ONE NETWORK TO RULE THEM ALL.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

Joint All-Domain Command, Control A Journey, Not a Destination

Much of the movie "Pulp Fiction" centers around a briefcase and its mysterious contents--an item or items of incredible value and importance never revealed to the audience. It's a classic MacGuffin, an object in a film that matters only insofar as it motivates the characters and propels the action.

And in some ways, the joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, concept is the Defense Department's MacGuffin--it's not clear what it is or what it looks like, but it has become one of the driving forces of military modernization and transformation.

The bumper sticker for JADC2 is straight forward: sense, make sense, act. The idea is to link sensor data to command centers to "shooters" -destroyers, jet fighters, missile batteries or ground troops--to take quick action against a target.

But JADC2 is far more than a bumper sticker, and things quickly grow complicated when it comes to building resilient command and control across domains that can function in contested environments--something the military did not face during 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to the Defense Department's March 2022 unclassified summary of the JADC2 strategy: "JADC2 provides a coherent approach for shaping future Joint Force [command-and-control] capabilities and is intended to produce the warfighting capability to sense, make sense and act at all levels and phases of war, across all domains and with partners, to deliver information advantage at the speed of relevance."

No small task. The description continues:

As an approach, JADC2 transcends any single capability, platform or system; it provides an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of needed technological advancement and doctrinal change in the way the Joint Force conducts [command and control]. JADC2 will enable the Joint Force to use increasing volumes of data, employ automation and AI, rely upon a secure and resilient infrastructure and act inside an adversary's decision cycle.

Thus, JADC2 is a concept, almost a philosophy, as opposed to a single technology, platform or system. In fact, part of the effort is building connectivity among all the disparate platforms and systems in use today that were not designed to communicate with each other and to develop requirements and standards for future systems to be interoperable.

In that regard, JADC2 is not an end state. There won't be a moment when the system is complete and pulled out of a box like a birthday present.

That has been one of the challenges with the concept: it's not easy to explain or visualize, said Cynthia Cook, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Since it's such a big and complicated set of programs, and it's technology, it's not that people don't understand it, it just doesn't have the same visceral connection to people's lives as an airplane program," she said.

"Since it's a bunch of interconnected capabilities that span across different systems, it's sort of harder for there to be a clear mental picture of what it is," she added.

Heather Penney, senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said getting to a shared...