The shuffle, effective July 1, will shift 4,700 positions and $2.7 billion in business to Collins, which will also continue its commercial aviation programs. Leadership at Collins is not expected to change.

The company will absorb from Raytheon’s intelligence and space and missiles and defense divisions work supporting autonomous systems, command and control, networking and connectivity, protected communications and battle management. The move was previously teased in a fiscal 2023 first-quarter earnings call.

Collins President Steve Timm told C4ISRNET the realignment will take better advantage of the company’s existing “commercial and military expertise” to expand on and develop new technologies that will aid the realization of JADC2, a multibillion-dollar Pentagon affair.

“The integration of these capabilities can be challenging,” Timm said, “and our new structure brings together the best talent we have into one organization to focus on providing solutions for our customers at speed.”

The Defense Department is pursuing JADC2 as a means to understand and react faster on battlefields of tomorrow. By linking forces and databases across land, air, sea, space and cyber, defense officials hope to outwit, outmaneuver and outshoot technologically advanced adversaries such as China and Russia.

The Army, Air Force and Navy are each pitching in on JADC2. The Army is doing it through Project Convergence. The Air Force has its Advanced Battle Management System. And the Navy is chipping away at Project Overmatch.

Raytheon in September was named to the Air Force’s ABMS Digital Infrastructure Consortium alongside four other defense industry heavyweights. Together, they will collaborate on secure processing, resilient communications, open-ended designs and other digital challenges inherent to the service’s next-generation command and control methods.

Timm anticipates the realignment will streamline how business is done across the Raytheon ecosystem, which also includes engine specialist Pratt & Whitney. That company will generally go unchanged.

“The official shift is July 1 of this year, but our technology and people synergies have been operational for much longer,” Timm said. “Similar to our customers’ need to seamlessly connect, our teams must do that, as well, to bring support to the edge with efficiency.”

Raytheon both this year and last pieced together products from its various divisions and put them to the test at Valiant Shield and Northern Edge. The exercises are dedicated to figuring out inter-service and inter-military cooperation.

Collins last year won an Army contract worth as much as $583 million to produce MAPS GEN II, the latest version of a technology that provides soldiers jam-resistant navigation capabilities aboard armored vehicles. The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity arrangement was expected to run for five years.

The return of the Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE, under the direction of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, comes after a months-long hiatus and amid an explosion of public interest in AI and its potential to augment humans, military or otherwise.

CDAO boss Craig Martell on May 3 said his team took the reins of the experiments to “understand what’s the right way to get after JADC2.” The office was previously charged with crafting a so-called data integration layer, which would help collect information from disparate sources and present them in a unified manner.

“We are not sitting down and writing up requirements that will get built five years from now, and then nobody will want to use it,” Martell said at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore. “Every experiment we do, it’s not just: ‘Hey, folks, did it work? Thumbs up, thumbs down.’ We’re actually building out metrics to ask, ‘Is this faster? Did we do that right? Has this number increased?’”

The multibillion-dollar JADC2 endeavor aims to link forces far afield — across land, air, sea, space and cyber — and support speedy battlefield decision-making. Such an approach is necessary, defense officials say, to deal with the military advancements of China and Russia, premier national security threats.

The first of the relaunched tests, the fifth overall, known as GIDE V, was held at the beginning of the year and featured Pentagon officials and multiple combatant commands and installations around the world.

Three more iterations, GIDE VI through GIDE VIII, are expected in 2023. Martell said he and his colleagues work “with the combatant commands on a pretty regular cadence,” aiming to dissolve barriers between regions.

“If you think about the Indo-Pacific fight, Africa Command might have some information that’s necessary. Central Command might know something about what’s going on in their domain that could be necessary,” Martell said. “So we think about this as global … and we’re asking these dataflow questions, these workflow questions.”

The initial GIDEs were spearheaded by Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command. The two entities are led by Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck.

GIDE I in December 2020 tied together Strategic Command, Transportation Command, Southern Command and Indo-Pacific Command. It also involved the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. GIDE II in March 2021 expanded participation and welcomed the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, one of four entities the CDAO subsumed.

Later versions pulled in Project Maven, designed to process imagery and full-motion video from drones and other surveillance assets and to detect potential threats, and manpower from the Department of the Air Force’s Chief Architect Office.

VanHerck in 2021 said GIDE embodies a “fundamental change in how we use information and data” to maintain an upper hand.

“Right now, the threats we face and the pace of change in the geostrategic environment continues to advance at really alarming rates,” he said at the time. “We’ve entered an era of new and renewed strategic competition, and this time, we’re facing two peer competitors, both nuclear-armed, that are competing against us on a daily basis.”

“At least from Project Overmatch, we’ve been pushing on that pretty hard,” Rear Adm. Doug Small, the leader of both the project and Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, said Feb. 14 at the West 2023 conference in San Diego. “We’ve already got an agreement at the ‘Five Eyes’ level.”

Five Eyes represents the U.S. and some of its closest intelligence-sharing colleagues: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K.

“We’ve been working toward a project arrangement toward that,” Small said. “We expect to be hand in glove with our international partners.”

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s contribution to Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, the Pentagon’s pursuit of seamless linkages across land, air, sea, space and cyber. Since its 2020 inception, the project has been shrouded in secrecy, a move experts say is necessitated by always-prying China and Russia.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday in October said the service is sharing insights from Project Overmatch with forces abroad — namely those with “a higher likelihood of interoperability” — but did not disclose specifics. Small on Tuesday offered few additional details, but said the “strategic advantage” of the U.S. rests on its “friends and allies around the world.”

“Our adversaries have to do that by hook or crook or coercion. We have friends and allies that we work together on these sorts of things,” the admiral said. “Everything we do should be with a mind toward being absolutely interchangeable with our partners. That’s the way they operate.”

The closeness can even extend to the ones and zeros of computer language.

“I think the other thing that’s neat about the modern methods, especially with software development, is you can work so much closer together, almost like a line-of-code type of level, because you’re just constantly working it, you can work at it as teams,” Small said. “I think the future is very exciting for true interchangeability, from operationally all the way down to development.”

The Navy plans to deploy a carrier strike group with Project Overmatch products, such as advanced networking, this year, a move Small previously told Defense News was the “starting gun.” Additional groups, Small predicted, will follow suite.

“And we will learn a tremendous amount from that,” he said Tuesday, “and we will pivot very quickly to deliver exactly what sailors need.”

A renewed era of great power competition with China has trained the spotlight on naval supremacy and operations across the Indo-Pacific, home to some of the world’s largest militaries and ports. Gilday, the naval operations chief, previously identified Project Overmatch as his No. 2 priority, behind delivery of the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine.

The Navy sought $195 million for Project Overmatch in fiscal 2023, a 167% boost over what it received last year.

Small told the West conference Project Overmatch is “absolutely on track,” noting the schedule to which he and others are held is “pretty aggressive.”

The successful trial, carried out in October, demonstrated the ability to connect military assets in the air with those at sea, a significant step toward future U.S. Navy operations defined by daunting distance and contested communications, company executives said Feb. 13.

The test involved an MQ-4C Triton drone, outfitted with a “gateway,” and a handful of simulated battlefield players: an F-35, an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye and Aegis class destroyers.

Using the gateway, which hooked into the Triton’s onboard radar and artificial intelligence, the drone relayed sensor data to what the company billed as previously disconnected platforms. Such a sentiment strikes at the heart of the Department of Defense’s connect-everything-everywhere campaign known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

“This powerful combination expands the mission set of maritime platforms to deliver a seamlessly connected fleet,” Ben Davies, a Northrop vice president and general manager for network-information solutions, said in a statement.

To stay ahead of China and Russia, the U.S. military is attempting to dissolve the walls that have long compartmentalized the services, their databases and their weapons. The multibillion-dollar endeavor, referred to as JADC2, envisions any sensor feeding any shooter the data he or she needs — meaning responses to foreign aggression will likely be quicker, more efficient and less constrained by geography.

At the same time, the Navy is pursuing what’s known as distributed maritime operations: becoming harder to find, harder to target and harder to sink. Underpinning the concept is the need for reliable, insulated connectivity.

The gateway installed on the Triton drone boosts its data-sharing capabilities and, in the long run, could help link forces scattered across the Indo-Pacific or other watery expanses.

“Triton’s altitude, persistence and robust communication links make it an ideal candidate to host the gateway system,” Jane Bishop, a Northrop vice president and general manager for global surveillance, said in a statement. “This demonstration highlighted gateway technology enhancements to Triton that would enable information dominance across distributed maritime assets, including access to the F-35′s robust sensor suite and the E-2D’s battle management capabilities.”

The demonstration also featured the Naval Air Systems Command, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific and BAE Systems. Both Northrop and BAE are among the 10 largest defense contractors in the world when ranked by revenue, according to Defense News analysis.

The service on Jan. 6 published a notice soliciting input from industry regarding software-defined wide-area network technologies, or SD-WAN, cornerstones of worldwide connectivity.

“There are many commercial SD-WAN capabilities available for procurement,” the notice reads, “but there has not been a holistic survey of the available commercial solutions and their ability to meet Department of the Air Force operational requirements.”

Submissions are due in early February. A formal request for proposals is expected in mid-March. Those eventually chosen will be funded for weeks of testing, according to the notice.

The Air Force is specifically interested in original kit that can boost data transfer rates and reduce latency, are hardened against jamming and intercept, can be scalable, and can be adopted by users with little in common.

The sought-after attributes are foundational to the service’s ABMS initiative, its latest push to create next-generation command and control with the help of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and more.

“The Department of the Air Force intends to facilitate the rapid exploration and maturation of innovative technologies,” reads the notice, which repeatedly references JADC2. “The Air Force will support future operations by providing the critical surveillance, tactical edge communications, processing, networking, and battle management command and control capabilities to the joint warfighting force.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has prioritized the buildout of ABMS. In September, he said reforming command-and-control systems is harder than expected and announced the appointment of a new program executive officer, Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, to supervise the endeavor.

The service that same month also selected several companies — L3Harris Technologies, Leidos, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and Science Applications International Corporation, together known as the ABMS Digital Infrastructure Consortium — to buttress its efforts.

The five are all among the 40 largest global defense firms by revenue, according to a Defense News analysis.

Like JADC2, the MDPW core operational concept, as it’s known, relies on interlinked command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to quickly coordinate firepower and expose foreign weaknesses, according to the annual China Military Power Report, which the U.S. Department of Defense delivered to Congress in November.

“As we note in the report, this new concept is intended to help identify key vulnerabilities in an adversary’s operational system and then to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities, which could be kinetic or non-kinetic,” a senior U.S. defense official told reporters Nov. 28, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Basically, it’s a way that they’re thinking about looking across domains to identify vulnerabilities in an adversary’s operational system and then to exploit those to cause its collapse.”

The Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army, “refers to systems destruction warfare as the next way of war,” the official added. Under that premise, warfare is no longer solely focused on the destruction of enemy forces; rather, it is won by the team that can disrupt, cripple or outright destroy the other’s underlying networks and infrastructure.

The U.S. considers China the No. 1 threat to its national security, with Russia a close second. The two powers have long invested in military science and technology. Confronting them represents a sea change to the counterinsurgency operations that defined a previous — and lingering — American era in the Middle East.

“Clearly, the United States has been primarily focused on other threats for the last two decades. That has changed,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said at a Dec. 8 event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. “In part, it started changing during the Obama administration. That accelerated under the Trump administration and really crystallized under this administration.”

To maintain an advantage over both powers and other technologically savvy adversaries, the Pentagon is attempting to realize JADC2, a connect-everything-everywhere campaign for communications and international collaboration. By linking once-disparate troops and databases across land, air, sea, space and cyber, defense leaders say the U.S. can strike faster, more efficiently and from farther away.

The notion, though, faces scrutiny from lawmakers and outside experts, who have expressed reservations about coordination between the Army, Air Force and Navy; how success will ultimately be measured; and its overarching price tag. The Navy alone wanted some $195 million for Project Overmatch, its contribution to JADC2, for fiscal 2023, a 167% jump over the $73 million it received in 2022.

Overmatch, specifically, is being executed behind closed doors, with service leaders reluctant to talk and details remaining skeletal. The clandestine route is taken to keep China off-balance and to stay out of range of its many ears and eyes, according to Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute.

“A key to that is not tipping your hand with regard to the things you’re actually trying to put together. They’re very careful on operational security for these Overmatch-related items,” Clark told C4ISRNET in early November. “Since we’re looking at this in the very near-term way, and since the Navy has failed to really field a wide variety and number of unmanned systems, the Navy’s only got a few tricks up its sleeve in terms of how it can combine different systems to create kill chains. Because of those limits, they’ve got to be really careful about showing which combinations they think are most valuable.”

Officials in Beijing have for years pursued an information-fluent force capable of dominating networks and bombarding targets from a sprawl of locations with a mix of weaponry.

“PRC military writings describe informatized warfare as the use of information technology to create an operational system-of-systems, which would enable the PLA to acquire, transmit, process, and use information during a conflict to conduct joint military operations across the ground, maritime, air, space, cyberspace, and electromagnetic spectrum domains,” the power report states. “The PLA is accelerating the incorporation of command information systems, providing forces and commanders with enhanced situational awareness and decision support to more effectively carry out joint missions and tasks to win informatized local wars.”

JADC2 leans on artificial intelligence and sophisticated computing to speedily sift through mountains of data and inform battlefield decisions. China’s MDPW — first teased in 2021, according to the report — and its other approaches to conflict do, too.

“As the PLA continues to focus on improving its ability to fight and win informatized wars, future information systems will likely implement emerging technologies such as automation, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to improve process efficiencies,” it states. “The PLA has already begun this process by embracing big data analytics that fuse a variety of data to improve automation and to create a comprehensive, real-time picture for warfighters.”

The Pentagon’s public spending on AI, including autonomy, mushroomed to $2.5 billion in fiscal 2021, after breaking $600 million 2016. The software-centric technology can help vehicles navigate, predict when maintenance is required and assist identification and classification of targets. The U.S. Air Force’s chief information officer, Lauren Knausenberger, in November said the service needs to “automate more” despite already “doing some very interesting things” with AI in the lab, on the battlefield and “in things that we are building today.”

At least 600 AI projects, including several related to major weapons systems, such as the MQ-9 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, were underway as of April 2021, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog. At least 232 ventures are being handled by the Army. The Air and Space forces are together dealing with more than 80.

To thwart the increasingly international ambitions of China, the U.S. is forging information-sharing alliances with friendly nations in the Indo-Pacific region. They include Australia, India, Japan and South Korea. Such arrangements are a pillar of JADC2, which involves a so-called mission-partner environment where data from a spectrum of foreign sources can be collected, secured and distributed.

Senators earlier this year in a draft of the annual defense bill instructed the Defense Department to focus on the buildout of JADC2 at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — a tacit recognition of China’s power amid a bloodbath in Ukraine. While lawmakers are concerned about Eastern Europe, and have supported the shipment of materiel to the frontlines, China remains a long-term, disruptive challenge.

The Pentagon’s Ratner said the China Military Power Report documents the “growing assertiveness, this growing coercion, as it relates to the East China Sea, as it relates to the South China Sea, on the line of actual control against India and, of course, against Taiwan.”

“We’re also seeing a more-global PLA,” he said, “one that is pursuing installations around the world, very ambitious aspirations to be projecting power, sustaining power, overseas.”

The companies announced the closing Jan. 3, some three months after the arrangement was first disclosed. L3Harris on Dec. 20 said regulators gave it the green light, accelerating a purchase that was initially thought to wrap later this year.

The buy consists of Link 16 Multifunctional Information Distribution System platforms, their associated terminals, which are installed in tens of thousands of U.S. and allied systems worldwide, and space assets. After taxes and other fees, Viasat will net some $1.8 billion for a business that generated $400 million in sales annually. The money is slated to be used to pay down debt and buttress efforts already underway.

Brendan O’Connell, the president of the broadband communications division at L3Harris, told C4ISRNET the Link 16 assets are “a very natural fit” for the company, which he billed as a “leading defense and electronics provider, really for a global customer base.”

Link 16 is a secure, jam-resistant and high-speed line of communication used across domains and by international players, including NATO.

“We’re looking, as a trusted disrupter, to really enable our Department of Defense customers and international partner customers to modernize and really build a whole connected, interoperable force, to allow them to operate in contested environments,” O’Connell said Dec. 28.

Ensuring forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber get the information they need when they need it is among the Defense Department’s top priorities as it prepares for potential conflict with China and Russia, two world powers capable of intercepting, jumbling and terminating communications. The department’s push to seamlessly link disparate databases and make compatible old tech with new is known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.

The endeavor includes specific contributions from the Army, Air Force and Navy: Project Convergence, the Advanced Battle Management System and Project Overmatch, respectively.

L3Harris in mid-September was named to the ABMS Digital Infrastructure Consortium alongside four other companies: Leidos, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and Science Applications International Corporation. The collective is meant to accelerate development of ABMS, a next-generation of command and control.

The Link 16 portfolio will only increase the competitiveness of L3Harris, O’Connell said, and will extend its reach to nab contracts. JADC2-related opportunities are lucrative; L3Harris, Viasat and others were in 2020 selected by the Air Force for a $950 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity arrangement.

“We’re really in a great position as a key JADC2 provider, especially when you add to that fact that we’ve done a lot of investments here in the last 10 years to develop resilient networking capabilities,” O’Connell said. “I think we inject a whole new set of ideas and capabilities to the current Link 16 portfolio we are acquiring.”

What’s next for Viasat?

Viasat plans to use the proceeds from the sale to accelerate and fortify ongoing projects. Link 16 accounted for one-third of its government business.

“The $2 billion purchase price gives us a lot of flexibility to do things we’d like to do. It gives us a better cash flow. We can manage our debt more effectively. And, most importantly, it gives us a really strong reservoir to invest,” Craig Miller, the president of Viasat’s government systems branch, told C4ISRNET on Dec. 5. “There’s a lot of things we want to do in terms of really bringing our broadband network to global capability as quickly as possible.”

Viasat, the No. 73 largest defense contractor in the world ranked by revenue, according to Defense News analysis, has no plans to exit the defense ecosystem. Rather, the satellite giant is consolidating and refocusing and paying particular attention to its multibillion-dollar takeover of Inmarsat, a British outfit that furnishes communications and data services worldwide.

Viasat officials believe the Link 16 portfolio — described in October as a JADC2 “accelerant” — will serve L3Harris well. The two have a long-standing relationship; Viasat CEO and Chairman Mark Dankberg in an October blog post described L3Harris as “our long-time data link partner.”

“We’re a very complementary company. There are places where we compete, but they’re kind of few and far between,” said Miller, who has worked at Viasat for nearly three decades. “This is a very good business. But we’re optimistic that they can probably even do more with it.”

Shielded from public view, the service has undertaken a flurry of work: simulating current pathways for data, writing software code to close gaps, testing it in a lab and at sea, and providing feedback to coders to improve future iterations.

Rear Adm. Doug Small, who leads both Naval Information Warfare Systems Command and Project Overmatch, told Defense News this high-priority effort remains on track for a planned deployment of the new capabilities to a carrier strike group in 2023.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s contribution to the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort — a push to reliably connect forces across land, air, sea, space and cyberspace as well as enable seamless international collaboration.

The fielding of Project Overmatch will arguably be the Navy’s most important work in 2023, especially as the service aims to incorporate more unmanned systems that serve as intelligence-collecting nodes, feeding information to sailors on ships and in ashore command centers.

“The Navy’s effort on Overmatch is very much focused on the next two or three years,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute. “Overmatch has really focused much more directly on the near-term operational problems faced by commanders dealing with China.”

Small said he’s optimistic about the upcoming demonstration — the largest of its kind, but not the first time the Navy will use this new technology at sea, noting it continues a critical line of research. With ships inherently disaggregated, he said, the Navy is naturally considering ways to better share information across ships and aircraft so the best-positioned platform can strike a target.

“The Navy in particular had been working various system of systems-type concepts and the technologies that would go into that for mission threads. How do you stitch together various components to create a mission or an outcome, an effect?” he said in a Nov. 10 interview. “Overmatch [is] sort of a natural progression of that sort of work.”

Origins of Overmatch

Though the Navy was already researching how to connect ships, planes and weapons, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday created Project Overmatch in fall 2020 and tapped Small to lead the effort. Gilday has since said Overmatch is his No. 2 priority, behind delivery of the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine.

Whereas past efforts were housed within specific offices, Small said Project Overmatch is meant to encompass the entire Navy.

“Inside of a platform-centric service,” he said, “how can you become more data- and network-centric?”

The core team started with just a few people, but has grown to about 50. The team, plus its collaborators across the Navy and industry, are focused on several key points: tools and analytics, networks, data, and infrastructure, which includes computing and platforms as a service.

“Fundamentally, this is all about management of data, exchange of data,” David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a retired Air Force lieutenant general, said Nov. 14 at a JADC2 industry event. “Without the appropriate infrastructure, you can’t be able to do the data, connectivity or networking. Without the security, all of it falls apart because you’re yielding a huge weakness and vulnerability to our adversary.”

But perhaps the most significant, overriding mission of the team is to figure out what barriers the Navy has put in its own way.

Small said the commercial industry is able to do what the Navy wants to do; car companies like Tesla remotely send software updates to address security gaps or capability improvements without creating safety risks for drivers, and Amazon pushes out hundreds of thousands of software updates each day, which an online shopper might never notice.

“Everything that we have put in our way that prevents us from doing exactly that is something that we’ve done to ourselves,” Small said. “Now, there are changes that need to happen to systems on ships and shore facilities to enable that, but then, eventually, that’s how you get to fielding.”

Small said his Project Overmatch team should have a client-like relationship with the fleet, where they understand what sailors need to do their jobs more effectively and, in turn, quickly produce and deliver tools to address those gaps.

“Bringing an upgrade every several years, or bringing hundreds of thousands of changes per day — somewhere in the middle, there is that sweet spot where we basically pace our adversaries with delivery of capability. And that’s what it’s really all about,” said Small, noting the difference between the Navy and the tech industry.

Ready to strike

Small said his focus is now on the 2023 carrier strike group demonstration. Though he wouldn’t identify specific technologies or software involved, he dubbed the event “the starting gun” and said additional capabilities will roll out in future iterations.

Small said the team will deploy this first increment onto the first carrier strike group in 2023, and then continue until all 11 carrier strike groups have the hardware and software installed. That equates to a large portion of the surface fleet, excluding amphibious ships and some forward-deployed vessels with a different operational model.

“The alternative path is, well, let’s design the whole thing out for a few years and then field that everywhere, right? And you’ve probably seen the [timeline] curves on that, and we’re trying to take a stepwise approach to get there faster,” he said.

The Navy sought $195 million for Project Overmatch in fiscal 2023, a 167% increase over the $73 million it received in fiscal 2022. Spending details have otherwise been scant, with the service executing Project Overmatch behind closed doors, a posture taken, experts said, to bamboozle China.

“It’s mostly because they don’t want to tip their hand as to what they’re looking to put together,” Clark said. “How they deter China is by increasing the uncertainty on the part of the Chinese, on the [People’s Liberation Army], that they’ll be successful on terms that the Chinese leadership would find acceptable.”

Away from the public eye, Project Overmatch technology has already undergone repeated testing, according to Small.

“Within even the first six months of the effort, we had done some work with the Marine Corps, for example, where we got some real-time feedback and did some connections,” he explained. “We’ve been to individual ships with systems and connected it to our labs to sort of simulate other [ships].”

Pushing Project Overmatch advancements into the real world is vital, according to Clark.

“Of all the services, the Navy’s done the best job of trying to really focus their effort on what the operational commander needs, rather than things that the service thinks are cool to put together,” he said. “The Navy’s really focused on Overmatch, being focused on what the average commander needs, focused on the near term and, therefore, focused on actual systems that can be deployed today.”

This fall, the technology was used in the Army’s Project Convergence exercise across multiple units, Small said. The weekslong experiment, during which bleeding-edge tech is put through the wringer, represents the Army’s contribution to JADC2. The Air Force, likewise, has its Advanced Battle Management System, an attempt to adopt the next generation of command-and-control tech.

But there are concerns the separate efforts are not properly aligned. An early draft of the annual defense bill included an audit of JADC2, with the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber and innovative technologies panel, chaired by retiring Rhode Island Democrat Rep. Jim Langevin, requesting a study on timelines, goals and potential shortfalls.

Defense officials have also expressed skepticism. The Air Force’s principal cyber adviser, Wanda Jones-Heath, in July described the services’ efforts as “all different.”

The data-centric odyssey is of the highest stakes as the U.S. and allied nations attempt to thwart Chinese and Russian ambitions, officials argue. Beijing and Moscow have each spent significant sums on military science and technology — including artificial intelligence and cyber advancements — ratcheting up the pace at which information must be exchanged and decisions must be made on the battlefield.

“Here’s how I see it: any data, anywhere, any time that is needed. And the vision, when I start to spin this out, is coalition warfare,” Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman said at a Defense Information Systems Agency event Nov. 7. “You have a U.S. Marine Corps [High Mobility Artillery Rocket System] getting a firing solution from an Australian [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capability; maybe you have a Japanese frigate that’s also going to hit the same target there; you’ve got multinational F-35s coming on station to provide combat air-support capability. All of this is going to have to happen quickly.”

Gilday in October said the Navy is sharing Project Overmatch insights with foreign forces to ensure international communication and collaboration will be possible in large-scale, distributed fights.

Though Gilday did not identify those allies, Small told Defense News his program started with Five Eyes — an intelligence-sharing group made up of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Small added that the U.S. has since welcomed other allies and partners to collaborate on software development.

No final destination

Some ships will have to wait for their next maintenance period to receive hardware and software changes, but Small said his team is working through policy issues to allow for installations to happen pier-side and, therefore, on a quicker timeline. In the meantime, the Project Overmatch team will chip away at the next increment, even as it’s fielding the first.

“Our concept of ‘done’ has to change a little bit,” Small said, “because it’s really not a traditional type of acquisition approach.”

Defense officials have cast JADC2 in a similar light. There is no true finish line, but rather the massive networking endeavor requires a rolling development process to maintain an advantage over adversaries capable of jamming, intercepting and muddying communications.

Sherman, the Pentagon CIO, said the key to JADC2 is speed and stubbornly staying “inside the enemy’s turn circle.”

“This has got to move so fast that the adversary cannot get back up off the mat,” he said. “Maybe they have mass on us, but we have quality of data, quality of capability.”

The dialogue, at what’s known as Technical Exchange Meeting 9, or TEM9, is focused on Capability Sets 25 and 27, batches of near-term networking upgrades drafted with armor and automation in mind, as well as Indo-Pacific and European operations.

Network modernization is a priority for the Army as it pivots to multi-domain operations — the ability to deter and defeat an enemy, with help from others, in any location — and confronts communication environments jeopardized by technologically advanced adversaries such as China and Russia.

The capability set initiative launched in fiscal 2021, with compounding upgrades of off-the-shelf and specialized tech expected in 2023, 2025, 2027 and beyond. Army leaders in 2019 compared the incremental approach to Apple’s iPhone strategy, with newer, better hardware and software rolling out on the heels of the last release.

The Army finished fielding Capability Set 21, tailored for infantry, earlier this year. The service in April completed a critical design review for Capability Set 23, focused on Strykers, signifying the equipment was conceptually sound and cost effective. The passing grade also opened the door for procurement.

“To some level, we modernized and touched over 300 units in the Army, whether it was updating or upgrading their transport, mission command applications, fires applications,” Nicholaus Saacks, deputy program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical, told C4ISRNET in October.

Work on Capability Sets 25 and 27 is underway. The technical exchange meeting is meant to generate research-and-development insights about those pursuits and provide industry face time with decision makers.

“With 23, we’re looking at capacity, looking at resiliency, and then we’re looking at convergence,” Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, the director of the Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team, said in October. “When you’re thinking about Capability Set 25, we’re looking at getting that auto-PACE, and then we’re looking at how we’re protecting the network capabilities.”

PACE describes the order in which lines of communication will be tried until contact is established: primary, alternate, contingency and emergency.

Director of the Joint Staff J6 Lt. Gen. Mary O’Brien and Deputy Director of Strategic Command Lt. Gen. Tom Copinger-Symes signed a formal agreement Nov. 4, the Pentagon said Thursday, describing the move as a “step in achieving collaborative C2.”

The arrangement comes as Washington pushes Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Pentagon’s vision for seamless, secure data flows across the battlefield, and London pursues its similar Multi-Domain Integration Change Program. Both strategies are meant to foster seamless connectivity across disparate forces, weapons and databases, no matter the national affiliation.

The links are needed, officials say, to counter technologically advanced adversaries such as China and Russia, and ensure smoother international collaboration. JADC2 and MDICP will be bridged via shared standards and principles, U.S. and U.K. officials said.

“I’m a huge believer in the strategic partnership that we have with the U.K.,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters Nov. 9 during a Project Convergence briefing. “The U.K. has been with us in all of our most important operations over the last 20 years, and I would expect they will be with us as we go forward.”

The services each have their own entries or contributions to JADC2, a multibillion-dollar endeavor now facing scrutiny from Congress. The Army has Project Convergence, the Air Force has the Advanced Battle Management System and the Navy has Project Overmatch.

Project Convergence — a weekslong test of technology in remote and demanding locations — this year directly involved soldiers from the U.K. and Australia, who brought with them an array of gear to test alongside U.S. assets. The U.K. Ministry of Defence specifically touted the deployment of long-range fires, uncrewed aerial systems, autonomous fighting vehicles and advanced sensors as well as the creation of a “complex multi-national network” used for information-sharing. The experiment wrapped Nov. 9.

Different scenarios, known as “alpha” and “bravo,” at Project Convergence focused on maritime issues expected in a fight for the Indo-Pacific and land-based challenges anticipated in a battle for Europe.

Defense Procurement Minister Alex Chalk earlier this month told reporters the U.K.’s participation in U.S. testing is “absolutely essential.”

“Warfighting in the future is going to require collaboration, particularly collaborating across countries, but also across domains and across technologies,” Chalk said. “This is all about making that happen, ultimately, to make sure that we’re more lethal, more agile, and better able to stand up for our national security and the security of our allies.”

The two countries fought side by side in the Middle East and have a long history of cooperation. British foreign policy is closely coordinated with the U.S. Both are founding members of NATO, as well.

Some 500 British troops and 200 members of the Australian Defense Force participated in Project Convergence this year, according to the U.S. Army. Observers from Canada and New Zealand were also in attendance.

“What I would underscore is: It’s a series of experiments, but we are each year increasing the complexity, increasing the scale,” said Wormuth, who has made digital fluency and data centricity her No. 2 objective for the service.

“Of course we want the U.K. armed forces to be as strong as they can possibly be,” she added. “The fact that we’re able to experiment and operate together here in Project Convergence, I think, will help us make the most” of available resources.