Then last year, leaders evacuated Travis Air Force Base in northern California due to nearby raging wildfires.

And today, Arctic Air Force bases hosting radar early warning systems and communication equipment are suffering coastal erosion, which is damaging seawalls, runways and infrastructure. Thawing permafrost and erosion threatens bases in the Arctic, damaging infrastructure. NASA tracks the extent of Arctic sea ice and estimates a declining 13.1 percent rate of change per decade.

“Climate change is going to cost us in resources and readiness,” Joe Bryan, senior climate adviser at the Pentagon, said during a July webinar. “The reality is that it already is.”

Now, after years of the Trump administration sidestepping the issue, the Biden administration has asked for $617 million in fiscal 2022 for climate change preparation, adaptation and mitigation. In addition, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, having already identified climate change as a top priority, launched a Climate Working Group in response to a January executive order signed by President Joe Biden. Climate change is no longer a problem for future defense leaders; it is an immediate challenge.

According to NASA, climate change is driven by increased levels of greenhouse gases causing global temperatures to rise, the ocean to warm, polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise. Since the late 1800s, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit, and the last seven years have been the warmest. The year 2020 is tied with 2016 for the warmest year on record.

Biden warned in his executive order that the world is facing “a profound climate crisis. We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.”

The problem is becoming clearer. The Congressional Research Service found that the Department of Defense manages more than 1,700 global military installations on coastlines that could prove vulnerable to rises in sea level. A 2019 departmental survey involving 79 installations warned that about two-thirds are vulnerable to recurrent flooding and that another half are under threat by drought or wildfires.

Melting Arctic ice opens new avenues to potential conflict; sea level rise threatens hundreds of millions of people globally and impacts military installations; and extreme heat can influence training and operations.

With the White House and the Pentagon signaling the prioritization of climate measures, Defense News reached out to the Army, Air Force and Navy about their efforts to adapt.

Innovation at the Air and Space forces

Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia — home to Air Combat Command and host to critical fighter aircraft as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities — sits just 8 feet above sea level.

Diego Garcia — an atoll in the Indian Ocean that often hosts deployments of U.S. bombers and is central to operations in Afghanistan, South Asia and East Africa — sits only 6.5 feet above sea level. And the Marshall Islands — where the Space Force is building a $1 billion radar installation to track satellites and space junk, known as the Space Fence — sits just 10 feet higher than the ocean.

“Nearly all of our installations are exposed to some natural or climate-related threat such as hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, and extreme winter weather,” Air Force spokeswoman Sarah Fiocco told Defense News. “These climate considerations have a direct impact on our ability to launch our missions, as our installations are a platform from which we project air power.

“The Department of the Air Force is actively working toward making our installations more resilient to the potential impacts of climate change and extreme weather.”

For example, Fiocco said, construction projects deliberately located in flood plains for mission purposes are built 3 feet above the design flood elevation (or the highest point of a possible flood that a retrofitting method is designed to protect against).

Amid ongoing disaster recovery at Tyndall Air Force Base, the service is constructing new buildings 19 feet above sea level if they are near the Gulf of Mexico. Fiocco said the projects at Tyndall are also built to withstand a minimum of 165 mph.

“Due to integrating severe weather and climate change design into our DoD building code, every project accounts for future changes in the climate and possibility of increased severe weather events,” she said.

The changing climate, particularly underway in the Arctic, also creates new mission challenges for the U.S. military. For example, a 2020 report from the think tank Rand said the melting Arctic ice and Russian military activity in the area means the U.S. Air Force must prepare for “an increase in demand for intercept flights” in the region.

“That’s a sensing challenge [because] we need to know what’s coming over the poles, which can be difficult,” said Raphael Cohen, acting director of strategy and doctrine program at Rand’s Project Air Force. “It’s a communications challenge because the way communications work in the high north are somewhat different. And then there’s a military capability question too. How much … resources you put up there? That is also a thing that we have to consider.”

Fiocco told Defense News that the service recognizes climate change “may drive increased mission demands or contingencies in new regions (e.g., Arctic) in response to resource competition, geopolitical instability, and a growing need for humanitarian assistance and disaster response to recover from climate-related events.”

“The Department of the Air Force is reviewing its current posture to inform necessary pivots in operational planning, locations and activities based on climate change considerations,” she added.

That includes projects with the Air Force Research Laboratory dedicated to improving communication capabilities in the high north. Arron Layns, the lab’s Arctic portfolio manager, said the organization is specifically working on new satellite and laser communications, and on bolstering high-frequency communications in the region.

Space-based communication for the Arctic is particularly challenging, as forecasting capabilities beyond Earth’s atmosphere are still maturing, and the North Pole’s environment is especially “dynamic,” Layns said. That’s in part due to the aurora — or northern lights — and how it interferes with satellite communications.

“The space environment is woefully under-observed, and the models are coming up, but they’re just not quite there for what we need,” Layns said. “The space environment has huge impacts on a variety of things. And if you don’t get that environmental information right, you might not know how your satellite’s going to work, or you might not know how your communications or [if] your navigation is really going to work properly.”

The Air Force, which is itself a major contributor to climate change, is looking at novel ways to improve the combat capability of its fleet while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to Fiocco, the service wants to increase the fuel economy of its legacy aircraft, in particular its mobility fleet.

In congressional testimony in July, Jennifer Miller, the acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy, said the service is funding “small items” that can increase efficiency, such as modifying aircraft with little winglets or adjusting the angle of windshield wipers.

Additionally, the planning tool JIGSAW, developed by the Air Force software factory Kessel Run and the Defense Innovation Unit — the Pentagon’s liaison for nontraditional contractors — now saves the service 180,000 gallons of fuel per week.

The Air Force is also exploring advancements in airframes and engines that would be “significantly more efficient” and increase combat power. According to Fiocco, the service is eyeing third-stream engines, which would be 25 percent more efficient than engines currently in use, as well as blended wing body aircraft, which would be about 30 percent more efficient.

However, she said, the potential for those capabilities is “limited by both technology and budgetary issues.”

Army strategies

The Army is currently writing its own climate change strategy, which is scheduled for release this fall, according to Jack Surash, the senior official performing the duties of assistant secretary of the Army for installations, environment and energy. Following the release, the service will unveil a “very detailed” climate change action plan that outlines a broad, “multiyear effort” for how the Army will tackle climate issues, he told lawmakers in July.

Asked by Defense News how the Army plans to adapt to potentially harsher environmental conditions, the service’s answers largely focused on energy storage.

“The Army is examining improved energy density and reliability of energy supply and storage technologies, [artificial intelligence]-enabled system-level power distribution (microgrids) and the use of renewable energy sources for use in operational contexts, including forward operating bases, tactical vehicles and on the battlefield,” Surash said in a statement.

He added that the Army wants “increased battery capacity, auxiliary power, electrification and alternative fuel sources that will increase operational endurance within the force, while reducing carbon emissions.”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, also emphasized the military’s need to generate power on the battlefield in challenging environments.

“Coming up with new ways to generate power is going to be essential. Not just because of the ‘feel good, we need to be more clear’ military perspective to combat climate change, [but] because the military is going to operate in places where the host nation may have made those choices already and therefore they don’t have a bunch of electric power available for us to use,” he said.

The service is also exploring hybrid and fully electric vehicles, though top Army leaders said this year that hybrid vehicles are more likely to be a successful option in the near term. In congressional testimony, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said the service is considering hybrid vehicles that reduce fuel consumption by 25 percent. Meanwhile, Bruce Geil, chief of the power integration architecture branch at the Army Research Laboratory, said his portfolio is focused on making hybrid power systems more capable, but also smaller.

The lab also has several ongoing efforts related to climate prediction and planning that help commanders map out operations.

“If you have a climatological sense of what’s going to be in that area, then commanders can plan for those regions and know what weapon systems are going to work,” said Robb Randall, chief of the lab’s Atmospheric Science Center and the Atmospheric Dynamics and Analytics Branch. “How do I outfit my personnel and supply your need? How much water do I need to bring?”

The lab is also working on risk-assessment and decision-aid technology for desertification, in which fertile land becomes desert, to predict areas that are more prone to the change in the long term, Randall said. It’s also developing predictive capabilities for flash droughts — a rapid onset of drought — which can cause regional instability.

In a 2019 report to Congress, the Army listed desertification as the top climate threat to nine of its top 10 most vulnerable stateside bases. The service listed drought as the secondary threat to all 10. The same year, the Army War College released a report naming challenges the service will face due to climate change, including rising temperatures and an increased need for water. The report warned that the service is “precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in a contested arid environment.”

In addition, the Army Research Lab and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency each have ongoing projects tackling hydration. The lab is exploring how to decontaminate polluted water using an aluminum panel that concentrates solar energy for purification. DARPA has chosen six partners to find unique ways to extract potable water from the atmosphere.

The Army Corps of Engineers is also contributing to departmentwide efforts, having designed the DoD Climate Assessment Tool, which projects the effects of climate change on almost 1,400 DoD locations. Additionally, the corps is researching unique approaches to developing construction materials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Navy preps for new missions

A Pentagon report this year on the impact of environmental changes to installations found the Navy had a “greater range of climate exposure” than the other services, with it facing drought, heat and coastal flooding in the United States as well as East Asia and the Middle East.

The Navy did not answer questions from Defense News by press time about how it is adapting to the changing environment.

In congressional testimony in July, Todd Schafer, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations and environment, stated broadly that the service is working to “build climate resiliency” into its installations.

Sea level rise particularly threatens naval bases. The Hampton Roads, Virginia, area, home to the largest concentration of military infrastructure in the world, is already under threat of flooding, with the sea level near the area expected to rise 1.5 feet in the next 20-50 years, according to the Congressional Research Service. The worst effects are expected at the end of this century.

John Conger, former acting assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment, told Defense News that in areas like Hampton Roads, the emphasis must be on protecting investments rather than taking the costly step of moving them.

“What the smart play is, in the near term, is to make your infrastructure more resilient,” said Conger, who leads the Center for Climate and Security and serves as a senior U.S. adviser to the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

DARPA is exploring new solutions to mitigate the effects of a rising sea level and the subsequent flooding. The agency’s Reefense program is looking to use reef-mimicking ecosystems to reduce the impact.

Lori Adornato, the Reefense program manager, said the Army Corps of Engineers is interested in the project. “Because we have a number of bases on the coast, one of the ways that we can think about protecting them is taking advantage of how nature has protected coasts over time.”

The Navy will also need to adapt to new missions, as fresh sea routes spring up amid the melting of Arctic ice — pathways for which U.S. adversaries Russia and China might take advantage.

The service will also need to improve its weather forecasting capabilities. That effort is underway with the Office of Naval Research, which is collecting data in the Arctic about waves, sea ice, and atmospheric and water circulation.

But there’s a lack of data.

“We don’t have the pattern of operations in the Arctic to have built the type of expertise that the Navy has, in terms of conducting things like detailed weather forecasting” in other regions, said Joshua Tallis, research scientist at Virginia-based think tank CNA.

To operate more frequently in the Arctic, the Navy may need ice-hardened ships — an expensive capability. In Senate testimony in July, Vice Adm. Jim Kilby, deputy chief of naval operations for war-fighting requirements and capabilities, said the service would make future ship design decisions based on where “we think we are going to operate.”

Tallis noted that the investment in ice-hardened ships is a tough choice for an armed service that operates globally.

“Part of what the Navy has to think about as it is building the force that combatant commanders will use in the future: It is this question of, is that demand for a specialized, ice-hardened capability sufficient in order to warrant the expense for the relatively niche capability that they would purchase? And so far, at least from a Navy standpoint, the cost benefit hasn’t worked in that favor.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, who serves as a key gatekeeper for Pentagon nominees and policy, told Defense News that the job of undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment ― which involves the tricky balance of affordability, modernization and cohesion between systems ― is “a critical job.”

“You have to find the best possible candidate, not simply just filling the job,” said Reed, D-R.I. “Then that candidate has to be vetted, and it takes a while. So there’s a process of very, very rapidly identifying a top-notch candidate and then as fast as possible getting him vetted.

“That’s a key position, and without that position being filled you’re going to require a lot of people to have multiple duties and not just one responsibility.”

In another setback for the Pentagon, the official performing the duties of the job Brown was to take, Stacy Cummings, is expected to depart in the coming weeks, Politico reported Friday.

Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell confirmed the report for Defense News, said the department had succession plans in place and that its acquisition work would go unhindered by Brown’s withdrawal. “The department’s work on acquisitions and focus on mission continues, guided by the expertise of the professionals in Acquisition and Sustainment,” she said in a statement.

Between the White House vetting a new nominee and the Senate’s crowded schedule, announcing and confirming a new candidate before Congress leaves town for its August recess could be a heavy lift. Reed’s panel will be occupied next week with its markup of the annual defense policy bill, but he said he could try to advance the nominee before August if the administration produces one that soon.

Brown said he withdrew from the running on July 13 because an ongoing investigation into allegations against him were expected to take up to a year to be resolved. The DoD inspector general is probing allegations that Brown violated federal hiring practices while serving as director of the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outreach arm ― allegations he denies.

“Due to lengthy delays in proceeding with his nomination, Michael Brown has chosen to ask the President to withdraw his nomination to the Department of Defense,” White House deputy press secretary Chris Meagher told Defense News in a statement. “We agree that this is the best course and will be immediately moving to fill this critical role.”

The likely delay in filling the job comes at an inopportune time for President Joe Biden, who focused his Pentagon budget proposal on divesting legacy weapons systems in favor of research and development.

Reed is not the only one who wants the White House to move fast. “I hope they have somebody that they send over quickly. I know Mike, he’s very talented,” said Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who chairs the SASC Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support. “I was very discouraged when I heard that, and I hope they will send us somebody top-notch very fast.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has only one nominee offered for its acquisitions arm: Deborah Rosenblum, who was tapped for assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs. Vacant positions include the deputy undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, the assistant secretary for sustainment, the assistant secretary for acquisition, and the assistant secretary for industrial base policy.

Arnold Punaro, a former SASC staff director and the current board chair of the National Defense Industrial Association, suggested the administration could fast-track the process by redirecting another nominee or offering a one who has already been through the confirmation process. However, Punaro and other observers agree there is no obvious replacement for Brown as yet.

There were high hopes for Brown’s ability to reform the Defense Department’s purchasing practices to prioritize nontraditional companies offering innovative solutions, an area considered key in winning the military technology race with China. A tech sector veteran, Brown spent nearly three years as director of the Defense Innovation Unit, where he focused on connecting small, innovative companies with departmental components.

Experts say it will be a challenge for the White House to find a nominee like Brown. He had a unique understanding of government acquisition and the needs of cash-strapped startups offering transformational technologies, and how that translates to the department’s competition with China.

“There are so few people that get this,” said Bill Greenwalt, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy. “There are so few people who have an understanding of the ability of Silicon Valley and small business innovation to radically change the Department of Defense. And Mike Brown was one of them.”

Former Rep. Mac Thornberry, who led acquisition reform efforts in Congress for years as House Armed Services Committee chair, felt much the same way.

“I think it’s a loss, really, for the country because of his background in industry, his knowledge of finance: what it takes for private companies to come up with financing, the investment to do business with the government,” Thornberry said. “I just thought that was a home run, and now it’s not.”

The next undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment will be charged with quickly developing cutting-edge systems and turning them into formal programs, especially if the Pentagon plans to retire legacy systems. It’s an area where the Pentagon has historically lagged, and it happens to be the specialty of the Defense Innovation Unit.

Thornberry said that, generally, the lack of confirmed nominees undermines the Biden administration’s goals of making tough and contentious decisions on the Pentagon’s investments.

“Any acting person in any capacity is going to be hesitant to make big decisions,” Thornberry said. “It will be hard to impossible to make significant decisions with the number of acting folks that they have.”

In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin obtained by Defense News, Brown said he was withdrawing because an inspector general investigation into hiring practices at DIU was expected to delay consideration of his nomination by up to a year.

”While I am confident the Office of the Inspector General will ultimately find no wrongdoing on my part, I know there are other qualified candidates who can focus on the urgent business of making our acquisition process faster and more cost-effective,” Brown said in the letter. “I must put the interests of the Department above my own enthusiasm for serving as Under Secretary for Acquisitions and Sustainment.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Austin respects Brown’s decision and thanked him “for his willingness to be nominated for this challenging position.” Austin “remains grateful for Mr. Brown’s continued service at the Defense Innovation Unit,” Kirby said.

News of Brown’s withdrawal was first reported by Inside Defense.

Numerous defense innovation experts expressed dismay over Brown pulling out as nominee. Because of his past career in the tech sector and work at DIU, many had high hopes for Brown’s ability to reform the department’s arcane acquisition practices that doesn’t suit small innovative, nontraditional contractors offering new technologies that primes don’t.

Chris Brose, former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director, said Brown had a “proven track record of rapid acquisition and fielding of advanced technologies” and called his withdrawal a huge setback.

“You need someone who understands what that ecosystem looks like, that understands what the cutting edge of advanced technology is and who’s developing it, what nontraditional defense companies and new entrants are going through in trying to begin and scale their work with the Department of Defense,” said Brose, now chief strategy officer at defense tech firm Anduril Industries. “He, better than anybody, understands all of that.”

As undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and sustainment, Brown would have overseen a budget of more than $100 billion for major defense programs — such as the F-35 fighter jet, aircraft carrier elevator and efforts to speed up software acquisitions. He would have been highly influential over defense industry matters and been responsible for maintaining America’s military edge.

Brown has led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outreach arm since 2018 and worked to connect small startups developing innovative technologies with Department of Defense components. Brown’s initial nomination was praised by observers, including several former senior DoD officials, because of his tech industry background and understanding of the challenges nontraditional contractors face working with the DoD.

“One of the exciting aspects of his nomination was the combination of a few different skill sets and knowledge bases that he would have brought to the role,” said Lindsey Sheppard, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Brown’s withdrawal is another setback for the president’s efforts to fill key roles at the Pentagon.

“Whenever you don’t have confirmed leadership in senior positions at the Department of Defense, you’re losing,” Brose said. “You don’t have people with the mandate and the legitimacy to take decisions and risky decisions to the fullest extent of the authorities of that office.”

Brown joined government in 2016 as a White House presidential innovation fellow after a long career in the tech sector capped by two years as CEO of cybersecurity software giant Symantec. As a fellow, he wrote a detailed report on the threat the Chinese government posed to the U.S. venture capital system.

Under Brown’s guidance, DIU has transitioned increasing amounts of projects to DoD components. In 2020, DIU transitioned 11 projects, up from four in 2018. One of DIU’s most significant achievements under Brown’s leadership was providing an alternative to Chinese-made small drones under a DIU project called Blue sUAS, which made trusted small drone options available to the whole federal government.

Bill Greenwalt, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy, called the news “sad and depressing.”

“He had the potential, based on his background, to really bring in and leverage this massively innovative sector of the U.S. and international economy and then fold that into how we can create better capability against China,” Greenwalt said.

Arnold Punaro, a former staff director with the Senate Armed Services Committee and the National Defense Industrial Association board chairman, said he is disappointed to see Brown out of the running.

“The DOD acquisition system needs strong leadership to implement innovation, speed, and cost-effectiveness, and Mike was the perfect choice for the position,” Punaro said in a statement. “Mike’s strong leadership will continue to benefit DIU and the Department moving forward, and we are lucky to have him there.”

As the military services move forward on their plans to share data and connect relevant sensors to relevant shooters for the future war-fighting concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, an important factor will be the ability to connect back to the enterprise network that has more data storage and processing power than devices available to users at the tactical edge.

“What’s different for the Marine Corps as we build our networks is we have to be able to have the power of the enterprise at the edge because as you’re inside the weapons engagement zone, we need the compute, the store, the analytics to be just like your iPhone,” said Brig. Gen. Lorna Mahlock, CIO of the Marines Corps and director of information, command, control, communications and computers. “As our Marines are maneuvering — really, really small maneuver elements — they have the power of the enterprise to be able to enable C2 and fires at the edge.”

Speaking at a Defense News Pathfinders event on Wednesday, Mahlock said that there is an “inextricable link” between the enterprise network and the tactical edge. To ensure that Marines — and the joint force — have a command and control advantage over adversaries, intelligence networks, business networks and war-fighting networks must be fused to make all necessary data available to war fighters who need it across the globe.

The Marine Corps is in the midst of a network modernization effort focused on IT consolidation to better integrate systems across the service. Mahlock stressed that the challenge in powering joint war-fighting and connecting enterprise networks to the tactical edge isn’t technological, rather cultural. For example, the Marines had to stop thinking about tactical, intelligence and business networks as separate entities.

“It’s about ensuring the data can pass seamlessly across all these systems,” Mahlock said, adding that “folks used to think that there is no interdependency between the enterprise and the tactical edge. That kind of thinking is passé.”

Mahlock emphasized the inherent joint nature of the Marine force: It is primarily naval but has a ground piece that needs to work with the Army and a Marine Air-Ground Task Force that needs to connect with the Air Force. That level of collaboration between the services is another cultural change underway while the services try to enable JADC2. The services are making efforts to include other services in their JADC2 experimentation, and top level officials at the Pentagon have stressed the importance of building systems capable of integrating into other platforms.

The advanced capabilities of militaries including Russia and China are driving new technological investments by the Marines. Like many branches, the Marines are exploring the benefits of commercial satellite constellations that offer higher throughput and lower latency. That move toward “SATCOM as a service,” in which the military would pay only for the transport it uses, is a “paradigm shift” to the way the Marines historically operate, she said.

“That is antithetical to how we have historically employed and deployed networks and C2 systems,” Mahlock said. “We’re used to building a tech stack and deploying that stack. And now we’re saying, hey, look, you just need to be able to tap into services wherever they are and consume their services, and obfuscate depending on the network that you’re pulling those services through.”

The Marine Corps also exploring 5G, as well as new encryption techniques and zero-trust cybersecurity architectures that inherently distrust users. With a web of interconnected networks accessed by the U.S. and allies, cybersecurity becomes a massive challenge.

“Wherever you are globally, you have to securely be able to consume all these services at all these different layers — at the unclassified, classified …. secret and top secret levels of the network,” Mahlock said.

Speaking at the Defense Department AI Symposium, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks described the Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration Initiative, an effort that will deploy technical teams to combatant commands to prepare military networks for Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Pentagon’s plan to quickly pass the best data from AI-backed systems to war fighters.

“Its goal is to rapidly advance data and AI-dependent concepts like Joint All-Domain Command Control,” Hicks said.

Though light on details, the initiative will rely on combatant commands’ experimentation events and exercises to test new artificial intelligence and data capabilities that could be critical to JADC2. Building the future war-fighting concept into reality will require top-tier artificial intelligence tools that can process data rapidly on a contested battlefield and speed up a commander’s decision-making.

“The AIDA initiative will generate foundational capabilities through a series of implementation experiments or exercises, each one purposefully building understanding through successive and incremental learning,” Hicks said. “Each exercise pushes the boundaries of the one before, building on the knowledge gained.”

The military plans to send “operational” data teams to the 11 combatant commands, Hicks said. These teams will provide the commands with expertise in cataloging, managing and automating data. According to Hicks, the teams will stay at a command until it can “leverage the data needed to create decision advantage.”

The initiative includes additional “flyaway” teams staffed by technical experts to assist combatant commands with integrating artificial intelligence to streamline and automate workflows. According to Hicks, the teams will build “real capabilities that can be evaluated in real operational environments.”

The information gathered by the teams and collected at the combatant command exercises will allow the department to update network infrastructure, remove policy barriers and ensure the “reliability and effectiveness of our global war-fighting capability,” she said.

“Through successive experiments, we seek to understand the obstacles and challenges that impair our current ability to rapidly scale AI across the department and the joint force,” Hicks said. “As we complete these episodic exercises and experiments, we intend to leave behind capability in our wake.”

The department will apply capabilities gained at one combatant command to other commands that face similar issues, she said.

“This will ultimately produce data and operational platforms designed for real-time sensor-data fusion, automated command and control tasking, and autonomous system integration. It will allow data to flow across both geographic and functional commands,” Hicks said.

Hicks’ announcement is significant given its emphasis on combatant commands. Much of the work on JADC2 so far has been driven by service projects, such as the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System.

The AI acceleration plan is a step toward achieving the DoD’s mission to link sensors and shooters on the battlefield. Most recently, the Pentagon announced that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed off on the Pentagon’s JADC2 strategy, though the document is classified.

At a separate event this week, Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, the CIO/J6 and JADC2 lead for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon started an analysis to understand the technology gaps it needs to address to prepare for the battlefield of the future; however, its findings are classified.

“Despite all the capability that we have, there’s a pretty long list of things that we believe we need to improve upon and really fulfill,” Crall said.

Air Force budget: Congress dealt ABMS a blow, but experts see progress | Army budget: Proposed modernization increases show Army sees joint operations as ‘top priority’ | Navy budget: Classified Navy JADC2 budget plan has a few spending hints

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s new budget plan provided a first look at how the military is building investment in its signature future war-fighting strategy, pumping money into linking networks and processing data for a connected force.

On one hand, experts said the fiscal 2022 proposal is a marker for Joint All-Domain Command and Control that shows shifting priorities and encouraging signs after 18 months of spending on the plan for U.S. superiority against highly capable adversaries such as China or Russia.

But the budget left many details murky, with chunks of classified spending, no top-line figures and much of the funding mixed in larger programs, raising questions with insiders on issues including whether command and control will get enough money or how the services will combine separate efforts.

By one conservative estimate, a national security expert expects the Pentagon to spend more than $1 billion on JADC2 next year. Observers predict funding will ramp up in budgets to come, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff already asking Congress for future JADC2-specific modernization money and the project’s top leader proclaiming “delivery time” has arrived now that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed a formal strategy.

“It’s great to see money going toward better networking, resilient communications and more adaptable communications. Those are critical things for the DoD, but they are not, in and of themselves, command and control,” said Eli Niewood, vice president for intelligence and cross-cutting capabilities at Mitre, which runs federally funded research centers for government technology development. “What we think really needs to happen for JADC2 is better capabilities within decision-making [and] within sense-making. It’s much harder to find that money than it is to find the money going into networks and radios.”

Under the Defense Department’s JADC2 vision, the military could take data collected from anywhere, process it with artificial intelligence to target potential threats, and push that information to the relevant weapon system or war fighter over emerging networks in near real time.

Experts expect future budget projections, when they’re eventually released, will provide a stronger picture of how the investments might change and grow. Air Force and Army demonstrations, which will take place again later this year, have shown progress at the ground level to link sensors and shooters at unprecedented speed. Still, accountability is hard to gauge because the services do not outline clear milestones and timetables for those events.

Some of what’s unknown about JADC2 investment stems from the fact that the money is spread across many programs that feed the services’ so-far disconnected individual efforts: the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, the Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s classified Project Overmatch. Further muddying the waters, only ABMS has a budget line as the sole program of record in the bunch.

Additionally, billions for service modernization efforts contribute indirectly.

But some spending insights can be found. A conservative estimate from Travis Sharp, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is that the Defense Department is requesting at least $1.2 billion in FY22 for programs that directly support JADC2. That number could underestimate the total “perhaps significantly,” he said.

Sharp searched for JADC2-specific terms, such as “Project Overmatch” or “fully networked command and control,” and he didn’t include programs that only partially support the concept. The bulk of the $1.2 billion is in requests from the Office of Secretary of Defense, which runs several joint command and control research programs, and for the Space Development Agency, which is developing a new space-based mesh network to connect sensors and shooters all over the world via satellite.

The challenge in estimating a total price tag is “due to the difficulty of assigning dollar values to programs that indirectly support JADC2,” Sharp said.

For example, the Navy noted that a broad proposed information warfare increase would help Project Overmatch.

After the services listed several JADC2-enabling programs on their unfunded priority wish lists to Congress, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, the chief information officer/J6 of the Joint Chiefs, tried to assuage any concerns that the services won’t have enough money for JADC2. “I firmly believe we are adequately resourced to get done with the experimentation phase we’re talking about,” Crall said at an early June press conference.

At an Army event that same week, Brig. Gen. Robert Parker, head of the JADC2 Joint Cross-Functional Team, said military leaders have had “encouraging” conversations with lawmakers about adding JADC2-specific funds to incentivize modernization and adopt promising prototypes.

“The critical thing is what is being invested in terms of a JADC2 capability versus what the services are investing in to modernize their force and to close some critical gaps within the force,” said Scott Lee, cross-cutting priority lead for JADC2 at Mitre.

The lack of clarity reflects broader issues with the JADC2 development structure. While the services have taken steps toward collaboration, it’s not clear how the independent efforts fit together. The Joint Chiefs are working toward a top-down plan, but for now each service has a unique approach with varying levels of transparency.

“Regarding JADC2, the issues go beyond funding. It’s much more important that the services are aligned, that the ‘J’ in JADC2 truly be ‘joint.’ The services aren’t there yet, but they’re working to find a mutual path forward. Once that is in place, they can look at funding with a more keen eye,” said Mark Lewis, executive director of the Emerging Technologies Institute of the National Defense Industrial Association.

With the JADC2 strategy in place, the Pentagon and its military services can focus on building the network of networks it believes it needs to fight highly capable adversaries such as Russia and China, a fight powered by high-bandwidth, resilient communications networks that pass mass amounts of data to help commanders make fast decisions. Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, CIO/J6 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon now has a document that ensures the services’ efforts are in “compliance [with] the direction that we set inside of JADC2.”

“This really starts our work. It’s now implementation time,” Crall told reporters. “Planning is good. Talk is good. Now it’s delivery time, and we’ve been given a clear signal to begin pushing these outcomes to the people who need them.”

Austin signed the strategy May 13, Crall said, and while the plan is classified, the Pentagon will share an unclassified version this summer. The concept of JADC2, in which data passes through secure networks to forces working together from any location, is how Pentagon leadership envisions potential battles against near-peer threats such as China and Russia.

JADC2, led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, consists of a series of efforts by the military services: the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, the Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch. The strategy gives each of those projects a guiding foundation.

Before “we had no northern star,” Crall said. “So specifically, what it does now is allowed me to take that JADC2 strategy at a specific line of effort and place it directly over the top of this experimentation and vet it and say, ‘What parts of those are in compliance today and which parts are not?’”

Although the specifics are classified, top officials have provided insights into what the Pentagon needs to do to connect disparate battlefield systems. Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, the head of the JADC2 Joint Cross-Functional Team, said at an event hosted by the Army Network Cross-Functional Team on Wednesday that the strategy has five key lines of effort: data, human enterprise, technology, nuclear command and control, and the mission partner environment.

As the department starts to roll out JADC2, Crall said the services need to solve several issues. First, the DoD needs to settle on the definition of a federated data fabric, which is a data management environment with common standards and tools. Officials across the services and the Pentagon have worked on the issues since January, and the challenge, he said, is finding the balance between being too prescriptive and too open.

The department is also searching for identity and network access management tools that can verify users on the battlefield, while recognizing that it will have to improve cybersecurity by moving to a zero trust environment that inherently distrusts a user and requires repeated verification. It also needs software packages that are easily adaptable instead of software that’s “impossible to change,” Crall said.

“We need solutions that work on the tactical edge,” he said.

For JADC2 to be successful, Crall said the department will need to integrate and scale key technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics, calling them “enabling requirements” for war fighters to have a decision-making advantage over adversaries.

Asked about some unfunded priorities the services sent to Congress after the release of the fiscal 2022 budget request that mentioned various JADC2-enabling programs, Crall said the he thinks the JADC2 efforts are “adequately resourced” to move forward for an experimentation phase.

It’s difficult to determine how much money the Pentagon plans to spend on JADC2 because the program is not a specific budget line, and programs across each service contribute to their respective war-fighting systems. For ABMS, the Air Force requested $204 million for FY22, a sizable bump from the program’s FY21 budget, but down from a projected $449 million the service previously said it expected to spend on the program in 2022. The Army plans to spend $106 million on Project Convergence, and several of its modernization programs, including its network team, that ultimately contribute to JADC2 would receive major funding boosts. The Navy’s Project Overmatch spending is classified across three research and development budget lines.

“It’s not about just doing everything we’re doing today exactly as we’re doing it, and then adding something new,” Crall said. “I think we need to be really smart about the way we move forward and utilize the resources we’re given smartly.”

While the Defense Department’s fiscal 2022 budget request to Congress did not summarize high-level numbers for Joint-All Domain Command and Control, the services’ spending proposals provide clues, with allocation leaps for the Army teams working on the project and for the Air Force’s main contribution: the Advanced Battle Management System. The budget also highlights increased investment in emerging technologies that will make JADC2 systems run, including artificial intelligence projects that the DoD said increased by 50 percent.

The Air Force budget request contains the most substantial information about how much services might need to spend to reach the Pentagon’s vision of a connected force that can pass sensor data across domains in an instant to the soldier, airman, Marine or guardian who needs it. For ABMS, the service requested $204 million, a $46 million increase over the total enacted last year by Congress.

The Air Force wants the increase in order to improve information sharing across its fifth-generation tactical aircraft and command-and-control nodes. Related to its JADC2 efforts, the service asked for $8.8 billion in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, which the service said underpins ABMS.

“This approach accelerates decision making, improves command and control, and achieves decision advantage ahead of competitors,” the request stated.

The U.S. Army’s requested budget signaled investment in its multidomain operations effort, known as Project Convergence. According to Army officials, the service plans to spend $106.8 million on its Project Convergence demonstration, including $33.7 million for operations and maintenance and $73.1 million on research, development, testing and evaluation.

But the Army’s multidomain efforts extend beyond Project Convergence-dedicated funding. The Army’s modernization cross-functional teams also make key contributions to Project Convergence and the service’s overall multidomain operations. The eight teams would get $11.25 billion, $1.76 billion over their last combined budget.

The Army Network Cross-Functional team, which provides the network backbone of Project Convergence and JADC2, would receive a $537 million increase for total budget of $2.7 billion. Last year Congress awarded about $2.12 billion to the network team.

Details are scant on the Navy’s JADC2 contribution, known as Project Overmatch. At the Navy’s budget briefing, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget Rear Adm. John Gumbleton said that Project Overmatch is funded across three classified research and development lines.

However, many Navy information warfare programs will be important to Overmatch, including network sensors, manned and unmanned platforms, electronic warfare and other C4ISR sensors. The Navy’s information warfare request increased $256 million over its fiscal 2021 allocation to $5.87 billion.

A major contribution of the U.S. Space Force to the DoD’s growing JADC2 infrastructure is the Unified Data Library, a cloud-based data storage platform. The Air Force sees UDL as the foundation of the ABMS data architecture. So far, the library is mostly known as the Space Force’s central space domain awareness database, consolidating information about objects on orbit from government, academic and commercial sources to create a common operating picture for the joint forces. But the service is keen to adapt the platform for more uses within the JADC2 framework. The fiscal 2022 budget proposal requests $17.1 million for UDL.

With multidomain war-fighting efforts spread across services, a senior Joint Chiefs of Staff official said Thursday that the team need to closely coordinate their efforts.

“It means that we have to work together and work smart. And so we’re really looking at what can be leveraged. How do we reconcile the investments that are being made between the services and then how do we forge our way forward? So some of this is: Where do we eliminate duplication of effort?” Stuart Whitehead, the J-6 deputy director for cyber and command, control, communications and computers integration on the Joint Staff, said on a webinar.

C4I investments

The Pentagon is requesting $12.7 billion for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence systems, up from its $11.9 billion request last year. The increase is largely driven by $500 million boost in technology development, as well as $600 million increase in information security and assurance. The military wants to develop technologies including network gateways, management, waveforms and information assurance.

The efforts are part of an “overarching goal to defeat any adversary or control any situation across the full range of military operations is achieved through a broad array of capabilities enabled by an interconnected network of sensors, shooters, command, control, and intelligence,” the DoD budget weapons system budget book states.

As part of C4I systems, the department wants to increase spending for the Army’s Tactical Network Technology Modernization in Service program to $436.5 million, up from $411.2 million in fiscal 2021. That program allows Army and joint forces to access the DoD-Information Network and gives the military reliable connection to video, data, imagery and voice services. The program’s goal is to modernize the Army’s tactical network for multidomain operations.

In fiscal 2022, the service plans to upgrade TNT MIS for four expeditionary signal battalions-enhanced and 40 units across the Army, reserve and national guard to modernizing network transport systems and regional hub nodes, which direct DoD network traffic.

The department requested a $236.2 million boost to the Army-led Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit radio that is required to meet the needs of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Special Operations Command. The HMS program includes one-channel rifleman radio, two-channel leader radio, and single-channel data radio in support of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System and Manpack radio.

The reprogrammable, networked, multinode radios support voice and data transmission needs across the joint force. The budget boost would fund procurement of leader radios, single channel data radio and manpack radios to five brigade combat teams and allows for follow-on testing for effectiveness, suitability and survivability.

Emerging technologies for JADC2

The Pentagon also wants to invest in a number of technologies that will enable JADC2, such as artificial intelligence and 5G networks. AI is a key component to almost every aspect of the military’s sensor-to-shooter plans. For example, the U.S. Army wants to use machine learning to process sensor data in near real time, automatically create targeting data for potential threats and recommend the best weapon system to respond.

The budget proposal counts 600 individual AI efforts across DoD — up 50 percent over fiscal 2021 — for which the Pentagon is seeking $874 million.

The FY22 budget proposal would continue investment in 5G wireless networks, which enable transformational increases in bandwidth and speed to move data from sensors to shooters. The Pentagon is seeking nearly $400 million for 5G efforts.

Perhaps most importantly, the Pentagon wants to continue putting money into microelectronics production, growing a domestic manufacturing base that can produce trusted components for DoD weapons systems. DoD describes the manufacturing base as “fragile and threatened,” forcing the military to rely on foreign-made components. The FY22 budget proposal sets apart $2.3 billion for the government’s microelectronics efforts, improving domestic capacity, procuring sufficient quantities of legacy microchips to sustain weapon systems in the near term, and increasing access to advanced microchips for next-generation weapon systems.

Nathan Strout contributed to this report.

With data at the core of the military’s new joint war-fighting concept, known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the services are trying to connect a myriad of platforms that range from new technology to older systems that weren’t built for passing data across domains. But to reach the Defense Department’s goal to connect the any sensor to the best-positioned person in a battle, the military must set common data standards and implement application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow older and newer systems to talk to each other.

While the military is preparing to lay out its requirements and strategy for JADC2, SOCOM Chief Data Officer Thomas Kenney said that the services need to set standards for all future systems to enable interoperability.

“We need to start at a very high level, just put a stake in the ground and say every system that is developed for the future is an API-centric system with regards to access to its data,” Kenney said at C4ISRNET’S Removing Stovepipes webcast.

The Pentagon and its service components are undergoing a reckoning with the sheer amount of data they collect, trying to understand the basics of what information they have and how they can share that data across the department. As part of that effort, the department released an enterprise data strategy on its data needs for joint war fighting. Chief data officers across the department frequently meet to discuss data challenges.

Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is leading the JADC2 initiative, is scheduling several meetings this year with data leaders across services, combatant commands and allies to set data standards to enable joint war fighting.

And if a system isn’t interoperable, Kenney said a process must be put in place for people to access needed data.

A critical pillar of JADC2 is the “democratization of data,” meaning that data is easily available to users who need it, he said. For example, full-motion video or object detection data is relevant to multiple program offices at SOCOM, such as fixed wing and maritime.

“We need to ensure that in a JADC2 world, we don’t just assume that all of the data is all going to end up in one data center, in one data warehouse, in one data store,” Kenney said. “We need to acknowledge that there, especially with telemetry and IoT [internet of things] data, there are going to be multiple sources where we may need to access the data or aggregation of that data, but not necessarily have to copy it all into a single source so that we get access there.”

SOCOM is building out its own SOF-specific data fabric, or a data management environment with common standards and tools, which will allow SOF systems to talk to each other. The information that SOCOM officials learn as they share data helps “inform and enhance what we’re doing and other verticals,” which is useful for acquisitions. Special Operations will build its data fabric with APIs so it can easily interact with one from other services.

But one hurdle that could hinder the military’s effort to make data easily accessible is finding adequate tools to verify users’ identities. Kenney said the Pentagon needs identity, credential and access management tools that would allow users across services to securely use tools from sister services.

“If we’re going to democratize the data and democratize our systems, having a common way to secure that data, where systems talk in like ways to each other, will really accelerate our ability to have interoperability,” he said.

The federally funded Center for Naval Analyses examined the Kremlin’s whole-of-government approach for artificial intelligence development and found it is largely driven by the perceived threat from the United States, combined with lessons learned from its continuing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine about what the future battlefield will look like, the report released Monday said.

However, the Russian government faces limitations because its AI efforts are primarily government funded, and it lacks a strong defense industrial base, noted the report, written on behalf of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Still, analysts cautioned Pentagon leadership not to underestimate the Russia’s technological advances as the U.S. pivots its strategic focus to the Indo-Pacific. The Russian military has been undergoing modernization since 2009.

“This is a very different military, qualitatively especially, and they are trying to be flexible in ways that we don’t give them credit for,” said Sam Bendett, a co-author and research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses. “This is a different military than the ones that existed prior to 2009 and going forward it’s going to become more high tech [and] more integrated. It’s going to be more flexible. It’s going to use different approaches to try and gain that advantage.”

Focusing on information advantage

Russia is heavily focused on developing information management tools to provide soldiers with maximum access to relevant data in war and keep them safe, the report found after analyzing open-source Russian government statements, Russian officials’ writings and legal documents about artificial intelligence. According to that research, Russian military strategists have placed a premium on “information dominance on the battlefield” and view AI-enabled technologies as the key to achieving that goal.

It’s a different approach than tactics of the past for Russia, which struggled to “see” the battlefield and rather relied on “brute force” with its arsenal of tanks and artillery, said Jeffrey Edmonds, a senior research scientist at CNA and report co-author. Among the 258-page report’s extensive findings, he warned that the Russian military’s desire to build AI and autonomy for information dominance, including for electronic warfare and space-based tools, should concern the Pentagon most.

For “the Pentagon’s plan on fighting with the Russians, that’s something to think about,” Edmonds said. It needs to “eschew the older mindset of the Russians just pounding you with artillery and tanks. They’re going to do that but in a much more efficient way that’s much more integrated.”

The Russian military has AI initiatives to improve command and control and decision-making; early warning and air defense; and training, logistics, maintenance and procurement — from the tactical level to the strategic planning level in Moscow.

The Russian government is using artificial intelligence to analyze changing geopolitical events using data from previous global armed conflicts, the report found. Operationally, its military is trying to link platforms across different military branches to share information in order to “to better coordinate forces and make faster decisions,” similar to the Pentagon’s new joint war-fighting concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

Russia perceives that the U.S. will sow domestic unrest in its country by trying “to undermine Russian authorities and create instability within Russia to foment political change, leading to a justification for U.S. military action,” the report read. That view of how the U.S. could attack is driving technology investment in many areas, including global event analysis.

An air assault from the United States is one of its biggest security fears for the Kremlin, hence its investments in AI technologies for early-warning systems and air defense. Its military strategists believe the processing power of AI will allow air defense systems to more quickly monitor, detect and respond to any aerial attack.

“Russia is trying to understand what the Americans are up to or what the NATO is up to,” Bendett said. “So NATO and the United States are very much in focus. And a lot of the Russian efforts in AI, military autonomy are actually geared towards how can they best counter the U.S. threat perception.”

Autonomous systems and future war

The story is similar for Russia’s perception of the future of autonomous weapons, another area where it’s investing. The CNA analysis found substantial debate over the ethics and future of autonomous weapons and having a human “in the loop” of the decision cycle. Russia’s military views completely autonomous weapons as an “inevitability” based on its perceptions of U.S. and China that the systems will become fully autonomous.

“This is part of the overall Russian security mindset about the United States … that where we have an advantage, we’re just going to keep pushing,” Edmonds said.

The Russian military is “heavily emphasizing” investments in autonomy for aerial, ground and maritime unmanned and robotic platforms. Bendett and Edmonds said that the Russian military views robots as a future replacement for soldiers and an important avenue to saving lives of its war-fighters in the future.

Russia’s conflicts in Syria and Ukraine have been a proving ground for its development of AI and autonomous weapons because the military has learned how to manage information better. By July 2018, the Russians flew 23,000 UAV missions with 140,000 flight hours, the report noted, used primarily for short- and mid-range ISR. Still, Russia lacks a “true combat UAV capable of striking targets.” In Ukraine, CNA found the Russian military used drones for reconnaissance and artillery spotting.

The Russian military is exploring the use of drones for several battlefield applications, including ones that can attack enemy ships or pass information to other platforms in the maritime domain. Its development of underwater unmanned systems that can attack U.S. ships or submarines is another area that Edmonds said the Pentagon should “keep a close eye on.”

The country’s forces also are considering drone swarming capabilities for land operations, particularly for urban warfare, in addition to drone swarms for aerial reconnaissance, electronic warfare and ground strikes for air warfare. Additionally, attacks by drone swarms on Russian bases in Syria led the Kremlin to invest in countermeasures. For example, its military used AI tools to study terrain around its bases to predict the most likely incoming drone route.

“The combination of the use of different types of uncrewed and unmanned systems, along with a countermeasures against those systems, is going to be where Russians will put a lot of their research, development, testing and evaluation emphasis going forward,” Bendett said.

There remains an ongoing debate in the Russian government over the role of humans in autonomous weapons. The Russian Ministry of Defense “appears” to be developing plans for AI-enabled robotic systems that can operate without human control, the report stated, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that AI-enhanced weapons will decide the future of war but will be controlled by humans and viewed as “faithful servants.”

“What appears missing from the conversation is a way to balance the two views. It is not clear in Russian military thinking where human control would end and where independent AI-enabled action would begin,” the report stated.