps on how to integrate it, and how to do that data quality associated with taking that to the next level,” Spirk said. “[That] will be the kind of the next phase for the CDO.”

“The deeper we dug into JADC2, we realized that more things that the agency does are impacted and part of this,” said Brian Hermann, director of DISA’s services development directorate, in an interview with C4ISRNET. “We’re going to play probably a growing role in JADC2.”

DISA manages the Department of Defense Information Network (DoDIN) and provides global connectivity to the department’s enterprise network. As the services build their systems for Joint All-Domain Command and Control, an effort to provide unprecedented amounts of data to commanders from across the battlefield, Hermann said DISA expects to play a role in network transport, data hosting and ensuring the department has spectrum access to allow networks to function.

“[It’s] how do we make sure that that the sensor data gets to the decision makers and the decision-making capabilities as quickly and cleanly as possible,” Hermann said.

Hermann said he expects DISA’s role to grow specifically to aid the Joint Force’s network transport needs. DISA generally doesn’t focus on tactical transport, rather it’s centered on long-haul, global connectivity back to the DoD network, which allows commanders to receive the information they need. As JADC2 progresses, DISA’s transport role will evolve, he said.

“Now what we have to do is we have to look at the JADC2 requirements for transport and we have to say, ‘What do we do differently?’ Do I need to make them somehow more robust than what I had originally planned our connectivity between theaters or between specific sites?” Hermann said.

DISA will also contribute cybersecurity capabilities for JADC2. It’s developing one capability, known as Thunderdome, a zero-trust cybersecurity initiative that could help solve some of the military’s cybersecurity challenges related to JADC2. DISA recently released a request for whitepapers for Thunderdome and plans to start prototyping “pretty quickly,” Hermann said.

Military officials have said that while JADC2 seeks to make data ubiquitous to warfighters, allowing only authorized users to access the data is tricky. That gets even more difficult when data is crossing different levels of security classification, an area where military officials have said they haven’t seen a viable industry solution that would work on the contested battlefield.

Speaking at the TechNet Augusta conference in late August, DISA director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner said “identity management is, I would offer, the number one issue that we have got to address within the department in pushing toward zero trust.”

The services are interested in DISA’s work on identity, credential and access management, according to Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, the chairman of the Pentagon’s JADC2 cross-functional team and deputy director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff J-6. Parker said at the Defense News conference earlier this week that a DISA ICAM solution could be available in the next year if properly funded.

DISA is also modernizing two legacy systems that feed into warfighter’s common operating picture, a tool that allows users to have common views of the battlefield. The agency is modernizing its Global Command and Control System-Joint, a battlefield awareness tool, and a force planning tool called Joint Planning and Execution Services, a modernization of a legacy program known as Joint Operational Planning and Execution Services.

According to Hermann, the situational awareness working group on the JADC2 Cross-Functional Team has an ongoing program decision memorandum study exploring the military’s future situational awareness needs. GCCS-J modernization is part of that discussion.

“Those are pending discussions that are ongoing right now,” Hermann said. “So a big part of it is what do we have now in GCCS-J and what do we think it ought to look like. And so we’re part of those discussions we’re looking at how that transition is going on there.”

As it considers its contribution to future U.S. war fighting, DISA is grappling with its portfolio of legacy command-and-control systems that were effective during the last few decades of conflict, but may not be suitable for the data-driven warfare of the future. Hermann said there is “some question” about the role of legacy command-and-control systems moving forward.

“The ability to plan forces in the competition phase, as well as in the hot phases of action, are something [where] we depend upon those legacy tools,” he said. “That said, the architecture of those tools is today not really very JADC2-focused because there are many enclaves around the department that provide separate pieces of the common operational picture that are then stitched together at the enterprise level.”

The goal in the modernization, he added, is to host the capabilities at the enterprise level to increase access, deliver updates and ensure cybersecurity. Until recently, Hermann said, GCCS-J had a separate modernization project known as GCCS-Joint Enterprise, but the Joint Staff redirected the agency to modernize the existing capability incrementally. Moving away from the legacy systems to enable JADC2 is a challenge.

“When you look at demonstrations associated with JADC2, sometimes what you find out is under the covers they’re getting the data from a legacy service that’s already there,” Hermann said.

Mark Pomerleau contributed to this report.

The answer was “no.”

“What we learned as a department and the joint force is we’ve grossly underestimated the scope of this problem,” said Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, deputy director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J6 directorate and chairman of the JADC2 Cross-Functional Team.

“We have some real work to do on some big challenges that are out there, [such as] getting access to authoritative data sources [and] having the right policy in place to allow us to share that with our partners — not just international partners, but our own federal partners,” Parker said during the Defense News Conference on Sept. 8.

The two-week operation in which the U.S military evacuated more than 124,000 people provided the Pentagon’s JADC2 leadership new lessons learned and identified areas in need of improvement. That included ensuring data is populated and easily visible on programs of record.

Data access is central to JADC2, which aims to provide unprecedented amounts of data to war fighters to make informed decisions in battle.

Senior leaders at the Pentagon, starting with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, are making a major push on ensuring the department harnesses its gobs of data to make better decisions. In the last year, the department released a data strategy, and earlier this year Hicks published five “data decrees” as the department sought to elevate the importance of data across the force.

The Afghanistan withdrawal also reinforced the Pentagon’s need to ensure its workforce has the data skills to understand incoming information, produce computer code and develop algorithms. Ultimately, the withdrawal has “given us a lot to look at,” Parker said.

”Twelve to 14 days to get your data all together and looking at it may sound very good by traditional bureaucratic measures in the Pentagon, but it’s absolutely failure in the future fight,” he said.

As the department moves forward with JADC2, Parker also said the concept’s implementation plan is under review by senior staff. He added that it’s “weeks away” from being released.

The plan, which is classified, will outline seven minimal viable products that the military needs in order to enable JADC2:

• A DevSecOps software development environment.
• Zero-trust cybersecurity.
• Cloud technology.
• A transport layer.
• Identity, credential and access management, or ICAM.
• Assault Breaker II (a tool to counter anti-access, area-denial capabilities of adversaries).
• The mission partner environment.

The mission partner environment — a common platform that allows the U.S. military and allies to share information — will have an initial operating capability within 90 days: one for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the other for U.S. Central Command.

Parker said the Defense Information Systems Agency also had a “viable” ICAM solution that could be ready in the next year. And he added that he’s “excited” about the the department’s announcement of a new multivendor enterprise cloud capability, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, which is set to replace the controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud.

Multivendor cloud capabilities combined with low-Earth orbit satellites is another area in which the JADC2 CFT is interested.

“Some of the partners out there who are putting multi-cloud vendor solutions on some of their early LEO capabilities — we think that not only helps us in terms of moving this data globally at speed with high bandwidth [and] gets after some communication issues, ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], PNT [positioning, navigation and timing], but importantly we think that’s going to be a critical step to getting some of the processing at the edge,” Parker said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed off on the JADC2 strategy in May, which is also classified. Parker said an unclassified version of the strategy should be released in the next few weeks.

The C5ISR Center tested numerous technologies this summer for manned-unmanned teaming and advanced network communications techniques at its Network Modernization Experiment, a field-based event at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey to try tools in an operational environment.

A primary takeaway from the experiment was that a critical open standards project for Army’s future battlefield network works. The C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards, or CMOSS, allows soldiers to upgrade capabilities more simply by plugging a rugged standard VPX card into a small box.

The C5ISR Center team responsible for developing CMOSS brought a prototype to NetModX and attempted to integrate a TSM waveform that works with software-defined radios; a position, navigation and timing solution; as well as mounted mission command applications. CMOSS is based on an open standards architecture that increases the interoperability of tools.

“The more important lesson we learned is that the standards work,” Ben Peddicord, the C5ISR Center’s branch chief for intel technology and architecture, said during a July media roundtable.

“So we were able to bring together a number of solutions from a number of vendors, and very quickly and easily — I mean, like, within days — successfully integrate them and help them execute their mission. So I think we learned some specific very narrow technical issues that we need to work on. Nothing significant, but most importantly, I think we really demonstrated the power of the standards.”

The Army plans to field CMOSS capability on Stryker armored vehicles for Capability Set ‘25, one of the service’s rollouts of new tactical network technologies that happen every two years. The team also demonstrated interoperability with a dismounted soldier’s Nett Warrior situational awareness tool and with a UH-60 Black Hawk, according to an Army news release.

During the first week of NetModX the research team focused on integrating the three solutions into the larger network. In the following two weeks they experimented with more vendors.

“We were able to, in the following two weeks, have vendors come in and very rapidly in the field, drop their solutions in, and everything really, pretty much just worked,” Peddicord said.

The products included emerging waveforms; assured PNT; CMOSS infrastructure prototypes; and capabilities for data encryption, tactical communication and electronic warfare, according to Peddicord.

The CMOSS experiment at NetModX included participation from L3Harris Technologies, General Dynamics Mission Systems, Spectranetix, Trellisware Technologies, SRC Inc., Curtiss-Wright Corp. and Collins Aerospace.

The C5ISR Center also tested a developing network capability for robotic combat vehicles that would give operators an improved understanding of their radio connection to the vehicle. Currently, operators can maneuver the vehicle until their link dies and the robot becomes “orphaned” on the battlefield, said Archie Kujawski, lead of the future radio concepts team.

“We saw a need for the end operators to be able to visualize the battle space for that remote link through the radios and to visualize that as they move across the battle space, and we saw that as a pretty big need in order to enable that link,” Kujawski told reporters in late July.

In response, the C5ISR Center developed a Network Coverage Overlay that allows robot combat vehicle operators to visualize the strength of their connection with the colors green, amber and red, according to Jonathan Lee, lead of the spectrum research and development team. The tool displays a coverage heat map that estimates radio signal strength based on terrain and elevation. The end goal is a capability that will notify users when their connection is degrading.

“One benefit that allows a user to gain knowledge of where they will have real network coverage,” Lee said at the media event. “This allows the radios to be used better, and allows the vehicle operators to make decisions based on radio connectivity along the different routes, and consequently allowing them to see how far they can send the remotely controlled vehicle.”

The network researchers also tested anti-jam, covert radio waveform capabilities of command post communications as part of a broader effort to reduce the electronic signatures of the service’s command posts. The Army is pushing for mobile, distributed command posts as it prepares for potential future wars against advanced adversaries such as Russia and China.

At NetModX, the C5ISR Center tested new commercial radios on moving vehicles that could in the future be part of the mobile command post effort, known as Command Post Integrated Infrastructure, an effort led by Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical. The researchers tested two commercial radios from undisclosed companies in a “caravanning” activity in which vehicles rolled around a seven-kilometer course with mixed terrain and foliage, RJ Regars, a C5ISR Center systems engineer, said at another media update in August.

One radio performed well, while the other did not, Regars said without getting into specifics. Neither radio performed well in a second test in which the devices passed off responsibility for maintaining the data link, based on their location. Those results “were as we expected” because the commercial radios weren’t built with tactical use in mind.

“There’s value in understanding both what the commercial systems are doing well, and what they’re not doing well because … our emphasis is to leverage what we can from the commercial world, and not have to redevelop these things,” Regars said.

The advancements come as the U.S. military is preparing for data-driven battle, in which gobs of data are transmitted across the battlespace, processed and used in a commander’s decision-making. Neural networks are a combination of algorithms that work together to recognize patterns in data through a process similar to that of the human brain.

The first project is working to provide a tool to battle commanders that quantifies uncertainty in data analysis using neural networks. Researchers associated with the Army Research Lab created a new framework for neural network processing that would use artificial intelligence to provide confidence ratings. The tool could enhance the ethical use of AI and provide commanders with a new level of confidence in their decision-making.

“The idea is to provide some sort of uncertainty measurements from the AI system so that the human counterparts are able to acknowledge and realize that the AI is not going to be perfect, but we can understand sort of how certain it is, and then use that information to make more informed decisions,” said Maggie Wigness, Army researcher and deputy collaborative alliance manager of the Internet of Battlefield Things Collaborative Research Alliance (IoBT CRA).

Several factors influence uncertainty around battlefield data and AI outputs, Wigness said. Data could be manipulated, it could have random “noise” that messes with the algorithms or uncertainty could stem from a degraded sensor that an adversary attacked. To quantify uncertainty in the future, researchers categorized sources of uncertainty in military networks, reviewed frameworks to represent the unknown and created solutions to manage it.

As the Army works to enable multi-domain operations, in which the service contests adversaries across the five warfighting domains, data from across all five will have to be fused and integrated. The neural network work fits into the IoBT alliance’s work that is “focused on processing data and establishing connections and communicating across a large network of sensors, those sensors could be sort of anywhere across these multi domains that need to then be fused together,” Wigness said.

Meanwhile, Army researchers at the service’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a programmable fiber that could be sewn into soldier’s uniforms in the future and provide biometric data that would help monitor soldier health. That fiber, according to the service, can sense, store, analyze and infer activity. The digital fiber technology is in the proof of concept phase, demonstrating that the fiber has memory capabilities. Researchers loaded a movie onto the fabric to show that it could store mass amounts of information.

In the future, researchers want the fiber to be able to store algorithms that can analyze the data that it collects. According to an ARL post about the breakthrough, the fiber has a neural network of 1,650 connections and successfully collected 270 minutes of surface body temperature data. Using artificial intelligence in the lab, the fiber identified what type of activity the soldier was undertaking with 96 percent accuracy.

Eventually, researchers want the fiber to be able to generate and store power to run artificial intelligence analysis or communicate with sensors and communications systems.

“You can imagine if a soldier is non-responsive, we may be able to have communication with these wearable computers … where the soldier’s uniform is communicating with Central Command or their home base on the battlefield,” said James Burgess, Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies program manager for the research lab. “So if they’re nonresponsive, we may know … whether they’re bleeding, whether they’re breathing, what their pulse rate is, so we would have some diagnostic information before we even reach the soldier with the rescue team.”

The capability is still “very early stage,” Burgess said, and the team is aiming to have an impact on the battlefield by 2050. The capability will be an important piece of providing soldiers information on their physical state as well.

“With the adrenaline flowing, it’s really important for soldiers to know what’s happening to them, their physiological state, and have warning buzzers, essentially, that go off [if] they’re overheating or dehydrated, if they’ve been exposed to something that is beginning to impair their cognitive or physical abilities,” Burgess said.

While Chaillan listed accomplishments in the LinkedIn post from his three years with the service — ranging from cybersecurity reforms to new cloud platforms for software development — he wrote that his departure from federal service comes amid frustrations with the department’s commitment to basic IT. In his post, Chaillan wrote of a “lack of response and alignment is certainly a contributor to my accelerated exit.”

An Air Force spokesperson declined to comment.

“With my 22 years of expertise running IT innovation, I was underutilized and poorly leveraged by the DOD, as most of my time was wasted trying to convince folks to engage with me and consider more relevant and efficient solutions, while I watched as they continued to deliver capabilities that do not meet the basic needs of our warfighters,” wrote Chaillan, who joined the Air Force in August 2018. “The DoD should stop pretending they want industry folks to come and help if they are not going to let them do the work. While we wasted time in bureaucracy, our adversaries moved further ahead.”

Chaillan, who said he will spend time with family and explore “rejoining boards,” took issue with the bureaucratic structure of the department’s IT program offices, asserting that majors and lieutenant colonels without IT experience shouldn’t be in charge of cloud, zero trust cybersecurity initiatives, or identity, credential and access management. The department, Chaillan said, needs to staff IT jobs with skilled workers.

“We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful? They do not know what to execute on or what to prioritize which leads to endless risk reduction efforts and diluted focus,” Chaillan wrote.

Chaillan shepherded the creation Platform One, the department’s first enterprise software development platform that used DevSecOps, a rapid software development approach. He lamented in his post that the Defense Department is still using outdated approaches to software acquisition, slowing the pace of change in the department, and he warned that the Pentagon has to move faster to compete with China.

“It seems clear to me that our leaders are not aligned with our vision in pursuing agility, the importance of DevSecOps, continuous delivery of capabilities, nor, most importantly, the need to fund teams, like Cloud One and Platform One, that are making things happen for the Department, and is a catalyst for change across the Government,” Chaillan wrote.

Chaillan added that he was frustrated at a lack of fiscal 2022 funding for a Joint All-Domain Command and Control project he was tasked with developing.

He also alleged that he and Lauren Knausenberger, the Air Force chief information officer, were “largely unempowered” to address “basic IT issues.” The CIO’s office also declined to comment.

“We are running in circles trying to fix transport/connectivity, cloud, endpoints and various basic IT capabilities that are seen as trivial for any organization outside of the U.S. Government,” Chaillan said.

Under the 10-year contract, the intelligence agency will pay to use HPE’s high-performance computing technology as a service. As part of the contract, HPE will build a new service that includes a combination of its Apollo data storage system and ProLiant servers, “which ingest and process high volumes of data, and support deep learning and artificial intelligence capabilities,” according to a company press release.

The contract award will provide NSA with the a secure and flexible platform to “meet their growing data management needs,” the press release stated.

“Implementing artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics capabilities on massive sets of data increasingly requires High Performance Computing (HPC) systems” said Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and Mission Critical Solutions (MCS) at HPE. “Customers are demanding HPC capabilities on their most data-intensive projects combined with easy, simple, and agile management.”

The company said NSA could access the service starting in 2022.

The Aug. 24 indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts to try to shield those avionics systems from cyberattacks are worth up to $200 million each over five years. The companies’ research will include cyber assessment and testing tools, cyber-hardening technologies, resilient cyber protections, and open-system architectures, AFRL spokesperson Bryan Ripple said.

The awards are part of AFRL’s Agile and Resilient Platform Architectures program to develop and integrate next-generation avionics cybersecurity tools and new system architectures.

“The challenge that the ARPA program seeks to address is the AF need to rapidly and efficiently field enhanced war-fighting capability in order to maintain technological advantage in highly contested and consistently changing environments,” Ripple said.

Solutions developed under the ARPA program “will be applied to a wide-range of associated platforms that operate within diverse, contested environments,” Ripple noted.

Booz Allen will complete the work in Beavercreek, Ohio, while Ball Aerospace will conduct its research and development at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The department has laid out a quicker timeline to award the contract to vendors after the preceding enterprise cloud, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, was delayed by protests for several years, preventing the Defense Department from filling what leaders called an urgent, unmet need.

“We remain on schedule to get out … our solicitation on or about 15 October in just a couple of months,” the Pentagon’s acting chief information officer, John Sherman, said at a FedScoop event.

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract will be a multivendor, multi-award project — a different approach than the single award for the JEDI cloud project. The department plans to release an initial solicitation in mid-October, and it will consider bids from Microsoft and Amazon, the two finalists from the JEDI contract, Sherman said in July. Microsoft has won the JEDI contract twice.

On Wednesday, he reiterated that the department is still targeting April 2022 for vendor awards. The department is having ongoing conversations with other major cloud providers — Google, IBM and Oracle — about the Defense Department’s requirements and the companies’ capabilities. In July, Sherman has told reporters: “If we determine that additional vendors can also meet our requirements, then we will extend solicitations to them as well.”

The JWCC contract would allow troops to access data in the unclassified, secret and top-secret classification levels from the enterprise down to the tactical battlefield environment. Sherman and other military leaders have emphasized that the enterprise cloud capability is critical to enabling the department’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept to securely pass data from sensors to war fighters.

“The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability [is] a fundamental pillar of how we’re supporting what JADC2 is going to become,” Sherman said. “This has been an urgent and unmet requirement to have those enterprise cloud capabilities at all three security levels from conus [the contiguous United States] all the way up to the tactical edge in a DDIL [denied, degraded, intermittent or limited] environment.”

The JWCC contract will be worth billions of dollars, but the Pentagon has not specified a final amount. As of July, the department expected the JWCC contract to have a three-year base period and two one-year options. Sherman anticipates a full and open competition in 2025 for contract awards.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, the chief information officer and J6 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week at the TechNet Augusta conference that while the Defense Department has many technological pieces it needs to link sensors and shooters, those tools must be equipped to handle interference by adversaries. The ability to pass and process massive amounts of data to increase the command and control capabilities of the joint force in future battles will also require edge processing capabilities that the military does not yet have.

“We’re missing some key components to do this in a contested environment,” Crall said. “So I’m concerned about our tactical processing nodes — the actual hardware capability to bring — got work to do there. [We] got work to do on a resilient cloud structure that follows us to make sure that that data is there. I’m concerned about the transport layer to move that information to decision.”

From a hardware perspective, Crall said that some tactical edge processing capabilities are already on the battlefield, but he declined to go into specifics due to classification. What the military needs next, he said, is “these ideas of bringing our portable data centers with us.” He added that the services need small, light, cloud-connected and “very” resilient processing devices with secure waveforms that can manage information while operating with spotty network access.

As the department forges ahead with its JADC2 vision for a connected, unified force across domains, Crall noted that industry needs to prove that solutions can work in denied and degraded communications environments.

“If your experimentation can’t move from garrison to the flagpole, if it starts and stops as a garrison solution, [and] it works really good in connected high-bandwidth areas of some level of safety and security” that’s not good enough, Crall said. If “it’s not battle tested for the mission use that we think it’s going to have, [that’s] not the kind of experimentation that’s useful because the war fighter will not have access to those things.”

Military officials across the services have long stressed that the process of constructing JADC2 systems must prioritize delivering battlefield-ready technology to war fighters first, working backward to then deliver the innovations across the enterprise. In order to enable JADC2, the military must hand war fighters tools that work regardless of adversaries’ interference techniques. One area the military is exploring is how communications needs differ on battlefields across the world.

Leaders have to consider: “What’s the minimum viable information exchange that has to occur in a particular fight? And depending on which COCOM [combatant command] you’re talking about and which mission set you’re talking about, those are a bit divergent,” Crall said.

The department has made progress on its promise to design JADC2 with information sharing with allies in mind with new developments for its mission partner environment, a battlefield information-sharing platform, he noted.

“We really do have, we think, an IOC [initial operating capability] … at the secret and below releasable environment,” he said.

According to Crall, U.S. Central Command could begin using the capability in fiscal 2022. The tool will be a virtual, hybrid cloud environment with zero-trust cybersecurity capabilities and identity, credential and access management tools to bolster cybersecurity.

Mark Pomerleau contributed to this report from Augusta, Ga. Andrew Eversden reported from Washington, D.C.