Congress Seeks Clarity on JADC2 Spending.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

The Defense Department's joint all-domain command and control initiative, or JADC2, is eyeing an increase in funding in the 2024 budget, and both the House and Senate are largely on board, but the latter has raised concerns about the difficulty of tracking the range of programs, projects and spending on the concept.

Kathleen Miller, deputy undersecretary of defense (comptroller), said the Pentagon requested $1.4 billion in JADC2 funding for 2024, all of which falls under the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

It belongs in research, development, testing and evaluation budgets currently because the services are going through a series of analyses, she said at the National Defense Industrial Association's recent JADC2: All Domain Warfare Symposium.

"We'll do the analysis, we change some things, we experiment, we look at the outcomes of those experiments, we go ahead and make some more adjustments, and we experiment again," she said.

"And so, while we're in this cycle of learning through experimentation with JADC2, it's most appropriate for many of the major and unique programs to reside in our RDT&E budget, but it's in many different parts of that element," she added.

There are five main buckets for the 2024 JADC2 funding request, Miller said: the Army's Project Convergence, $66 million; the Navy's Project Overmatch, $192 million; the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, $500 million; the defense-wide Joint Staff work to oversee Cross Functional Team efforts, $28 million; and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, which is responsible for the JADC2 data layer, mission command applications and the Global Information Dominance Experiments, $615 million.

Congress generally agreed with the request, but both chambers made some adjustments that will have to be ironed out in conference.

Because JADC2 is an initiative and not a program, there are other expenditures across the department that further JADC2 goals, Miller said.

"There is some $385 million going to things like artificial intelligence and machine learning that will benefit JADC2, but those efforts are broader than JADC2," she said.

Also, the $1.4 billion does not include a lot of hardware --sensors, radars or communications systems--that would connect through JADC2, she noted.

"It doesn't include any of the funding that wraps around all of the other ways we communicate in the department, the aspects that are overseen by the [chief...