Training, Simulation Key to Achieving JADC2 Goals.

• Author: Bayer, Michael J.

This spring, hackers breached U.S. critical infrastructure on the strategically crucial island of Guam.

Multiple U.S. technology companies investigated the breach. One assessed that the hacking campaign was designed to pursue the development of capabilities that could disrupt communications between the United States and Asia during future crises.

This is yet another blunt reminder of the People's Republic of China using its growing cyber capabilities to prepare for potential conflict.

For years, the Defense Department has asserted future great power conflict would likely involve both dispersed U.S. units fighting against adversaries of roughly technical parity and simultaneous asymmetric attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure that degrade logistics and vital communications lines. That future is here.

To prevail, the U.S. military must be able to dominate across all operational domains to present multiple dilemmas to adversaries. It must also prepare for persistent, sophisticated and novel efforts to disrupt, degrade, destroy or compromise the Joint Force's sensors, networks and command-and-control nodes.

To address these challenges, the Defense Department is organizing around the concept of joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, which represents a new and powerful approach to warfighting. Its goal is to restore operational competitive advantage through information dominance and command decision-making superiority.

Therefore, the Defense Department and the Joint Force are undergoing a massive digital transformation, with the objective of connecting the individual military services' sensors, shooters and communications systems into a networked solution that can interact across U.S. and allied systems. The desired end state is to support cross-domain operations, information sharing and decision-making under operationally relevant timelines in degraded or disrupted communications environments.

JADC2 will require a significant investment in new technological and operational approaches that can only be developed in partnership with industry. An early element essential to operationalizing JADC2 is the department's investment in U.S. industry's creation of modeling, simulation and training in synthetic environments. Synthetic environments --virtual and constructive simulations--will be critically important as they allow the Joint Force to test, evaluate, experiment, train and support future multi-domain operations. Due to recent advances...