Project Overmatch: Navy Testing Secret JADC2 Technologies.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland -- The Navy has revealed little about its contribution to the Defense Department's joint alldomain command and control initiative but has started experimenting with systems that will bring the concept to life at sea, service leaders say.

The Army has held annual Project Convergence experiments and Air Force leadership has openly discussed its plans for the Advanced Battle Management System, but the Navy has remained tight-lipped about Project Overmatch, the service's component of the JADC2 initiative to connect sensors to shooters across all warfighting domains.

The aim of Project Overmatch is to "create a more interoperable force, allowing more pieces of the Navy --more ships, more aircraft, more unmanned systems later on--to be able to connect with one another and talk to one another, using the Navy's wildly diverse collection of communication systems," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.

Like the other services, the Navy has a variety of communication systems that are not necessarily interoperable, "and you have to create gateways that connect them together, or you've got to put multiple radios on everything in the force to be able to allow them to communicate," Clark said in an interview. "What Project Overmatch is designed to do is" use software to translate "automatically between different communication systems," he said.

Once operational, Project Overmatch will ultimately flow into a "joint command structure," said Rear Adm. Doug Small, the commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command and the program manager for Project Overmatch. But while the "joint" part of JADC2 is important, each service faces different commandand-control challenges, he said.

"The operational architecture that we're developing... is all about naval power on behalf of the Joint Force," Small said during a panel discussion at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space conference in April. "That's what the project is about. I can't get into specifics--only thing I can say is that each service has unique needs for how to command and control forces" in the operating environment.

"It still comes down to the art of command and control, and what it is that we provide architecturally to allow those commanders at all levels to be able to exercise" that capability, he said. "It's joint, it's all-domain, but it comes down to... command and control."

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said the Navy is testing...