The connected battlespace, part two: The fault in our (joint) stars
The connected battlespace, part two: The fault in our (joint) stars

            
  
  
  
    

    

    
      Joint All-Domain Command & Control ("JADC2") is the new hotness—but will it really work?
    

    

    
            
              
            
    
    
      Artist's impression of some kind of cool integrated battlespace AR/VR interface kind of thing.

              
          Credit:

          
          Jackie Niam / Getty Images

                  
          
  
          

    
    
    
      Artist's impression of some kind of cool integrated battlespace AR/VR interface kind of thing.

              
          Credit:

          
          Jackie Niam / Getty Images

                  
          
  
  



  

  
      
    
    
                      
                      
          
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously (or infamously) said in 2004, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Over the course of the last twenty years of armed conflict, the US military and NATO allied forces have tried to evolve into the force they wished they had been at the beginning, rapidly evolving in some ways while staying very much the same in others.
The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were in many ways a crucible for connected battlefield technologies—some of which were in their infancy during the 1991 Gulf War and others that were born out of urgent needs that arose as the wars became never-ending counterinsurgency operations with forces spread far and wide. But now the military faces the problem it deferred at the beginning of the so-called “Global War on Terror”—how to operate a connected battlefield in a world where the enemy is very capable in the air, in space, and in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The new holy grail is “Joint All-Domain Command and Control,” or "JADC2" (pronounced "jad-see-two"). JADC2 is the aggregation of command and control for sea, air, space, land, electromagnetic spectrum, and other cyber-y things. It’s not going to happen overnight. But with the hard-learned lessons of the past few decades and the rise of technologies that can begin to help manage the information overload of the battlefield, JADC2 appears to need a lot less unobtainium that previous integrated battlespace plans were made of.
The basic building blocks for JADC2 have existed for a while. The problem has always been how to integrate them in a way that doesn’t warp US Air Force strategist Colonel John Boyd’s celebrated OODA loop into a circular decision-making firing squad. To be effective, the data firehose of the modern battlefield has to be turned into an orderly flow of information that supports rapid decisions, and those decisions need to reach the pointy end of things quickly enough to matter—at every level of operations. Things that need to be blown up need to be found and assigned to units that do the blowing up faster; changing conditions in any domain need to be accounted for and responded to before they affect the success of the mission.

          
                      
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
That kind of unified view requires networking together the sensors, the deciders, and the shooters—and transforming the raw data about the domains of operation into information that can easily be acted upon by the appropriate human in the chain. Building that network has been intrinsic to much of what the military has tried to do with force modernization since the 1991 Gulf War. The problem is that there are too many networks, and they don't have common data formats.
From JSTARS to... JSTARS
Coming into the 21st century, the DOD had several different, largely disjointed visions of "joint C2" ("C2" stands for "command and control"). Some domains had been (sort of) managed, but cross-domain coordination remained (indeed, remains) a work in progress—especially between the Army and everyone else.
The first take on truly “joint” multi-domain command and control was the fusion of Air Force and Army projects that became the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS). As conceived in the late 1980s, JSTARS would put a battlefield sensor and combat operations center aboard an aircraft, and transmit information about enemy armor and vehicles to tactical air and ground force commanders via mobile “Ground Station Modules.” Mind you, “mobile” did not mean “moving.”
The concept was pushed out in development mode to assist during the Gulf War. Old Boeing 707 airframes were recycled and re-engined and turned into the E-8 Joint STARS aircraft. Equipped with a giant ground target motion indicator (GMTI) radar system and onboard combat operations center and crewed by Air Force and specially trained Army personnel, the E-8 gave coalition forces a clear picture of Iraqi forces on the ground—and also detected SCUD missile launches.

    
              
                
              
                An E-8 JSTARS aircraft (converted from a Boeing 707 airframe) lands at Nellis Air Force Base in 2006.
                                  
                    Credit:
                                          Ethan Miller / Getty Images
                                      
                              
            
                  
          
    
    
      An E-8 JSTARS aircraft (converted from a Boeing 707 airframe) lands at Nellis Air Force Base in 2006.

              
          Credit:

          
          Ethan Miller / Getty Images

                  
          
  
        
            

The last of seventeen E-8C aircraft were delivered in 2005. But the role of the aircraft would change considerably as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq progressed, becoming communication hubs and optical eyes in the sky for troops in the field fighting an enemy that didn’t exactly show up easily on ground radar.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
The JSTARS program gave birth to the mother of all command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs (this is abbreviated as "C4ISR," and thankfully it's pronounced as an initialism). The Ground Station Module evolved into the Common Ground Station, a system based on commercial off-the-shelf computing technology; that, in turn, snowballed as it rolled among the intelligence systems of the various services and birthed the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS, pronounced “dee-sigs”)—a platform that was to bolt the "ISR" onto the "C4" across all the services.
The problems with DCGS’ rollout were legion. The hardware and software varied with service and application: there was DCGS-A for the Army and Marines, which retained the CGS capability and provided a tactical view for ground commanders. Then there were the Navy’s DCGS-N and Air Force DCGS, which honestly are beasts of an entirely different sort. The DCGS systems did share some things, like a Common Object Request Broker (CORBA) architecture—much like the JTRS radios the Department of Defense was hoping would solve all their networking problems. As with JTRS—which, spoiler alert, was a giant mess—this was not necessarily a good thing. And since even DCGS-A carried a Secret-level classification, most soldiers in the field were not allowed to view DCGS data, making it less than ideal as a platform for information sharing downstream.
Even at the joint command level, it was a bit of a mess because of the uncommonness of these “common” systems. At the beginning of the war in Iraq, Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper confessed that even coordination between the forces in one domain—Air—needed work. “You go into an [air operations center] and what will you see?" he asked. "Tribal representatives sitting down in front of tribal workstations, interpreting tribal hieroglyphics to the rest of us who are on watch. And then what happens? They stand up and walk over to another tribal representative and reveal their hieroglyphics, which are translated by the other tribe into its own hieroglyphics and entered into its own workstation.”

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
Today, the picture is better but still challenging. The Air Force wants to retire JSTARS, but Congress won’t let them until they have something better to replace it with. That “something,” the Air Force hopes, is the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which turns the battlefield into an Internet of Things.

One (group of things) to link them all?
JSTARS isn’t the only networked sensor in the sky (or on the battlefield) anymore. Aside from the command-and-control features of Link 16 that have become part of Blue Force Tracking (BFT) solutions on the ground as well as aircraft in the air, sensors in every domain are connecting over high-speed tactical links. The F-35, for example, receives plaudits for its ability to function not just as a shooter but also as a flying networked sensor platform, allowing the Air Force and Navy versions of the aircraft to locate and hand off targets to other weapons systems.

    
              
                
              
                An F-35 with weapon bay doors open. (Note the irregular edges on the bay doors—avoiding right angles lowers the aircraft's radar cross-section and is an essential component of its stealth.)
                                  
                    Credit:
                                          NurPhoto / Getty Images
                                      
                              
            
                  
          
    
    
      An F-35 with weapon bay doors open. (Note the irregular edges on the bay doors—avoiding right angles lowers the aircraft's radar cross-section and is an essential component of its stealth.)

              
          Credit:

          
          NurPhoto / Getty Images

                  
          
  
        
            

The Navy was working on this problem in the maritime domain more than two decades ago. Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), the networked sharing of raw sensor data between platforms, has been in service since the early 1990s. It was the basis for Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA), which has since begun to incorporate the tracking and targeting of all sorts of targets in the maritime domain. The Navy has already demonstrated that its F-35 variant can act as a sort of forward sensor for battlegroups, providing targeting on everything from surface ships to ballistic missiles (for Aegis ships to shoot down).
The problem is that very little of the sensor networks built by the services—for drones, radars, and other sensors—can be automatically shared and understood by all of the other services. And processing all of the data from battlefield sensors into information that can be used by a joint commander is arduous. Even with instant sensor data, it can take hours to effectively translate it into information for mission planning for things like air and missile strikes. That's time that gives the adversary an opportunity to act more quickly inside US commanders' OODA loop.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
The Air Force saw its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) as the answer—finally, a common architecture tying everything from below the waves to high in orbit into a single comprehensive command-and-control system. But Air Force leadership has since backed off a little bit from that idea, instead referring to ABMS as the “backbone” for future JADC2 integration. (Sort of like how DCGS was supposed to be a backbone for integrated C4ISR. Oh, God, the acronyms.)

    
              
                
              
                A peek inside an Air Force DCGS control center.
                                  
                              
            
                  
          
      A peek inside an Air Force DCGS control center.

              
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          US Air Force / Wikimedia Commons

                      
                  
          
        
            

The “A” in ABMS originally meant “Airborne,” as it was intended to strictly be a JSTARS replacement connecting satellites, drones, and manned aircraft together into a bigger virtual airborne command network—without putting all the eggs into an aging airliner that was vulnerable to enemy air defenses. But the plan advanced by the Air Force now is to make ABMS a platform for all the things, including cyber. Right now, ABMS is, to borrow some Department of Defense-speak, highly notional. While some components are in developmental testing, others are still a little more preliminary.
The Air Force’s ambition is to use machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to help accelerate the processing of data and turning that data into information that decision-makers can act upon. This includes aggregating sensor data and assessing threats. But the piece that the Air Force is trying to sell to the other services the hardest is a shared communication structure for sensor data—creating a universal map of the battlefield.
“ABMS will enable all equipment to seamlessly communicate with one another across the kill chain,” said Colonel Alan Docauer, chief of Air Combat Command, Directorate of Operations, Command and Control, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Operations, at a recent Air Force C2 summit. “Moving forward, our focus will be on finalizing the JADC2 concept and refining AMBS technology in order to create a future Air Component JADC2 system fully integrated with the joint force, as well as our partners and allies.”

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
There are some legitimate questions about just how much "joint" and "all domain" operational commanders really need.
The reason Docauer and others are confident of ABMS and JADC2 coming together is that the technical underpinnings needed to make much of them happen are already coming into place—or at least will once the Department of Defense figures out its cloud computing mess with the failed JEDI contract and gets some of its other ducks in a row. The Air Force already has built a cloud-based system for tracking aircraft and targets that went into testing in 2020.
The other services have their own plans for now. While the Navy's "Distributed Maritime Operations" battle management concept is still vaporware, the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System was recently cleared to enter production. The Army has spent $2.7 billion to develop IBCS and is expected to start deploying it in 2023. Like ABMS, IBCS has evolved from a single purpose to a broader platform play. Originally intended to be for air and missile defenses only (and integrated into the Patriot missile system for that purpose), IBCS is now intended to be the basis for what the Army refers to as “integrated fires”—putting missiles, rockets, and artillery shells on targets.
Closing the loop faster
Voice communications are the lowest common denominator of C2, and right now that’s how too many joint operations work. Machine-to-machine communications like DCGS and JSTARS CGS and Blue Force Tracking and F-35 sensor hand-off are all vertical stacks that require a lot of human work and other kludges to make them interoperate, even within the same military services. There are countless examples of military integration that have struggled. So how can one system of systems pull everything together and speed the OODA loop up at the command level?
It’s already happening in some more manageable verticals of command and control—even among multiple military and civilian partners, in the world of humanitarian aid and disaster relief. The Department of Defense has used the All Partners Access Network to coordinate humanitarian assistance and disaster response operations, for example—standing up an ad-hoc C2 system connecting non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and multinational military partners and providing information-sharing across all of them using standardized tools.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    

        
        
          
          

    
              
                
              
                Royal Canadian Air Force Colonel Travis Morehen, NORAD and USNORTHCOM Command Center director, stands in the command center at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station. This is one of the many places that needs accurate information from many different branches of the joint force.
                                  
                    Credit:
                                          RJ Sangosti / Getty Images
                                      
                              
            
                  
          
    
    
      Royal Canadian Air Force Colonel Travis Morehen, NORAD and USNORTHCOM Command Center director, stands in the command center at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station. This is one of the many places that needs accurate information from many different branches of the joint force.

              
          Credit:

          
          RJ Sangosti / Getty Images

                  
          
  
        
            

There are some legitimate questions about just how much "joint" and "all domain" operational commanders really need. But it's clear that existing technologies can begin to provide a better shared picture of operations without having to hard-wire sensor feeds into commanders' brains. Machine learning and even more basic software connectors could be used to convert sensor data into shared information streams—streams that rules and algorithms can process in a way that both adds context to data and allows multiple operational pictures of varying scale and detail to be built upon them. Even a basic shared situational awareness based on this information could speed up the decision and action parts of the OODA loop.
Eventually, the quality of any JADC2 construct is going to depend on the networks that carry its data. And as the US military begins to face foes who will be able to target communications more effectively than non-state actors can (and mount cyber and space attacks against communications infrastructure), the resilience and redundancy of networks is just as important as moving toward a shared data standard.
These are problems that have no instant solution. But if the Department of Defense focuses on incremental steps and building a strong foundation for sharing first, instead of trying to make a massive single leap into buzzword compliance, something resembling the vision of JADC2 is possible. (But please, don't build it on CORBA.)


          
                  

                  
          


  
    Listing image:
    Jackie Niam / Getty Images
  




  
  
          
  

  
    

    
      Sean was previously Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor, and is now a Principal Threat Researcher at SophosLabs.  A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
    
  



  
    
    
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